It’s been called “A Content Marketing Must”, “The Mother of All Hacks”, “A Collection of Hacks to Trump All Hacks" 121 of the most relevant marketing hacks available on the internet.

We’ve poured our heart and soul into collecting the most valuable, current and relevant collection of hacks just for you. The Uku team has spent weeks clearing the clutter (a.k.a BS), so you don’t have to, to present you with the best possible collection of hacks out there.New apps and online platforms seem to appear every day, and we often get caught up in the hype. Buzzwords have a way of finding their way into conversations around the office and “the next big thing” is all the rage, a lot of these are fly by nighters, but there are a few core sites that are here to stay that you have to master.

The good news is - it’s easier than you think.

Here’s a quick look at what follows:

• Content marketing hacks
• HubSpot hacks
• Facebook ad hacks
• SEO hacks
• Reddit hacks
• LinkedIn hacks
• YouTube hacks
• Video hacks
• Social media Ad hacks
• Instagram hacks
• Quora hacks

A lot of people are unaware of all the tools and shortcuts we have at our disposal. The problem is nobody has time to read a fat thick Moby Dick looking “Social Media for Dummies” guidebook.

Actionable information is what we’re after, and we’re in a hurry to get it. A no-nonsense guide to get to the heart of it is what you need and that’s what we’ve created. So, If you’re ready for a whole lot of “Aha” moments, read on!

Content Marketing 

1. Pick a Topic

Stop creating content around keywords! Yup, you heard me, just stop. SEO has changed recently in a big way. It has shifted to the topic cluster model, which means we now need to focus on creating a single pillar page that acts as a central strut in our content strategy. It is intended to broadly cover a topic relevant to you and your customers and then have multiple blog posts related to that topic link back to it. This internal linking tells search engines that the pillar post has authority over the topic and in time as the pillar page ranks higher, all the connected pages and posts will benefit from an increase in rankings. Simple as that.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Identify topics that are relevant to you and your customers, i.e. growth-driven design.
2. Do keyword research and brainstorm blog titles related to your topic.
3. Create your pillar page.
4. Link to your existing content or create new blogs posts.
5. Watch your rankings climb!

Source: HubSpot

2. It’s Pillar Time

Sticking your flag in the ground by picking a topic and building out a whole new content plan can be a little scary but fear not. There are a few simple steps that HubSpot recommends to help you organise and create your first topic clusters today:

• Start off by mapping out five to ten core problems that your buyer persona faces. Questionnaires, interviews, even a quick call to some of your clients will do the trick.
• Use that research to build out core topics with some subtopics using keyword research.
• Create a quick list that aligns your content ideas with each core topic and subtopic.
• Then create, measure, learn and start again. 

Source: HubSpot

3. Rock Keyword Research with Übersuggest

If you haven’t been using Übersuggest you've been doing it wrong. With Übersuggest you can quickly find new keywords not available in the Google Keyword Planner. Just pick a short tail keyword, put it into the machine and click suggest. It'll give you tons of new related keywords that you can use in your content marketing.

4. Pick your Anchor text wisely 

There has been a lot of back and forth regarding the relevance of anchor text and the part it plays in SEO. Although it seems Google is reducing the impact anchor text has, for now, it will still help drive your rankings. So, what's the hack? Build backlinks with relevant but varying anchor text. For example, if you sell purple ballet shoes, go for a mix of "purple ballet shoes", "purple shoes", "ballet shoes", "ballet" etc. SEOMoz ran an anchor text experiment that you can check out. The results are pretty clear; varying anchor text will help you rank in the long term.

Source: SEO Hacker

5. Infographics Made Easy

Infographics are awesome! Visual, informative or infinitely shareable. The only problem is that we aren't all designers and without the necessary design skills it'll just look shabby. Well, until now. A great infographic hack to use Piktochart. It'll help you create a beautiful infographic without the need for a designer. Here's how to do it:

• Layout the information in a simple Google doc, highlighting the critical bit.
• Sign up to Piktochart.
• Pick a template.
• Make it personal by changing the colours and adding some of your graphics.
• That’s it! Now share it out like crazy!

DOWNLOAD THE 121 HACKS PDF  

6. Go Deep

There are on average around 80 million blogs published every month! Which is crazy if you think about it. A majority of those blogs are between 600 and 800 words long, which begs the question how long should a blog actually be? We know Google loves in-depth content and it seems that our readers love them too. So what's the magic number? HubSpot analysed over 6000 of their blogs and found that blogs between 2,250 to 2,500 words generated the most organic traffic. OkDork did a similar study of over 100 million articles and found that articles 3,000 to 10,000 words got the most shares on social media. Aim for 2000+ words and don't be afraid of the length. It'll force you to go into detail, and it's the details that make great blogs! Happy writing!

Source: Clariant Creative

7. Canva GIF hack

This is a quick and easy one! Canva is a design platform that has prebuilt designs and elements that allows anyone to become a designer. It's super easy! They recently added a new animated GIF feature which is in beta. It'll allow you to create a simple GIF in literally a couple seconds to share with your community. Here's what you need to do:

• Go to Canva.com
• Select a template from their pre-built designs or create a custom canvas.
• Create your post using an image and some overlay text.
• Once your design is ready click the "DOWNLOAD" button and select "Animated GIF/Movie."Then click "Preview Animation" and select one of the six predefined animations.Once you're happy click "Download as GIF."

These are great for social media posts. If you feel too limited by Canva, go check out Giphy!

8. Sie Pablo

We're not talking about the Narco’s series, although it's definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it yet! Pablo is a Buffer app that helps you make a beautiful post for your social media channels quickly and easily. It's user-friendly and better yet, it's FREE.

9. Always Say Thank You

A simple one to implement and very useful, adding a CTA ("call-to-action") to a thank you page to help nurture a lead further down your funnel. We all know our way around the buyer's journey: awareness, consideration and decision. If a lead came in through an awareness stage offer like an ebook, perhaps you should add a CTA that invites them to join your next webinar or schedule a demo. This will help drive them closer to the decision stage and hopefully give you another happy customer!

10. Content Exploring with Ahrefs

Let's start off with a simple statement, Ahrefs is fantastic!! Their content tool is particularly useful when you start developing your content calendar. When you are preparing your content topics and subtopics, merely add the topic to the content explorer and it'll pull up all the related blog content. Yes, we know a simple Google search will do that too, but there is more. They also give you in-depth analysis of the content like share data, ranked keywords, backlinks, who tweeted, post word count and referring domains. You can use this to find keywords, identify new backlinking opportunities or simply scope out the competition.

11. Make That Sh@t Shareable

Headlines are important! Very, very important. According to Upworthy, it's not as much about having a conversation but instead being conversational. To get your content to hit the big time on social media you need to make sure your followers like and share it, your followers' friends also like and share it, and for added virality, your followers' friends' friends need to like and share it too.

How is that achieved?

In the Sweet Science of Virality, Upworthy recommends writing a minimum of 25 headlines per post. We know that sounds mental: 25 is a lot! But it'll force you to get creative and think outside the box. Here are their eight rules for writing headlines:

• You HAVE to write out 25 headlines for every piece of content.
• You WILL write some really stinky headlines.
• Once you start getting desperate, you start thinking outside the box.
• So you HAVE TO WRITE 25 HEADLINES.
• #24 will suck. Then #25 will be a gift from the headlines gods and will make you a legend.
• Accept that not every headline will be perfect.
• Then write 25 headlines
• With practice, you'll be writing 25 in 15 minutes. Only then do you have permission to lower your limit?

Source: Upworthy, Coschedule

12. Use Mid-Content CTA’s

Using CTA's in your content is crucial to get your website visitors, prospects and leads to take a specific action. The challenge is that most people don't make it all the way to the end of your blog post to take that next step. Experiment with using a text CTA after the introduction or halfway down the blog. Text CTA's often look more natural in blog content, where images albeit more attractive can seem a little spammy.

13. Get Social

A great way to share your content, engage with potential leads and build up your profile is to use Facebook and Linkedin Groups, answer questions on Quora and Reddit and share your content on Medium. You don't want to go in and drop a bunch of links to your content or give the hard sell. Find groups you'd like to be part of and answer questions or simply share something interesting and RELEVANT. Once you've built up some social cred, you can share your content. Keep it conversational and remember it's a community, not a soapbox.

