Demand Curve - The Growth Newsletter #135

The Growth Newsletter #135

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Hello and welcome to all growth-loving founders and marketers.

The West Coast, and a lot of other places, are on fire right now. I hope everyone reading this is okay and safe! 

This week is the ultimate "growth hack," social listening, and juicy internal linking.

Let's dive in 🐭

– Neal

1. The one growth "hack" that truly works

Insight from us.

We've figured it out. The one growth hack to rule them all:

A great product that solves a painful problem or fulfills a need.

I know that's incredibly difficult to achieve, but that's truly the thing that matters.

All of the 400+ tactics we've shared in this newsletter over the past several years are useless if it's trying to grow something that is not useful.

In fact, a truly amazing product, service, or piece of content will grow despite poor marketing execution. But these tactics are what you layer on top of a great foundation of a sound product, a sound brand, and a sound strategy.

OR to get initial users for your product to help you determine if it does solve a painful problem or fulfill a need.

And that's why ultimately we prefer the term "growth" over "marketing."

Because growth is cross-disciplinary. If changing your product in a way that makes it more useful is the best way to get more users, then that's what you should do.

If people aren't buying or retaining then continuing to throw people at a "meh" product is not going to magically make it all better.

I know this isn't our normal actionable advice. But I've felt funny sharing tactic after tactic when the above is what we firmly believe. It's the ethos of what we do at Demand Curve and at our agency, Bell Curve.

The foundation is the most important. So make sure to build a strong one.

2. "Social listen" and become the hero

Insight from Lia Haberman.

A group of 11 young women arrive in Italy for vacation, only to find that the villa they reserved via Booking.com doesn’t actually exist.

Alix Earle, a TikTok influencer with more than 5 million followers, laments about the scam to her audience.

But it’s not Booking that responds to make it right—it’s Airbnb. They save the day by putting them up in a nearby villa straight out of White Lotus:

Alix’s videos documenting the saga got more than 20 million combined views on TikTok. One social media expert estimates the earned media value for Airbnb at around $100,000.

All for what probably cost a few thousand dollars to compensate the host.

Booking did eventually respond... with a boilerplate comment asking Alix to reach out on another social media platform for support. (Yikes.)

Maybe it’s no surprise Alix’s videos have inspired other users to create videos sharing their negative experiences with Booking.

The moral of the story: "Social listening" can really work. Look for opportunities to swing in and be the savior.

ConvertKit founder, Nathan Barry, did this when their competitor, Gumroad, jacked up their prices suddenly. They even offered to handle migrations for people for free.

3. Juice your SEO by 10-50% with internal linking

Insights from Eli Schwartz, Ethan Smith, and Kevin Indig.

Google has bots that crawl the internet clicking on links. It does this periodically, and it uses sitemaps that website owners submit to help it find pages—particularly new ones.

We all know that a page that gets a lot of external links (ones from different sites) have a huge effect on SEO (hence why people play the backlinking game).

But you wouldn't assume that adjusting internal links (ones pointing to other pages on your site) to drastically influence your SEO rankings.

But according to the 3 SEO experts above, it is one of the biggest levers you can pull. Ethan Smith's agency says it can increase search impressions by 10 to 50% within 50 days.

Here's 7 tips for internal linking:

#1. Don't just link to a page once, do it 7+ times. If you want a page to be found via search, link to it from multiple pages. Graphite says there an inflection point at 7+.

#2. A link from the homepage is the most important. Have your homepage link to all of your most important pages.

#3. Create an HTML sitemap page that links to every page. Link to this page from the homepage. Here are some examples of HTML sitemaps.

#4. Add site-wide navigational links in the header, footer, or sidebar.

#5. Don't just rely on footer links. Google gives more weighting to links in the main content area of a page than it does a footer as they're more likely to be clicked.

#6. Use contextual "anchor text." Don't say "Join our marketing community by clicking here." Instead say "Join our marketing community."

#7. Make sure you don't have any broken links. Find broken links using audit tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Semrush.

If you invest in SEO at all, then spend some time adjusting your internal linking.

News and links

News you can use:

• The European Union's Digital Services Act has now made it so users can "opt out" of algorithmic feeds—instead seeing their friends/follows posts in chronological order.
• Meta releases Code Llama, their open-source AI that writes code.
• Bing AI is now available on Google Chrome (previously only available on Edge).
• Quebec researchers develop a complex series of two AI models to encrypt medical data stored in the cloud. Allowing doctors with the passcode to ask questions of the AI, but the underlying data makes sense to nobody but the AI.
• Google Home adds a bunch of "starters" and "actions" making it almost feel like Zapier for your home.

Event we recommend: Un-ignorable Newsletter Masterclass

135 issues and 4 years ago, we started the Growth Newsletter. It started as a simple way to encourage activity in our growth marketing Slack community.

We didn't intend to build a newsletter business.
We didn't intend to inch towards 100,000 subscribers.

Yet, our newsletter has driven 7-figures in revenue from agency clients, course sales, and sponsorships. And is frequently ranked in people's favorite newsletters.

If you want to learn how to create a newsletter you can build a multi-million dollar business off of, join us on Sept 7th for our Un-ignorable Newsletter Masterclass.

Limited spots available—join the waitlist to get first dibs.

Something fun

From @dinosandcomics.

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And if you have any comments/question, I'd love to hear them. Just hit reply!

In case you're new: Who's Demand Curve?

We’re on a mission to help make it easier to start, build, and grow companies.

We share high-quality, vetted, and actionable growth content as we learn it from the top 1% of founders and marketers.

How we can help you grow:

• Read our free playbooks, blog articles, and teardowns—we break down the strategies and tactics that fast-growing startups use to grow.
• Enroll in the Growth Program, our marketing course that has helped 1,000+ founders get traction and scale revenue.

• Check out our Sprints: short video courses that are laser-focused on a topic in growth.

• Want to build an audience of buyers? Join the waitlist for the Un-ignorable Challenge.

• Are you an ambitious startup/scaleup looking to grow? Our agency, Bell Curve, can be your strategic growth partner.

• Get your product in front of startup founders by sponsoring this newsletter.

See you next week.

— Neal and Justin

Neal O'Grady

Justin Setzer