So, to get you, as one of my diehards even MORE EXCITED about the book, I wanted to share a part of the introduction for this section (is that ok?).
Cool, then here we go:
======== EXCERPT FROM SECTION THREE ========
Now, we finally get to move into growth hacking.
What is growth hacking, though? I'm smiling to myself, because when I got started online 15 years ago, we didn't have Facebook. The Google slap had crippled most of our companies, so we had to figure out other ways to get traffic into our funnels.
We tried and tested everything. Some things were super "black hat," and while they weren't anything bad, they were frowned on by companies like Google. For instance, we would set up cloaked pages that would trick the search engine's spiders into thinking our pages were perfectly optimized for search. However, when real people (who didn't come from a search engine spider's IP address) would show up, they would see a completely different squeeze page that was optimized for conversion. We built link farms to get our pages ranked at all costs. We figured out ways to get emails past spam filters and delivered into our subscribers' inboxes.
But it wasn't just black-hat techniques that we played with; we also spent countless hours working on getting free PR that would push people from TV, radio, and top online news sites into our funnels. We tried everything we could think of: black hat, white hat, and about a thousand shades of gray in between.
For us, it was a battle of life or death. If we didn't figure out how to get eyeballs to our pages, we didn't eat. All the tricks and hacks that we tried were looked down on by "real" businesses.
Some called us spammers, while others were harsher and called us scammers. We didn't know what to call it, so we just called it "internet marketing."
Those are the days that I'll never forget. It was the Wild West, and we were there early, way before our time. I played on this playground for almost a decade before what we did was considered cool. When I first heard the term "growth hacking," some writers had published articles talking about some of the fast-growth startup companies like Dropbox, Uber, PayPal, and Airbnb.
Once people shared their amazing growth-hacking techniques for quickly growing their companies, I started to laugh out loud. Every "hack" they shared was a basic technique we had been doing for over a decade! Many of these hacks were the same things that others used to shame us for, but they had now become cool. Because of ClickFunnels's rapid growth, many people have told me we are a unicorn because we have such a unique growth strategy, which is that we don't grow through funding; we grow by hacking.
In this last section, I'll share with you the most powerful white-hat growth-hacking techniques that we still use to this day. Even though these appear to be new growth hacks to many, we've
been mastering them for the past 15 years. In truth, our success comes from going backward, diving deep into the playbook that we wrote before the term growth hacking was even cool. Have fun with these hacks, as they're incredibly powerful and will give you an advantage against anyone who wants to compete against you.