14. Tweet all about it

In order to have your content shared you need to make it as easy as possible for users to share it! Click-to-Tweet makes it simple and easy for you to create a tweetable link that your readers can share on Twitter. The best of all is that Click-to-Tweet is free! HubSpot has created an easy to follow guide on how to set up your own Click-to-Tweet.

Growth Hack #14: Create a quick and easy tweetable CTA with Click-to-Tweets incredibly FREE and straightforward tool @uku_rocks #twitterhacks >>> Click to tweet!

15. Include Reading Time on a Blog

The fact of the matter is that people like to know what to expect! Have you ever started reading a blog post and then scrolled all the way to the bottom to get a sense of how long the post was? If you knew that it would only take you 5 minutes to read you'd be more likely to stick it out to the end. A simple way to calculate reading time is to divide the number of words in the blog with the speed an average adult reads at, roughly 250 words per minute. You can also use these tools: Read-O-Meter and Decimal to Time Calculator.

Source: Marketing Land 

16. Pop-ups Work

I know the thought of using a pop-up makes you a little sick. They're spammy and obnoxious! Right? Well, not quite. Pop-ups certainly have a bad wrap, but the truth is when done right they work. An experiment run by AWeber found that their pop-up form converted 1375% better than traditional forms for driving blog subscriptions. Yeah, I know, that's impressive!

Source: HubSpot

17. Focus on What Works

A great way to identify high-value content opportunities is to keep an eye on where your leads are coming from. Find out which of your content offers is driving the most leads and carve it up into smaller topics. All you have to do next is write a more detailed blog on each of the topics and add the CTA to the original offer to the bottom of the blog. It's a pretty simple hack and highly effective!

Source: HubSpot

18. Go Beyond Your Blog

It's easy to stay in the relative safety of your blog, but there is a whole big bad world out there where potential leads are waiting for you! Creating a mix of content on a variety of channels will help drive traffic to your site and will build up your reputation as a thought leader. Here are some content ideas:

• Videos on YouTube
• Podcasts and audio content
• Udemy course, or Skillshare
• SlideshowQuora, or other answer sites
• Forum contributions

Source: CoSchedule

19. A/B Test Your About Us Page

The About Us page is one of the most overlooked pages on most websites and yet it is one of the most visited. Your "About Us" needs to be optimised to connect to your visitors. It's not about selling or telling people how awesome you are but instead about making a deeper connection with your potential leads. What are your shared values? Goals? Or aspirations? Try testing putting the most important information above the fold and remember to include a CTA. You can use Optimizely or HubSpot (if you use their marketing software) to run A/B tests rather simply!

20. Recycling Is Good

Content marketing isn't just about creating as much new content as possible. Take a look at your blog, you've probably done a boatload of work, and there's a lot of good stuff in there! According to HubSpot's Head of Growth and SEO, Matthew Barby “In general, pages deeper in the architecture of a website will get a lower share of internal PageRank.” Try updating some of your posts with more current information, examples and data and republish. This will give them a breath of new life and boost your rankings!

21. It’s All About Influence

You need to connect with the influencers who your customers listen to. It's pretty simple. People will be more willing to buy your products or services if it is referred to them by someone they trust. Start off by identifying who these influencers are, big and small! Then engage with them, review them, share content, mention them, interview them and ultimately try to build a relationship with them.

22. Pinterest should not be overlooked

In the realm of social media platforms, Pinterest is often overlooked. The platform holds some hidden powers. They say that imitation is the best form of flattery and Pinterest’s visual presentation is so powerful that it has influenced search engine giant Google to copy it in their image searches. Focus on building up your boards through pinning, sharing content daily and engaging with your followers.

23. Pull the Trigger

There is often a lot of potential leads that need your product/services, read your blog, see your CTA but don't convert right at the last second. This is due to uncertainty, doubt, lingering questions about what you offer etc. A simple hack to solve this issue is to introduce click triggers that minimise these doubts. And you can use reviews, testimonials, case studies, free trials, security signals, guarantees and payment icons near your CTA's to provide the reassurance they may need.

HubSpot

24. HubSpot CRM

So, HubSpot’s CRM is a fantastic little hack as it's easy to use and free. The CRM is ideal for anyone in your team who engages with leads, prospects and customers. It helps you keep all lead data in one place, automatically tracks and logs emails and gives you a clearer idea of what your sales pipeline looks like.

25. Don’t Set Goals

Well, some goals are good but when it comes to offer download workflows in HubSpot refrain from setting goals. By setting goals, you are telling the workflow that once a user has successfully downloaded an offer by clicking the "Download Now" CTA or whatever your CTA says the user has completed the download task and met the goal. That sounds great but what it will also do is prevent them from re-enrolling in the workflow in the future. So, if they can't find the original download link and they return to the landing page to download the offer again the workflow won't be triggered, and you'll have one frustrated lead on your hands.

26. Don’t Just Rely on Email

We use workflows extensively in our marketing, but some of the workflow features are severely underutilised. The one feature that we are sorry we hadn't used earlier is the internal SMS. In the past, we used internal emails to notify salespeople when leads have come in and require action. If they aren't on top of their email reaction times can be a little slow. A quick SMS sent off to sales is a great way to spur them into action.

27. It’s All About Flow

Creating content takes a lot of work, and with the new topic clusters model, it seems we will be creating massive, detailed offer size blogs and leaving it ungated for all to see. So then how do you get potential leads to convert? It's simple...convenience! With HubSpot's Lead Flows tool you can offer readers a PDF version of the blog post that they can easily save, share and refer to in the future. If your blog is useful enough, trust me they'll download it!

28. Tweet More, Faster

If you're a prolific tweeter, you need to be publishing 10-15 tweets a day! Luckily HubSpot's social publishing tool has a bulk messaging feature that makes it easier for you and your team to set up your tweets in advance and stay organised! Here are the steps you need to take to scale your Twitter strategy.

29. Open Up Your Calendar

Booking meetings can be a tedious affair. The back and forth trying to find a suitable time can waste a lot of time. HubSpot’s new Meetings tool allows you to significantly simplify this task. Meetings are connected directly to your Gmail or Office 365 calendar and give your prospects the flexibility to pick the most suitable time for them. All you have to do is allocate time slots that work best for you and your leads will do the rest!

30. Clones

This is not some mad scientist hack but rather a simple way to avoid doing the same task twice! If you've spent time crafting the perfect email, built a landing page that is driving leads or engineered a workflow that is working seamlessly, HubSpot allows you to clone your work saving you tons of time. You can clone almost anything in HubSpot: emails, CTA's, landing pages, web pages, social posts, lists, forms, workflows and campaigns.

Facebook Ad Hacks

31. Text + Image = Success

We all know that Facebook is a little tight on their text: image ratio which has prevented a lot of marketers from even experimenting with text on images. But, I wouldn't dismiss it too quickly. Adding your unique value proposition to the image will help grab your potential leads’ attention and enhance the copy in your ad. A unique value proposition is not about product features or some marketing tagline. Here’s what you need to consider when you craft your UVP:

• Be Relevant - Focus on how your product or service solves your customer's problem
• Quantified Value - Be very specific about the benefits the customer receives
• Differentiate Yourself - Tell your ideal customer how you are different from the rest

Source: CopyHackers

32. Give Them Social Proof

We were all taught not to speak to strangers as kids and it's the same on social media. If they don't know you or your brand, you'll get ignored and your well-crafted ad will be useless. If you are reaching out to an audience you've never engaged with before an excellent way to engage with them is to use social proof. Testimonials, reviews, user numbers, and client logos all go a long way to opening people up to start that initial engagement. A little trust goes a long way!

Source: AdEspresso

33. Stock Video is Better Than No Video

Here's a simple stat: Videos receive 135% more organic reach than images on Facebook! That's huge!! I know it's daunting if you've never created a video before but the good news is you don't have to make the next Avatar movie. There is a whole host of high-quality stock footage on sites like Shutterstock, VideoHive and Adobe where you'll be able to find something that suits you. Yes, I know "stock" isn't very sexy but a few simple tweaks will help you make it your own! Here's what you need to do:

• Sign up to Shutterstock or Adobe.
• Find footage that suits the story or message you want to create.
• Personalize it to your brand with iMovie or Adobe Spark. Simple text overlays are great to help craft your story. Don’t forget to add your logo and CTA at the end.

34. Deliver Within 48hrs

Getting feedback on your Facebook ads quickly is very beneficial, particularly at the start of a campaign. By accelerating your ad delivery, you'll pull in results quicker (within 48hrs) and then can optimize your ads going forward without waiting several days to get the feedback. Here's how to set it up.

