Growth Hacking for Freelancers in 6 Steps

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Growth hacking has become quite the buzz word in the past couple of years. But, as many buzz words, it is often misunderstood. Growth hacking isn’t some crazy, ridiculous way to magically turn your business from a garage shop to Microsoft in a couple of months.

The techniques that are usually summarized under the term growth hacking are just combining traditional and non-traditional marketing strategies to successfully grow a business rapidly, but still trying to keep it sustainable in the long-term.

Growth hacking is all about efficiency. Here’s a useful guide on how you can achieve that for your freelance business, step by step.
 

1. Decide on precise, actionable goals

“Getting a larger audience” is not a great goal. If you would like to grow in a fast but sustainable way, it all starts with having the right target in front of you. Focus on SMART goals. They should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound.

Trying to simply get a larger audience won’t get you anywhere. This goal will never be complete, because it has no deadlines and doesn’t allow you to measure either progress, or completion percentage. “Get 200 new Twitter followers by the end of the month” is a much better example of SMART goal.

2. Growth hacking is all about analytics

Start gathering data and tracking your progress. This is essential for the long-term sustainability of your growth strategy. Staying on the Twitter example, your followers might not always be coming where you think they are coming from.

There are always unexpected things along the way that might prevent or help you from achieving your goals. Both scenarios are bad. If you don’t know what makes your strategy good, you won’t be able to replicate it.

3. Utilize what you learn from the data gathered

Focusing on your strengths is a key aspect of growth hacking. You will only be able to achieve rapid growth, if you hammer down on the areas where you are having most success. If you spread your efforts too thin, you might still be able to achieve slow, steady growth. But that’s not good enough for many small businesses.

Especially at the beginning, growing as much as you possibly can help catapult you to a whole new level and keep expanding until you reach a place where you feel comfortable sticking at for a while.

4. Try different strategies and compare them

So you’ve identified some strengths, you know what your goals are and you’re ready to measure your results. Now is the time where the action begins. What you want to do is to develop at least two different strategies and try them out under similar conditions. Let’s say you want to encourage people to follow you on Twitter with an article, because your strength lies in writing. Write two different articles and make sure different people see the different variations – then track who came to your Twitter profile more.

This is a pretty simple example of A/B testing, but it illustrates how experiments work in growth hacking. You will have to invest a lot of resources. And, inevitably, some will have more success than others. But experiments are all about learning from successes and failures alike. Now that you have the numbers to back up your theories, you can use the results to grow.

5. Rinse and repeat

Testing out a lot of theories will be essential to growth hacking. So don’t give up on your experiments too early – keep going until you are actually sure one of the versions is definitively better than the other. That means repeating the experiment if it’s necessary to verify your initial results.

And once you know version A is better than version B, think about how you can improve version A in itself. Now that you have the original (A) and an improvement of the original (A1), you can run a new test. Utilizing that strategy should eventually lead to the most optimized method for your business to reach the goals you have set for yourself.

6. Keep at it

You will have to trust the numbers if you want to follow the above outlined steps and succeed in growing your business. If the numbers say that one thing is better than the other, look for the reasons and trust them, but don’t get discouraged if not everything works from the very first time.

Like we said in the beginning, growth hacking is not just about reaching big goals fast, it’s also about making sure that you can sustain that. So don’t forget to keep your eyes on the long-term results!
 

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Have you attempted growth hacking? Tell us your story in the comment section below this article, we’d be happy to hear from you!

Viktor Marinov

Viktor is the voice behind the freelancermap blog. Every week he comes up with helpful hints, checklists, and guides for freelancers and independent workers. If you would like to know how to find remote jobs online or how to niche yourself as a freelancer, don't miss his freelancer tips!

By Viktor Marinov

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