Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

by Ryan Holiday

So the digital single for this book was $2.99. That meant basically anyone could afford to give it a read. By making the cost really low and then overdelivering on content we set this book up to succeed. I had some other great hacks, too. Before launch I wrote approximately a dozen articles by adapting lessons and content from the book for publication on influential sites. Instead of charging for my writing as I usually do, I gave these away for free. The result was popular articles on MarketWatch, Betabeat, Fast Company, Thought Catalog, The Huffington Post, Shopify, Hacker News, SlideShare.com, reddit, Medium, and a few others. This content marketing strategy is now quite common in the start-up space because it’s cheap and available to anyone who can write decently. I also relied on my own ten-thousand-person mailing list, which I had built slowly over the past six years painstakingly recommending books by other authors. This list has some of the most die-hard book fans and rabid readers you can imagine. (For anyone who wants to sign up, you can do so here: http://www.ryanholiday.net/reading-newsletter.) Finally, I reached out to the growth hacker community, who was looking for a book that validated and championed its work. The most influential guys in the space, from Sean Ellis to Andrew Chen, all helped promote the book to their audiences on Twitter and Facebook, which helped get this project going. Lesson: Reduce barriers to entry; use targeted media and platforms to ...