• Start off by creating a new campaign.
• Assign a Daily or Lifetime budget that exceeds your overall planned budget by 200%- 500%.
• Do not select the Accelerated Delivery option as Facebook will then prioritise speed over cost or quality.
• Once you hit 10000 impressions, you'll be able to look at the results and make adjustments where necessary.
• Now, re-adjust your budget to what you are planning to spend and watch the results roll in.

35. Hook Them With Data

A great way to drive awareness and collect leads is by promoting low-risk offers with high value data. Psychology Today explains that people rely on emotions, rather than information, to make brand decisions. That’s why it’s important to get them link your brand to positive things (such as a company’s rapid growth). Use graphs, charts and stats instead of plain images in your Facebook ads to help your potential customers understand what they can gain by using your products or services.

Source: CopyHackers

36. Create Headline Magic

Undoubtedly your headline is one of the most critical parts of your Facebook ad. It's the thing people read first when they see your ad and it's vital that you grab their attention from that first moment to get them to continue reading. Make sure you write a headline that people can't help but click. Here are 3 best practices to follow:

• Make it clear and concise
• Call them to action with verbs like "Get" or "Try."
• Emphasise the benefits of your product or service

Source: AdEspresso

37. Placement is Everything

Placement is truly everything! AdEspresso found that the cost-per-click of your Facebook ads can vary by more than 550%, depending on the placement. To dive into which of your ad placements are driving the most results, log in to your Facebook Ad Manager, and use the Breakdown menu to sort your campaigns by Placement.

Once you know what has been working for you and which placements haven't, you can double down on the top performers and stop the ads that are underperforming.

Source: Aggregate Blog

38. Always Be Testing

The immortal rule in marketing is "Always be testing!" And Facebook ads are no different. Whether you want to test which audience responds best to a specific offer or which ad placements work best, to hone in on what really works for you, you'll need to run split tests. Here are a few guidelines:

• Identify which variable you’d like to test
• Craft a measurable hypothesis based on KPI’s
• Check your audience is big enough to support your test
• Set up your campaign timeline and budget

39. Emojis Are 👍🏼

We all love using emojis when we talk to our friends and family but can you use them in your ads? Absolutely! Emojis have crept their way into the subject lines of our email campaigns, Facebook posts and now our ads. The key, however, as with anything new and fun, is to not get carried away. There are two basic rules for using emoji's in your ads:

• Don't overdo it! 1 or 2 are more than enough!
• Make sure the emoji's make sense with your copy. The emoji needs to be relevant to the action you want users to take and the emotion you are trying to convey.

Source: Search Engine Journal

40. Nail Your Ad Audience

The audience you target will largely dictate what you offer, your ads design and placement and the messaging. To get the most out of your ads and provide relevance for your users, you need to align your message to speak to specific audiences.

Johnathan Dane from KlientBoost likes to divide Facebook audiences into three distinct groups:

1. Ice cubes – people who have never heard of you and haven't visited your website before. Try to use social proof to help create that initial engagement. Check out hack #32.
2. Lukewarm audience – people who know who you are, but can’t exactly tell what it is that you do. Try use demo offers, explainer videos or product data to create a clearer USP.
3. Volcano lava traffic – people who have bought something from you before or are way down the conversion funnel, on the path to becoming a customer. Target this group with highly related retargeting ads, offer a discount on their next purchase or product compared to their last purchase.

41. Carousels Aren't Just for Fairgrounds

Yeah, that's right, carousels aren't just for fairgrounds. According to an article by Digiday, carousel ads get 10 times more clicks when compared to static sponsored posts on Facebook. The key to a high performance carousel ad is to craft a story, use enticing headlines and beautiful imagery. Here are a few tips:

• Make your first slide count so that people want to see more!
• Stick to one story across all slides.
• Include your unique selling proposition in your headlines.

42. Focus on High ROI Audiences

Just because you can target anyone on Facebook doesn’t mean you should. The best way to find your most valuable customers is through segmentation based on their interests and behaviour. A great way to do this is through retargeting. You can segment according to specific URL’s visited on your website and show them with relevant ads based on the website content they viewed.

Here's a quick example: If you ran a travel site and you are selling packages for a trip to Thailand. You could create an ad targeting users on Facebook who had visited any pages on your site that was related to Thailand. For added relevance perhaps you could limit the audience to people who had been on your site in the last 30 days.

Here is a list of more potential high value audiences:

• All your website visitors (Custom Audience)
• Pricing page visitors (Custom Audience)
• Shopping cart abandoners (Custom Audience)
• Existing customers and past purchasers (Custom Audience)
• Specific landing page visitors (Custom Audience)
• Email list subscribers (Custom Audience)
• Blog readers / readers of particular articles (Custom Audience)
• Free trial and freemium users (Custom Audience)
• People similar to your customer base (Lookalike Audience)
• People interested in your competitors’ brands (Saved Audience)
• A wide audience of people interested in your industry (Saved Audience)

Source: Karola Karlson’s Blog  

SEO 

43. Location, Location, Location

We all know that Google uses location to help increase the relevance of user searches and this means you organic ranking will differ from place to place.

To ensure you rank for the right keyword in your main locations it's important to optimise your content and website to include your main geographies. If you run a graphic design agency and service clients across the globe, you might be thinking, "I'm not sure this applies to me!" and you'd be wrong. To get started, make a list of your key markets and dive into your analytics. Take a look at your traffic share stats, impressions, rank and market share for each location as compared to your competition. Focus on the areas that drive most of your business. Simple website optimisations like including the places on your website and in your copy can make a big difference. You can also write case studies about clients in those locations, build backlinks from local sites and include content that is location specific like events, local industry news etc.

44. The Need For Mobile Speed

The world has gone mobile! This is not something that is new to us but it still seems that our mobile experience is an afterthought for many businesses. Google is now a mobile-first index which means that page speed can be either foe or friend.

According to recent data from Google, "40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they're less likely to purchase from the same site again." If Google says it's important and your customers agree, then you better pay attention! Here's how to improve your page speed:

• Keep your redirects down.
• Use compressed images.
• Simplify your web design.
• Keep the use of custom fonts to a minimum.
• Activate Google AMP.
• Make your sign-up path shorter.
• Turn browser caching on.
• Minify your code.
• Do your mobile SEO well

45. The Missing Link

Google has slowly been reducing the influence backlinks have on your rankings and is starting to place more emphasis on internal links. If you're not sure why check out hack #1 and #2 about topic clusters. Effectively, good internal links help search engines understand your website and find relevant content that might help searchers. Internal links also share their link juice with other pages on your site which means that when one page performs better, it improves the performance of pages connected to it.

The key to this hack is linking your top performing pages (i.e. Homepage, About Us and blog posts) to relevant high-value pages like your offer landing page, pricing and services pages or even a demo page. The goal here is to drive more traffic to your high-value pages and improve the organic ranking for those pages.

Here’s what you need to do to improve your sites internal linking:

• Take a look at the internal links on your site; Screaming Frog can help you with this.
• Strategically link to your high-value pages from blog posts.
• Make sure to use relevance but varied anchor text.
• Find and fix any broken internal links.Develop standards for internal linking (ie when to link to a specific page and how) and be consistent.

DOWNLOAD THE 121 HACKS PDF   

46. Home Is Where The SEO Is

This is true for a majority of websites out there; your homepage usually attracts more links than any other page on your site. Similar to hack #45 the key here is to optimise your homepage to effectively link to high-value subpages and share some of that added link juice.

You might be thinking, "Of course I have links to other pages from my home page!" But, I'm not talking about your top navigation or footer. Including links in the body of the page as plain HTML links will pass more link authority than navigational links. Try linking to product/service pages, demo pages or other high-value landing pages.The added benefit of clear links is that it improves your overall user experience as they can easily find your most valuable and relevant content.

47. Panguin Not Penguin

Google continually pushes updates to its algorithm, and it can be hard to pinpoint exactly how it is affecting your SEO. 

Panguin Tool is a free SEO tool to see how various Google Algorithmic Updates impacted your website’s traffic. It allows you to select custom dates, compare landing page and keyword variance, and also has a data filter to include and exclude landing pages or keywords.

This is a must-have in your SEO toolbox!

48. Content Is King

Creating good content takes a lot of effort!

The problem is that most marketers don't put enough energy into promoting their content and resort to producing what can seem like a never-ending wave of content! Marketers often share it on social media and do some basic influencer outreach and then move on.

