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Growth Models

Analysing and experimenting with growth marketing

I've spent ~10 years helping digital brands grow. I share what I know and what I'm experimenting with in this newsletter.

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Featured Post

When people pay...

"I'm finding it's not working as well anymore... it's easier, but the results are pretty bad." This is what a FB ad specialist said to me the other day on a consulting call. What were we talking about? Free lead magnets. And this isn't the only person who's said this to me in the last few weeks. A coaching student was running ads to a free ebook. They managed to get a tonne of leads, but couldn't sell them their new product. With each week my belief in offering freebies for lead gen dies off...

about 18 hours ago • 1 min read

Had someone reach out after yesterday's email about the idea of using FE offers to attract leads at cost (or slight profit) and build a list of buyers. They said... "Hey Pete, I'm not sure I get it. The image has you making sales at $30ish, and you said the average value of a customer is $49. How does that work with your $1 offers?" A couple of things to note here. 1, the $1 product pricing is to help validate the idea. Once you've sold some and can prove people will pay, it's about figuring...

1 day ago • 1 min read

What's the fastest way to grow your email list? I've seen growth with everything from creating content to doing partnerships with people. But let's face it. These are not the fastest way to grow. Content takes a while to spin up and to get good results. Partnerships are hit or miss. The best way to grow your list consistently? Buy subscribers. Simple as that. Here's the thing. Buying leads is a big risk. Especially if you're working on a tight budget. A lot of people use ads to drive traffic...

3 days ago • 1 min read

Sorry to tell you, but no one knows 100% what's gonna work to move the needle. Sure, there are people with more experience who can steer you away from obviously bad decisions and towards approaches more likely to work. But no one can call a winner 100% of the time. If you look at most success stories (the real ones, not the simplified fluff pieces people write about their success), the majority of them come down to "we tried loads of stuff and then doubled down on what worked. Each new...

8 days ago • 1 min read

There was a time when I made the lion's share of my income through cold outreach. What I learned that worked included... Keep it short Open a dialogue Explain clearly what the offer is and what's in it for the recipient It's always going to be a numbers game, but following the above three rules made sure I got better results than most. Yesterday, I got a really bad outreach email. Usually, I ignore and move on with my day. But this guy also booked a slot in my calendar through a hidden link....

9 days ago • 1 min read

I’m running a job ad on UpWork right now to see if we can bring the Custom GPTs I’ve created into the community. It’s been a while since I’ve hired through UpWork, but I am amazed at how far the bar has lowered in just a year or two. I’ve always had some immediate disqualifications that help me avoid the real low-value providers. But thanks to AI, it feels like I’m gonna be filtering more people. Within minutes of adding this job posting I had 9 applications (up to 14 as I write this). Most...

10 days ago • 1 min read

Fresh off the back of the workshop yesterday with Adriana around growing an audience without using rented audience platforms like social media and Google, I spotted this. Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc I've got some bad news for affiliate/product review sites. It is not looking good with this Google update. I just dug into several examples where The Wirecutter, arguably the best product review site (section) on the internet, has lost positions in the last 2 weeks. The drops…...

13 days ago • 1 min read

A quick one to say that we'll be going live in 1 hour with Adriana Tica to learn her methods for growing an audience WITHOUT social media. If you've already got your ticket, make sure you log in in 1 hour. If you've not yet joined but want to, check out the full details about what's being covered below. Learn more here See you soon! Pete Vagrants, Vagabonds, and Villains Ltd, Unit 16535, 13 Freeland Park, Wareham Road, Poole, Dorset BH16 6FAUnsubscribe · Preferences

14 days ago • 1 min read

I'm not gonna beat around the bush here. This email is a blatant promo of the upcoming workshop Adriana Tica is doing this Thursday the 25th on growing an audience without social. Why might you need this? Look, social is important in reaching more people. But the networks are cracking down on you "deplatforming" people. Or, in simple terms, they don't want you redirecting people from their platform to your site. So that means social posts with... Links Engagement bait Anything else that...

16 days ago • 1 min read

Was recently chatting to someone about the pricing stages for their $1 Product Funnel. We were figuring out whether their upsell price was too big of a jump from their initial front-end purchase. So, I started combing back through offers I’ve run successfully, and what I see a lot of other people do to see if there are any benchmarks or potential guidelines. Personally, I’ve always tried to keep the upsell pricing to be between 10 - 30X the pricing of the front-end offer. So if you’re...

17 days ago • 1 min read
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