The key to eeking out the most reach and performance from your content is to repurpose it. Here's how to repurpose your content for maximum value:

• Consider distributing it on multiple channels
• Chop up longer blog posts
• Use the content as a podcast topic
• Explore visual content formats for blog posts
• Rewrite archived top performing content
• Combine related content to create guides

Source: Forbes

49. Your Competitors Know Best

A great hack to improving your organic rankings is to first look at your competition! To give your content a boost, you need to copy the style of sites that are ranking higher than you. There are a few good tools out there but we prefer Ahrefs. With Ahrefs you can analyse competitors directly, what keywords they are ranking for, their backlinks and top performing pages.

You can also wing it on Google by searching for topics you are trying to rank for and analyse the top results.

Here’s what you need to consider:

• What type of content or post is it? Case study, a report, a list post, a video or infographic etc.
• What are headlines and meta descriptions that are being pulled through?
• What is the focus keyword?
• How detailed is the content?

Now, go to your post and optimise:

• Jazz up your title by applying the 25 headlines technique
• Reshape your content to match the format of the top ranking posts
• Re-optimize your content to focus on the new keyword
• Make sure your blog is more detailed and offers more insight than the competing posts

50. More Engagement Means More Rankings

Simply put, engagement is the ability to hold a user’s attention. In SEO terms, it is a measure of the amount of time spent on a page.

Although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that this search engine giant does reward sites with strong user engagement with higher page ranking.

So what can you do to keep your visitors on your page for longer?

• Improve readability with shorter sentences and paragraphs
• Break up content with subheadings and lists
• Use bucket brigades! Bucket brigades are a copywriting technique designed to capture a reader’s interest and keep them on your page
• Include relevant images throughout your content
• Use the APP rule when writing your intro: Agree, Promise, Preview

Reddit a.k.a Guerilla Marketing

51. Tame the Beast

The Reddit community is notoriously sticky when it comes to posting anything that ever so slightly resembles marketing. There are thousands of little daft rules you need to follow in the “Rules” section of every Subreddit. So, the very first thing you need to do is to win the crowd and tame the Reddit beast, here’s how:

• Pick a topic you like - soccer, stamp collecting, Dark Memes, whatever you fancy and subscribe to a subreddit related to that topic. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you have an interest (and preferably some knowledge) in it.
• Post only curated articles, relevant media or something interesting related to the topic, and make sure you follow the dreaded Subreddit rules.

Why do this?

Anyone can click on your Reddit profile and track your history, and if you’re only posting promotional looking stuff, you’ll get labeled as a spammer.

So, before doing anything on Reddit "business" related build an “organic” profile.

52. Clear the Clutter

As soon as you subscribe to Reddit you are automatically added to a list of Subreddits. Some of them might be useful, but most of them are useless so delete all the unnecessary clutter and remove the useless Subreddits so you can build out your own relevant list of Subreddits.

53. All that glitters is not gold!

Only Follow Subreddits That Are Worth Your Time. Just because a Subreddit topic looks related to your industry doesn’t mean it’s the page for you. An excellent example of this is the Manufacturing Subreddit; at first glance, you can see there are over 6000 followers which is great, but they only allow company blog posts to go out on Saturdays, another rule to annoy you.

Here’s what to look for in a Subreddit:

1. Read the Subreddit rules CAREFULLY before adding a Subreddit
2. A large number of followers doesn’t mean there are a lot of active followers
3. Check the number of upvotes that recent posts are getting, if it’s low then consider moving on
4. Read some of the comments from active users in the group; it might just be filled with self-loathing trolls that will only end up wasting your time 

54. Research isn't dead

Research your topic to find a Subreddit that fits your needs, before diving in.

Here’s how:

1. Use your keywords in a Reddit search. When you do a keyword search in Reddit relevant Subreddits and top ranking articles will pop up, follow the rabbit down that hole.
2. Search [site.Reddit.com KEYWORD] in Google, this will bring up relevant subreddits within Google worth exploring.
3. Use tools such as RedditMetrics.com to identify high keyword-usage.

Knowledge is power, research as much as you can as fast as you can and you’ll quickly get a feel for Reddit.

55. Don’t Try to Beat the System, Reddit will screw with you!

Marketers, as previously mentioned are not welcome on Reddit, they are tolerated if their content creates value but barely.

Probably the only way to be successful on Reddit (in the long run) is to generate an audience that instinctively wants to return to your site, who also happens to use Reddit. The only way to do this is by creating significant good quality content on your site that’s really appealing to the persona you’re targeting. A single piece of amazing content won’t suffice, even the new Pillar Content Craze that’s all the rage now.

Redditors can smell marketing bulls%*t a mile away, disingenuous comments or posts are either flagged and removed or blatantly ignored. So keep it as “real” as possible, learn from other posts. It’s often silly stuff that gets the most attention.

56. Dolly up Reddit

It’s no secret, Reddit looks the same way it did back in 2005 and quite frankly it’s dull! If you’re going to spend a lot of time on Reddit you might as well spruce it up a bit using Reddit Enhancement Suite.

RES is a plugin for your browser and it’s stacked with cool tricks that make using Reddit a lot more enjoyable. It has some cool features like:

• Account switcher
• Comment karma counter in the header
• Subreddit tagger
• Comment previews

It’s a free tool and is available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

57. Respond to Comments

It’s best you hear this from me, Reddit is going to make you cry. Don’t think less of yourself when this happens, just embrace the tears and remember that 99% of the active users on Reddit are mostly heartless ghouls with a massive chip on their shoulders.

You’re going to get heat, even if you post a video of Jesus saving a puppy, you will get awful comments from some holed up excuse of a human being. That being said, don’t shy away from responding to comments about what you posted. Filter through all the hate mail, read the more constructive criticism and kinder comments to see if there are areas where you can improve.

Nobody likes criticism, but the key here is to understand that you can’t take ANYTHING on Reddit personally. If you post a blog at the right time and Subreddit it could mean thousands of visits to your site or views on your blog, so don’t let the trolls get to you.

58. Grow, sleep, repeat

Grow, sleep, repeat….that’s all it takes. Find out what works for you and repeat. Growth hacking Reddit is as simple as being a good productive member of Reddit and sharing your own material. Stick with what works for as long as you can, and avoid coming across spammy at all costs.

Respect Reddit, it’s a home to 243 million unique users and posting spammy comments in their safe space won’t be tolerated. Now, go get stuck in.

LinkedIn

59. Create a THOROUGH LinkedIn Page

Nothing is more annoying than a skimpy LinkedIn page, if you’re going to halfass it, don’t bother.

• Add as many certificates as possible
• Add a company profile PDF on your profile page that clients can download
• Reference every single job title in sequence and make sure it looks as impressive and is as thorough as possible
• Use a professional picture for your profile image, and if you add a picture of you and your girlfriend I will personally find you and slap you! Keep it professional
• Get as many references as possible from reputable business associates or friends online, it looks good on a profile

60. Jazz Up Your Email Signature with Your LinkedIn Page

Twitter and Instagram tags look snazzy at the end of an email, but you want to direct business contacts to your LinkedIn page, or the account you’re ghosting for a client so make sure they have it in their signatures as well.

Adding your LinkedIn profile at the bottom of an email sends a clear statement that you mean business. Nobody cares about your Instagram page and all the pictures of you and bae at the beach! LinkedIn is the platform to connect with business professionals, clients, and others in a business setting. Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat are places to connect to consumers, which means it’s fine to include those profiles when you’re dealing with the general public, but business partners need a separate option into your professional profile.

61. Pulse Till It Pulsates

LinkedIn pulse is an excellent place to share blogs, articles or anything relevant to the trade you're working with. You have an opportunity to add niche content on Pulse that you don’t have anywhere else on the internet. More often than not (considering your keyword is in your Pulse post title) your Pulse content will rank on the first fold of a Google search result if done correctly.

Keeping a steady stream of content on Pulse provides you with more exposure to the LinkedIn audience, especially on mobile devices. Use it as much as you can.

Source: The Daily Egg

62. Actively Engage with Your Contacts

There’s no point in building a network if you don’t go to the effort to engage with your current connections. Engaging with your current network allows you to see who’s active and who is not actively using Facebook, or worse that are fake.

Fake social media followers will negatively impact your company, both by people and algorithms. Long story short is you’re wasting valuable marketing money for lower returns when engaging with click farms and other fake profiles.

Source: The Daily Egg

63. Reuse and Recycle

If you have existing content (we assume you do) then you can repurpose whatever you have available on Pulse, and the best part is it won’t affect your SEO on your website negatively. This will help widen the scope of your message and brand consistency across the board. Embed case studies, white papers and articles in your profile as well as any images and videos.

Look for a LinkedIn marketing program that can help you convert your blog posts into infographics, images, or simple activity updates. Communicating other forms of the same content in various ways boosts your brand within your community.

64. Start a Band

Ok, maybe not a band but the closest you get to a band on LinkedIn - a group.

One of the best ways to expand your network is to create a focused LinkedIn group. This will help you attract professionals who are interested in specific topics and give you a platform for your posts. Groups aren’t always engaging though, so you’d have to put in a bit of effort to make it work with some interesting content and threads.

Another advantage of LinkedIn groups is the ability to share information with people without needing to add them as connections. Creating a group is an awesome first step to blowing up your network in an amazing way.

65. Video Killed the Radio Star

Video content is all the rage right now because it seriously increases engagement online, especially when used for marketing purposes. It also increases conversions by around 80 percent.

Right now, video is huge and surprisingly enough it’s great for LinkedIn.

Video Marketing Infographic courtesy of Intralink Global:

66. A/B Test your posts

Some things work, and some things don’t. The smallest changes can make a massive difference, so you should always run an A/B test on your posts. A simple colour change might be the difference between 1 or 2 likes and 5000 likes. Don’t accept anything at face value, test, test, test and test some more and you’ll wisen up quick enough.

67. Export Your Connections

Export your connections from LinkedIn and then import the email addresses into Facebook to create a Facebook Audience or list . This audience is made up of the people who used the same email address when creating their LinkedIn and Facebook account. Generally, you can get around a 50% match when doing this. Now you can promote your content to your connections on Facebook where they are most definitely spending much more time than on LinkedIn.

68. If All Else Fails - Spy

You are reading an author and you quickly want to know the reach he/she is getting. Paste: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/LI PROFILE/ where "LI PROFILE" is replaced by the author's LinkedIn profile. This will instantly take you to the page which shows all the articles that the author has written.

Source: Terry Wilson

69. Longer Does Seem to Be Better (I didn’t say bigger)

Post a lengthy article, followed by a short post without a link (this is critical) and as soon as your short post gets 500 views, insert the link to your long post. After 500 views the short post goes for a ride on its own and takes the long post with it, BAM!

Almost like a tugboat pulling a large ship into the sea. Take advantage of this tip, the loophole probably won’t last very long so make the most of it while it lasts.

70. Use the Mobile App

You can add anyone on linkedIn when using mobile searching on your app, with the "+" sign, as opposed to a laptop where you have to know your target’s email address or if they are a connection of a connection, which is just a pain in the ass really. This only works when you know what to say! You have to kick off with a solid private message, don’t use any generic form of introduction and always be closing = ABC be brief and to the point.

71. Use the Mobile App, Again

Edit your professional headline on mobile to get extra characters. On desktop you're restricted to 120 characters, but if you edit your headline on the mobile app, you'll get an extra 100 characters, that’s like a whole tweet! Imagine what you can do with that, if Donald Trump can run a country with 280 characters you should be able to win LinkedIn.

Youtube

72. Get the Script

YouTube automatically generates a written transcript for every single video uploaded to its website. Anyone can access any transcript at any time, unless the user manually hides it from viewers, which is just a dick move and you don’t want their mediocre transcripts anyway.

Why is this useful:

1. You can use the transcript to make notes which you don’t have to get dictaphone style.
2. You can skip to a specific section of a video without having to watch the entire video again.You can use the notes for instructions on how to fix something you broke, without your better half hearing what you’re doing! I use this one often.

To see a video's transcript: Open the video in YouTube and press the "More" tab underneath the video title. Choose "Transcript" from the drop-down menu.(If you aren't seeing this option, it's because the user chose to hide the transcript.) The transcript will appear as a new module in the same window. In many cases, the user who uploaded the video will not have gone back and manually polished the transcript, so it won't be perfect. But it'll certainly save you some time and effort.

Source: Hubspot

73. Boost Your SEO by Editing or Uploading a Transcript

YouTube and Google look at a wide range of factors when ranking videos in a search to determine what exactly your video is about (really hard in the porn industry), and a transcript of your video is one of them. Just remember that your description always takes first place here, so add your keywords accordingly.

To add a transcript to your video: Open the video on YouTube, and you'll see a row of icons just below the play button. Click the icon on the far right for "Subtitles/CC." (CC stands for "Closed Captions.)

Set your language, then you'll be asked to choose from three different ways to add subtitles or closed captions to your video by:

• Uploading a pre-written text transcript or a timed subtitles file.
• Pasting in a full transcript of the video, wherein subtitle timings will be set automatically.
• Typing them in as you watch the video (really helps you tone down the amount of crap you talk)

DOWNLOAD THE 121 HACKS PDF    

74. Save Videos to Watch Later

We all lose focus now and then, but it shouldn’t affect your work! Rather than lose your focus, earmark the youtube video that popped up and watch it later. Here’s how you do it:

Similar to Facebook’s Save Video feature, YouTube’s Watch Later feature makes it easy to save videos on the fly for a later viewing.

1. Click on the Add To icon under the video’s play button (just like when adding a video to a playlist)
2. Select Watch Later from the pop-down box
3. To view your saved videos, go to your Youtube homepage (click on the three horizontal bars at the top-left of your page to get to it) and choose the “Watch Later” and you’re done.

Source: Hootsuite

75. Boost Engagement by Adding a Card to Your Video

Engagement is key to success in the world of social media. It’s not good enough for a “target” to simply see your content, you need them to interact with it too.

The YouTube cards feature is an excellent way to get your audience to easily engage with your videos. They are like pop-up boxes that you can add to your video, just don’t overdo it, okay? They are available for mobile and desktop.

Here’s how you do it:

• Click on your channel icon and go to the “Creator Studio”
• Now, click on the Video Manager option that appears on the far left-side of your YouTube homepage
• Next, go to the video you want to add the card to and click on Edit
• Click on the Cards option that appears in the drop-down menu
• Click on the Add Card button and select the type of card you want to add and you’ll be given a list of options
• Once you’ve created your card, you’ll able to move it to the spot you want it to appear in the video 

76. Free High-Quality Sound Effects on Youtube

YouTube has a vast collection of high-quality, royalty-free sound effects and music you can browse through and download.

If you want to spice up your video or get that comedic timing just right, you can add sound effects or music to your video.

Here’s how you do it:

• Click "Create" in the menu on the left-hand side, and choose "Audio Library.
• "By default, it'll start you on the "Sound effects" tab where you can start browsing.
• Once you've found your track (fair warning you won’t find mainstream tunes here but it’s a pretty good selection) click the arrow to download.
• The file will download directly to your computer as an MP3 file, and you can do whatever you want with it.

77. Create a Custom YouTube URL

You can make your channel easy to remember with a customised URL. These can incorporate your brand, company, campaign, or product name.

To be eligible, your channel must:

• Have over 100 subscribers
• Be at least 30 days old
• Have an uploaded photo as your channel icon
• Have uploaded channel art.
• Learn more about YouTube’s URL eligibility requirements, on the platform’s help page.

Make sure that you’re 100 percent satisfied with your customised URL name before saving. You won’t be able to make any changes to it once it’s created.

Here’s how you do it:

• Click on your Settings icon on your YouTube page and click Advanced under your account name.
• Next, you’ll see a You’re eligible for a custom URL prompt (only visible if you’re channel is eligible).
• A “Get a custom URL” will then appear showing the custom URL Google has approved.
• Click on Claim here and agree to Google’s Custom URL Terms of Use.
• Make sure you’re completely satisfied with the URL (remember you can’t change it) and click Confirm Choice.

And that’s it, your custom URL is ready to use.

Video Hacks 

78. Autoplay All the Way

Facebook has been heavily concentrating on video for quite some time now. To compete with YouTube, they had to come up with something innovative.

Their greatest hurdle - getting people to press play!

Enter Autoplay.

While scrolling through the newsfeed, videos automatically start playing if people stop at one, or not, depending on the speed of your internet.

The result: video views and engagement has exploded! Twitter and Instagram have now followed suit.

If the first 10 seconds of your video content is engaging and mind blowing, you can easily attract a lot of engagement using Social Videos. Don't forget to use subtitles as 85% of social videos are watched without sound.

79. Go Live

By all accounts, live video is not a new concept. If you’ve ever watched the news at 8pm you should know that. But recently social media leaders have started promoting live videos on a massive scale.

Periscope was first to come up with live videos. Within 4 months after launching, the total users surpassed a behemoth 10 million.

However, Facebook and YouTube is where all the action is right now. Strangely enough Facebook is smashing it in China, where it also happens to be banned! Gotta love a good VPN.

Live videos are popular because of the authenticity it promises and for that reason it beats scripted videos all day long. If played well, anybody can go viral. Play around with live video and you could be smashing it.

80. No Need to Reinvent the Wheel, Use Social Video Creation Apps

Video editing or animation used to require professional expertise and a fat wad of cash in the past. Even animated videos were beyond the reach of startups and media marketing agencies.

Animaker was created to solve this specific issue. Using Animaker, anyone can make animated videos, video infographics and even vertical videos. Animaker even has free animation software with tons of features.

Apple recently launched Apple Clips which helps people make high quality social videos easily. People can even arrange the sequence of the clips by dragging, dropping or deleting clips from the footage and there’s an automatic subtitle generator to boot.

It usually takes a lot of time for video creators to edit, add music and subtitles etc. With clips, all this can be done in less than 10 minutes.

81. Focus People FOCUS!

You have 2 seconds to grab the attention of the audience, gone are the days where 4-hour Operas could hold the crowd’s attention. In any form of video, you have barely enough time to grab attention, and it’s crucial that you get your message crystal clear as fast as possible.

Identify a single key point that you want the viewer to walk away with and stick to only that. How detailed you want your script to be is up to you, but keep in mind the more you pack into your video, the less likely your viewers will hang around for the total video. Use as much imagery and descriptive text as possible, keeping in mind that most of these videos on social media get viewed on silent. Keep your central message focused.

82. Share Your Video Everywhere

Once you’ve created and published your short video, share it on any platform where it may be seen by your ideal clients, even if you think your client doesn’t use that particular platform. If you share your stuff on Twitter, re-share it on Instagram and Facebook, and scatter it at different times.

LinkedIn is fairly new to the whole video scene but they are likely to catch on to releasing more capabilities for the average user as time goes by, and if they want to stay relevant.

Make short-form video a part of your overall social media strategy and reach your audience to make a huge impact in very little time.

Source: Rockdigital

83. Inspire to the Wire

According to Psychology Today, brand preference is predominantly an emotional decision. Humans associate the same personality traits to brands as they do with people.

Choosing a favorite brand is like choosing a best friend, and since we spend time with the people who make us feel good, we engage with the brands that  make us feel good too.

If you want your videos to resonate with your viewers, then they need to go straight for the heart. Emotions that drive viral content:

1. Hope
2. Excitement
3. Happiness

By highlighting the digital age’s low market entry costs, a diminished need for investors, and the ability to efficiently build unprecedented amounts of brand engagement through social media, video inspired entrepreneurs everywhere can pursue their dreams. The future of video has never looked brighter.

Source: Hubspot

84. It's all about trust

Trust is pivotal in the inbound marketing world. If your audience doesn’t trust you, they would never consume your video content. And just because you have a good name to run with doesn’t automatically give your video credit.

Get someone or something to backup your video, or claims, even if it’s a boring statistic!

On Facebook, video isn’t everything, but engaging video is. And to create gripping videos, you need to be able to understand and predict human preference and behaviour.

Social Media Advertising Hacks

85. Improve Your Quality Score

Quality Score is the metric Google uses to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads, and influences your cost-per-click. Facebook went the other way with this one and calls their version a “Relevancy Score”.

Whatever it’s called, Quality Score is a crucial metric. The way to increase Twitter and Facebook Quality Scores is to increase post engagement rates.

A high score is great: you get a higher ad impression share for the same budget at a lower cost per engagement. On the flip side, a low score sucks: you get a low ad impression share and a high cost per engagement.

How do you increase engagement rates?

Promote your best content and stay away from the bad content. To figure out which is which, test it out!

How to test your content:

1. Post lots of stuff (organically) to Twitter and use Twitter Analytics to see which content gets the most engagement.
2. Post your top stuff from Twitter organically to LinkedIn and Facebook. Again, track which posts get the most traction.
3. Pay to promote your best content on Facebook and Twitter.

The key to paid social media advertising is to be picky. Cast a narrow net and maximise those engagement rates.

Source: BusinessCommunity

86. Increase Target Audience Engagement

Targeting all your personas in one go isn’t best-practice; it’s imprecise, lazy and equivalent to throwing stacks of cash into a volcano.

Because they are your target audience doesn’t mean they are alike. It’s highly likely that they all have different values, interests, hobbies, incomes, interests, values, and preferences.

Pay attention to who you target are and put some thought into it. Keyword targeting and other audience targeting methods helps turn average ads into winners.

87. Make use of Social Media Remarketing

If you’re looking to build successful remarketing funnels on Facebook, you’ll need to deliver unique ads to custom audiences segmented according to their browsing history and interests.

Social media remarketing, on average, boosts engagement by three times and doubles conversion rates, while cutting your costs by a third. Make the most of it!

Use social media remarketing to push your hard offers, such as sign-ups, consultations, and downloads.

Once a target has visited one of your landing pages, you know two things:

1. They’re interested in a particular product or feature
2. They’re already familiar with your business

Targeting these hot leads with a generic offer would be a waste of time. Instead, create landing page-specific Facebook ads that are highly relevant to your audience.

88. Remarket to Your Blog Readers

Blog visitors find your site via search engines, paid promotions, email newsletters, referrals, and  a variety of other channels. For the majority of blog readers, their first visit will also be the last; they’ll soon forget about your blog and move on to read the next one.

Remarketing to these readers is a great way to recapture their attention, eventually turning them into returning readers. One of the best ways to warm up cold leads is to share free high-quality content.

89. Hack RankBrain for SEO Magic

Google is using an AI machine learning system called RankBrain to understand and interpret long-tail queries, especially those queries Google has never seen before (like when you use Siri in an inebriated state).

The hypothesis is that Google is examining user engagement metrics (such as click-through rates, bounce rates, dwell time, and conversion rates) to rank pages that have earned very few or no backlinks.

Even if user engagement metrics aren’t part of the core ranking algorithm, getting really high organic CTRs and conversion rates has its own great rewards:

1. More clicks and conversions.
2. Better organic search rankings.
3. Even more clicks and conversions.

Use social media advertising to build brand recognition and double your organic search click through and conversion rates!

Source: Business2Community

90. Who Said There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

On Twitter, tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign. Nobody knows why. You have to pay for every user engagement, regardless if they view your profile, expand your images, expand your tweet from the tweet stream, or clicks on a hashtag.

If you’re doing this, don’t!

Instead, pay only for the thing that matters most to your business, whether it’s clicks to your website, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.

91. Combine Paid Search & Social Media Advertising

The most advanced advertising hack of them all: Combine social media advertising with PPC search ads on Google using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).

RLSA is incredibly powerful. You can target customised search ads specifically to people who have recently visited your site when they performed Google searches. It increases click-through and conversion rates by three times and reduces cost-per-click by a third.

The problem?

By definition, RLSA doesn’t target people who are unfamiliar with your brand. This is where social media advertising comes in: it familiarises people with your brand.

Social media advertising is a relatively cheap way to start the process of pushing people towards your content/brand/product etc. They may not need what you’re offering them now, but as the need arises they’ll be much more inclined to do a branded search for your stuff.

Slack

92. Download the App

You might think of Slack as a cloud-only service, accessed via a browser. Although this is a slightly easier way to use Slack it’s not the only way.

Slack has the obligatory mobile versions for iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone, plus a full set of desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux (Ubuntu or Fedora). Best of all is that you don’t need to separately install Slack to use it on your Desktop. Slack is essentially a browser pane anyway.

But if you like to keep operations separate, so Slack won't crash if your browser does, this is a great option. No matter how you access Slack – mobile, desktop, browser – all the messages are always in sync.

Source: PCMag

93. Be the Slash Master ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Shortcuts are useful, but to access Slack's full potential you need to type a forward slash (the one on the question mark key) in the message text box. You’ll immediately see a full list of commands pop up, everything from searching for apps to checking the weather. Many depend on app integration (like Slacker), but there are several native Slack slashes you should know for everyday use.

/away—toggle your status to away (or back)

/collapse—collapses all the attached files in a channel (use /expand to see all)

/dnd—do not disturb. You should add a time description for the DND session to end. For example, add "30" and Slackbot assumes 30 minutes.

/feedback—send a message direct to Slack, the company

/invite—ask a specific user (via @ mention) to join a channel

/leave—Leave or unsub a channel (also use /close or /part)

/msg—quickly send a message to a user (/dm does the same thing)

/mute—stops notifications in the current channel/group or from an individual user

/open or /join—type the name of a channel to get access

/rename—give the current channel or group a new name

/who—see who's in the current channel/group

And the Kicker /shrug

94. Don’t Miss Messages, Unread Them

We all get busy, and it’s not always possible to respond to messages immediately. So, make sure you don't drop the ball later and mark a message as unread. Click on it while holding down the Alt key in Windows, or the Option key on the Mac. On mobile, do a long press—hold your finger on it—a menu pops up that includes the option to mark it as unread. Just remember that on mobile, the long press is also how you copy text, add a reaction emoji, or star a message.

95. Clear Every Single Unread Message

If you get a lot of messages on slack and you want that annoying #### to be gone here’s how you cut it in one go:

On the desktop type Shift+Esc. You'll get a popup warning telling you quite simply that you're about to mark everything as read. Check a box in the pop-up warning and you'll never see it again, putting Shift+Esc on the fast-track to keeping you at Slack-box Zero.

96. View Only Your Activity

All unread is great but can still be cumbersome with a large team making lots of comments (sometimes admittedly unnecessary). If you want to see only what's related to you, click the @ icon at the upper right of the desktop and a new pane opens called “Activity”. This is where you can see all your most recent mentions, reactions, and keywords. Simply click the @ again or the X at top of the pane to make it go away. Voila, you don’t have to read all the other BS.

97. Repost a Message

Occasionally, a post is worth revisiting, even if it's not worth pinning. Find the original post you want to share again, and on the desktop, right click on the timestamp (or click the ellipsis menu next to the message) and select “Copy Link”. Then paste the link in any channel/group or to an individual. The link will expand to show the full original message in your Slack archives.

Source: PCMag.com

98. Create Unique Text Snippets You Can Reuse

Snippets, a little segment of text for re-use over and over by multiple members of the team, are one of Slack's best features for programmers. They are excellent for coders by supporting a number of programming languages - Fortran, C, C++, Cold Fusion, AppleScript, Ruby, Python, etc as well as Plain Text and HTML and XML. To create a snippet, click the + sign next to the message block, and select "Code or text snippet." As easy as that.

99. Put a Pin in It

There's a difference between starring a message and pinning it on Slack. Stars are only for you, but pins are for everyone. Pin a message in a channel to bring attention to it, or make it easily accessible in the future, for everyone. Hover over a message (or long hold on mobile) and select  the "Pin to this conversation". To get to your pinned items again later, click the split-pane icon at the top of a channel/group to access the right sidebar; one of the features will be Pinned Items. There's a limit of 100 message/files pinned per channel at a time.

Source: PCMag.com

100. We Love Slackers

Slacker is an excellent integration tool that lets you post messages to a group conversation as ANYBODY you want to be. Once you grant Slacker access to Slack you can add any character (as long as you can paste the image URL) that your heart desires.

Developer Nathan Hoad’s brilliant Slacker web app integrates seamlessly with Slack itself. After logging in at https://slacker.nathanhoad.net, simply select the team you’d like to authorise Slacker to post from:

Pick a character and Slacker will ask you to specify which channel you are sharing to, and then simply click Post Message. But be warned, once you go down this rabbit hole there’s no turning back, it’s simply too much fun.

Instagram

101. Never miss another post from your favourite Instagrammers

Have you noticed something different in your Instagram feed?

If you have that’s because Instagram has changed the way your feed works, instead of a chronological feed, they now decide what you see based on how interested you are in certain a topic, how recently a post on that topic was shared, and your relationship to the person posting.

This is all pretty sweet but it may not necessarily be what you want to see at the top of your feed, meaning that you might miss out on some other really cool posts.

This shouldn’t worry you too much because there is a way to avoid missing out on the important posts and take back control of your feed, here's how:

• Visit the profile of the account you’d like to see more of

• Tap the the … icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen

• Select ‘Turn on Post Notifications’

If you just happen to change your mind later, repeat the above three steps and turn off the notifications.

102. Stop seeing posts from specific accounts you follow

The next hack is the exact opposite of the one above…

You may initially like and follow certain people only to later realise that they can only be taken in small measured doses.

So, how do you bypass their annoying posts without running the risk of offending them with an unfollow?

The solution is to mute them and here’s how to do it:

• Tap the … icon in the corner of a post from the account you want to mute

• Click mute

• From there, you can choose whether to mute posts, or mute posts and stories from the account

• You can also mute posts and stories by pressing and holding on a story in your tray, or from a profile

103. Knock out two birds with one stone

 Have you started pinning your Instagram posts to your Pinterest yet?

Noooo?

Well, why not?

If you are already taking, cropping and editing photos for your Instagram, you are missing out on a great opportunity to repurpose your content and grow two platforms at the same time!

Although Pinterest may not currently be one of the network choices you can select when sharing a post from Instagram, there’s a way to knock out two birds with one stone...for both Instagram mobile and the desktop version.

How to do it on mobile:

• Go to the post you’d like to pin

• Tap the … icon located above your post to the right

• Select ‘Copy Share URL’ to copy the post link to your clipboard

• Open the Pinterest app on your mobile device

• Tap on your profile image icon to see your profile

• Tap the plus sign icon at the top right of the screen to add a new pin

• An “Add a board” or “Pin” menu will appear, select “Copied link”

• Pinterest will automatically open the link saved to your clipboard

• Choose the image you’d like to pin and finish posting as usual

How to do it on desktop:

• Log on to your Instagram and find the post you’d like to pin

• Right click on the post and select Open Link in New Window

• Use the Pinterest browser button to choose the image you’d like to pin and finish posting as usual

104. Block those haters

If there are some ugly words you don’t like, or worse if you are being trolled, there is now a way to avoid this dark side of the internet.

Instagram has introduced a feature which allows you to filter and block comments containing specific keywords that may be hurtful or even harmful to you and your brand.

This is super useful if you are running a business account and don’t want to tarnish your company’s name.

Here’s how to do it:

• Select your profile image icon to visit your profile

• Tap the gear icon then to go to ‘Options’

• Choose ‘Comment Controls’

• Toggle the ‘Hide Offensive Comments’ option on

• This feature will hide comments that contain words or phrases that are often reported as offensive

   

105. “Remove” old embarrassing photos without deleting them

A night of too much wine and karaoke or #relationshipgoals with someone you’d rather forget about, or maybe just an old photo of you in your Christmas sweater?

There a million reasons why you may not want certain photos to ever be seen on your feed ever again!

You can now archive these embarrassing photos without actually deleting them, all thanks to the Instagram archive feature.

Here’s how to do it:

• Tap the … icon at the top of the post you want to remove

• Select ‘Archive’

• Tap the ‘Archive’ icon in the top right corner of your profile to review all archived posts

• If you want to restore content to your public profile, simply tap ‘Show on Profile’ at any time and it’ll show up in its original spot

106. Adjust the intensity of your filters

Half the fun of Instagram is finding the perfect filter that brings your photo to life, but what if that perfect filter doesn’t quiet capture the essence of the moment because it is too intense?  

There is only one thing left to do! Instagram lets you adjust the intensity of the filters that you use.

Here’s how to do it:

• After uploading or taking a photo, tap the filter you’d like to use

• Tap the filter again to open edit options

• Use the sliding scale to adjust the intensity of the filter

• Tap ‘Done’ to add the filter to your post and continue your edits

107. Look through entire profiles with total freedom

Liking pictures is one of the easiest things to do on Insta. In fact it’s so easy that people often do it accidentally! A little slip of the fingers and oops, all of a sudden you’ve double tapped on a post from 6 months ago!

So, here's a handy little Instagram hint for you, to look through someone's photos without double-tap paranoia scroll through Instagram feeds with your phone set to airplane mode.

Without internet access, you won't be able to “Like” any photos, even if you double-tap it, accidentally or even intentionally.

You’ll get to a point where the pictures will stop loading, this is not a problem though, go back to the feed first to load the posts, then turn off airplane mode, let the pictures load, turn on airplane mode again and get back to scrolling.

Cumbersome? Maybe just a little, but it is a small price to pay for paranoia mitigation.

108. Use Instagram as your own photo editor

Have you ever wanted to post a picture on another social media platform instead of Instagram but couldn’t find the right filter for it? Then this hack is definitely for you.

To use Instagram as a photo editor without having to post anything, all you need to do is publish a picture while your phone is on airplane mode.

First, be sure you have "Save Original Photo" turned on in your Instagram settings.

Then, turn on airplane mode, next follow the normal steps to post a photo to Instagram: Upload the photo, edit it, and press ‘Share’ An error message will appear saying the upload failed, but you'll be able to find the edited image in your phone's photo gallery.

109. Increase your engagement on your feed and your stories

If you have noticed, engagement is shifting away from the Instagram feed and moving over to stories.

Since the story feature was introduced, views and engagement seem to be constantly on the rise!

This is the perfect hack if you are stuck on what your next story should be.

You can now post on both your feed and your Stories without having to do a whole bunch of workarounds.

Here’s how to do it:

• Post your image to your Instagram feed.

• Choose that same image and open it up. Then choose the paper plane symbol below the image.

• Instagram will show you a new screen with two options to add the post to your story or choose friends to send it to.  Choose to ‘Add Post to your Story’.

• Instagram stories will open up with the post on the screen ready to go.

• If you follow the instructions to ‘Tap for More’ you will get some basic detail added to your post like your profile and the first line or two of your caption.

• You can also use your fingers to change the size of the image of the feed post or change the position.

Quora 

110. Optimise your profile to increase your visibility

If you’ve got a question, Quora’s got the answer and on the rare occasion that the answer is not there, someone will answer your question shortly!

Quora is quickly becoming the go to place for anyone who may be stuck on an issue and needs a person with experience and insight into that issue to help them.

Trust and credibility is what Quora is built on, so if you want to get into the inner circle, the sooner you optimise your Quora account, the better.

Let’s show you how:

• Edit your credentials

• Write a clear, concise bio and don’t forget to add links to your website/blog.

• Edit the ‘knows about’ section

• Link your social media profiles to your description

111. Be an inch wide and a mile deep, aka don’t be a jack of all trades

If you want to stand out on Quora, it is best to first focus on one area of expertise and add maximum value by answering questions that are focused on that topic.

But just because you are knowledgeable on a certain topic, doesn’t mean that the whole world will be knocking down your door so that you can answer all their questions.

You may have just have to hunt down the questions that you are looking to answer, here’s how!

• Search for the topic by using the relevant keywords,

• Search for the topic using Quora’s search bar,

• Search for questions using Quora’s search bar, or

• Find relevant questions via Google search

112. Tap into Quora’s true potential to drive traffic to your site

Carrying on from Hack #112, we just need to point out that not all topics are built equal. Some topics are actually dead ends and will drive absolutely zero traffic back to your website.

This is no cause for panic though, the hacks guide is here to point out what to look out for when you are searching for a topic category that is worth answering

Look for topics with the following:

• A profile photo of the topic

• Check for recent activity

• A populated “About” section

• A high number of questions

• A high number of followers (This is a big one as it shows people are interested in the topic.)

• A dedicated FAQ page

• A list of most viewed writers

113. Move fast and answer time-sensitive and newsworthy questions 

Once in a while there are questions that are either time sensitive or are newsworthy, think solar eclipse or Donald Trump’s election, and on the rare occasion there are questions that are both time sensitive and newsworthy, think Donald Trump getting elected during a solar eclipse, okay we are getting carried away…

The point is that there is always a conversation happening online and putting a relevant answer in front of a “captive” audience is the most effective way to drive traffic to your website.

Just ensure that your answer is relevant and actually adds value to your community.

114. Don’t shy away 

The first mover advantage works very well on Quora but it is not the end of the world if you are not the first to answer a question.

Always remember that the point of Quora is to add the maximum amount of value for your audience. In short, if you are not first and you would still like your answer to get views and upvoted you will need to give a better answer than the ones that have already been given and here is how:

• Study the previous answers and look for details that may have been left out

• Agree with the previous answers, you may even @mention their authors in your answer, then proceed to address the details that have been left out from previous answers

• Ensure that you answer in full but also refer back to your website for a “fuller” answer through relevant links.

   

115. Include images in your answer

They say that a picture speaks a thousand words and this is true on Quora as well.

For the most part Quora looks like a newspaper and often answers to certain questions can be lengthy, this puts you at risk of losing your audience's attention.

Adding in a picture or two will serve the dual purpose of breaking up a lengthy answer into smaller more bite-sized readable chunks thus keeping your readers attention and a picture can be used to represent visually what you are saying in your answer.

116. Bold-out important points to help the reader

Readability is an important consideration when writing down your answer but often your answer will contain a few very important points.

Using BOLD letters can help you draw your reader’s attention to where you need it to be.

117. Contribute to Quora’s Answer Wikis

Answer Wikis are based on the same idea as Wikipedia, they allow the entire Quora community to collaborate together on an answer summary or an aggregated answer for a particular question.

Summaries: These draw from the different points of view that have been given to a particularly complex question with the aim of consolidating these different perspectives to form a more ‘rounded’ answer.

Aggregated answers: These aim to be a comprehensive collection of uncontroversial, factual information.

Basically it is a summary that users can edit.  It is designed for those readers who prefer a broad strokes answer rather than reading a dozen or more lengthy individual answers.

Quora wikis work best where most of the answers are suggesting specific names of books, movies or people and where there are lots of long-winded answers all essentially saying the same thing.

118. Share your answers on Facebook and Twitter

People looking for your answers may not always be on Quora,

Quora allows you to link your Facebook and Twitter account so that your friends and followers are able to see your answers from Quora.

Once you have answered a question on Quora, a pop-up screen will appear asking whether or not you want to share to Facebook and Twitter, click the share button.

Sharing your answers to other social media platforms has the following added benefits:

• You may potentially attract and build a new audience

• It gives you a chance to test less successful answers on another platforms

• It expands your reach

• It maximises your time and effort

• It increases your online presence

• It potentially increases your chances of driving more traffic to your website

   

119. Host a Quora session

After you have been active in the community for a while, answering questions and building up some cred in the “Quora Streets”, you may be lucky enough to get invited to host a Quora session.

Basically, a person who is a subject matter expert is invited to host a session where they answer questions on their area of knowledge. How it works is that from the time that a session is announced, people can start posting questions and then the host sits down and answers the questions with the most upvotes.

120. Use Quora analytics to your advantage

When you start gaining momentum and churning out a lot of content on the platform, you can take advantage of Quora analytics. The analytics dashboard on the stats page is minimal and will let you track views, upvotes and shares over the last 7 days, 30 days, 3 months and all of time.

Having insight into your engagement will help you know where the majority of your audience is coming from and will help you determine what sort of content and questions they are looking for.

80% of your traffic will come from 20% of your answers, once you identify which answers drive the most traffic, you can iterate, re-calibrate and fine-tune your strategy.

You’ve Made It All the Way to 121  

121. Find Your Tribe

We know marketing can be hard, the digital landscape is ever evolving and growing your agency or business is tricky! And that's where this last hack comes in. We believe in digital collaboration, in moving beyond simple outsourcing and build a robust partnership to deliver remarkable inbound marketing.

At Uku Inbound we wanted to create a home for big thinkers, where we are lead by our curiosity and not confined to the rational. We believe that this is a road that is best walked together, like explorers on a journey to digital mecca. Whether you are a navigator, hunter or master sailor, our tribe of Uku’s is here to join your expedition!

Conclusion

Our list of 121 marketing hacks takes a closer look at some tips and tricks for a marketer to use and drive results of their clients and businesses. With that said the list of hacks available online today is seemingly endless, some very useful while others less so. With all these options available to us the key to driving maximum results is to experiment with a few hacks on channels that are the most relevant to you and your clients. Keep the ones that work and throw away anything that doesn’t.

If your users are on Facebook, don’t go implementing hacks on Google+, Snapchat, and Instagram. Rather focus and nail your efforts on Facebook. The internet is constantly changing and evolving and it can be incredibly hard to keep up. Don’t allow yourself to get too distracted by the flashing lights but rather simplify your approach and focus on a few relevant channels.

As you start to get feedback and start to see the results or lack thereof, you can make adjustments and build up a portfolio of hacks that work for you. Results require consistency so try, try and try again.

Good Luck. 

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