Kamal Ravikant

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Google Play Listen on Spotify

Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Kamal Ravikant, a VC, author, mountain climber, and has served in the army!  We are lucky enough to have him on the show to share some of his wisdom about the startup game and beyond.

Tune in to hear Kamal’s fascinating life story, why he decided early on in his career that he preferred starting companies rather than joining someone else’s vision and how his desire for a better kind of investor led him to the role of VC.

TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:

Resources From The Interview:

Leave Some Feedback:

Connect with Eric Siu: 

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Google Play Listen on Spotify

Ameer Rosic

Hey everyone! In today’s episode I share the mic with Ameer Rosic, co-founder of Blockgeeks, an online learning platform that helps you learn blockchain.

Tune in to hear Ameer discuss how he got the idea to create Blockgeeks in order to fill a need for a blockchain resource that didn’t exist, what the differences between cryptocurrency and ICOs are, how he went from not understanding bitcoin to building Blockgeeks, and where to go for educational guides and tips on learning more.

Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How a High School Dropout Built the Blockchain Site Blockgeeks (& Did 1M Organic Visits in 1 Year!) TRANSCRIPT

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

Resources From This Interview:

Leave Some Feedback:

Connect With Eric Siu:

Paid Content Promotion: A Comparison Of The Different Platforms

This post, written by Pawel Grabowski, originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.

I’m sure you’ll agree: Getting prospects to notice your content is one heck of a task.

Between the sheer amount of content published each day and our dwindling attention spans, it’s no easy task to grab and hold your target audience’s attention. 

As a result, you spend countless hours tweeting about it with with fingers crossed, hoping that someone will notice your awesome content, share it with their social network, and make it go viral.

Or you could try an easier way to ensure that your content reaches the right audience:

Paid content promotion.

A lot of advertising platforms allow you to promote your content to a highly specific audience, attract qualified traffic and leads, and grow your customer base. The downside? You have to pay for it, of course. Luckily, many of them aren’t expensive, especially if you consider the ROI they can generate.

If you’ve been afraid to start promoting content with paid ads or even wondered how they work, you’ve come to the right place.

In this post, I’ll give you an overview of the 7 most popular paid content promotion platforms.

Free Bonus Download: Get a list of insanely actionable steps to launching Instagram ads – advice not found in this post! Click here to download it free.

#1. Facebook Advertising

According to Social Media Examiner, Facebook is the most popular paid content promotion platform among marketers: 84% of B2B marketers use it to regularly drive traffic to their content. (Hardly surprising, right?)

Paid content promotion

(Image source)

And according to AdWeek, we spend around 28% of our time online on social networking:

Paid content promotion

(Image source)

Statista reports that consuming content is one of the primary activities on Facebook:

Paid content promotion

(Image source)

Facebook also attracts both B2C and B2B audience, making it a viable promotion channel for practically any business.

So regardless of whether you target customers or brands, you have a big chance of attracting them to your content.

Facebook offers many opportunities to promote content via its Advertising Platform, and Page Post Link ads can help you drive more traffic to your content. These ads typically show in the Newsfeed (also on mobile) and clicking on this ad takes a user directly to a website.

paid content promotion

(Image source)

Page Post Link ads include a big image which makes it perfect to help catch your ADHD-prone audience’s attention. What’s more, Facebook allows you to A/B test all elements of the ad to come up with the most converting creative.

Learn More: Facebook Lead Ads: Everything You Need to Know to Increase Mobile Conversions

Targeting

When setting up your ad, you can target users by:

You can also display your ad to current customers or subscribers by including them in a Custom Audience based on e-mails, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs.

Lastly, you can also use Lookalike Audiences to target people similar to your clients, leads or fans.

Cost

Facebook Advertising is a bidding platform, meaning that you can specify how much you’re willing to pay for a campaign.

On Facebook, you can bid on Cost Per Click, Impressions, Cost Per Action/Conversion and Cost Per Like, and the final price is affected by:

Next Steps

#2. AdWords

I know, it makes no sense at all, does it?

AdWords is an ideal platform to attract new customers or leads, but not to promote content, right? And yet…

The aforementioned Social Media Examiner report states that 41% of social marketers use AdWords to promote content regularly, making it the second most popular paid content promotion strategy.

Paid Content Promotion

And according to the latest Content Marketing Institute B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks report, search engine marketing is the most popular paid content strategy among marketers.

Paid Content Promotion

Of the survey participants, 66% admitted to using the Google’s advertising platform to promote their content.

What’s more, 55% consider AdWords the most effective paid promotion strategy.

How is that possible?

You see, AdWords is a versatile yet extremely simple platform to use. Creating an ad takes no more than a couple of minutes, and Google starts displaying it to anyone looking for keywords that you specified practically right away.

Also, the AdWords platform offers extensive research tools which allows you to really make sure that your content reaches the right audience at the right time.

And finally, data you collect in AdWords lets you improve your audience targeting and create much better content in the future.

Free Bonus Download: Get a list of  insanely actionable steps to launching Instagram ads – advice not found in this post! Click here to download it free.

Targeting

Google AdWords targets keywords that people actually use to search for information. So when you choose words or phrases that are relevant to your content, your ads appear to those people.

On top of that, you can also target users by location, language, and device they’re using. Also, by using remarketing, you can target people who have visited your site before.

Paid Content Promotion

(Example of an AdWords ad promoting content.)

Cost

AdWords is an auction-based system in which you specify how much you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad for a specific keyword.

Next Steps

#3. LinkedIn

Social Media Examiner reports that LinkedIn is the 3rd most popular paid content promotion strategy among marketers, with 18% of them effectively using it to distribute content.

Paid Content Promotion

And InsideView states that LinkedIn delivers more leads to B2B companies than any other social networking site or a company’s blog.

LinkedIn offers 3 options to promote your content:

1. Sponsored Updates – a native advertising model in which you display content as a sponsored update in a person’s news feed.  

Paid Content Promotion

(Image source)

2. Text and Image Ads – allows you to place ads in prominent places across LinkedIn’s website.

Paid Content Promotion3. Sponsored InMail – lets you use LinkedIn InMail to message targeted audience segments about your content.

Paid Content Promotion

(Image source)

Targeting

The power of LinkedIn ads lies in their ability to target people not just by their demographics (age, gender, location, etc.), but also by such factors as a job title, employer, industry, company name, company size, skills, LinkedIn Groups they’re members of, and even interests.

Paid Content Promotion

(Image source)

Cost

LinkedIn offers two basic pricing models:

Next Steps

#4. Twitter

I agree: You rarely think of Twitter as a paid content promotion platform.

After all, you already use it to promote your content for free (by sharing every article you write on this platform), and you probably use software like CoSchedule or Buffer to tweet about archived content.

You might even reach out to influencers to help you spread the word on your posts.

But I bet you never considered paying to promote your content on Twitter.

Consider this:

Twitter Ads offers an option to publish Promoted Tweets that are nothing but ads disguised as tweets that appear in a person’s timeline. In most cases, the only difference between normal and promoted tweets is a little “Promoted” label in the bottom left corner.

Learn More: Do Twitter Ads Really Work? (And How to Get The Most Out of Them!)

paid content promotion

Targeting

Twitter offers advanced targeting options to ensure that your content reaches a highly-qualified audience.

For example: on Twitter, you can target users based on their interests, accounts they follow or keywords and user behavior.

Cost

Like most platforms I discuss in this post, Twitter Ads is an auction based system.

However, unlike AdWords, for instance, on Twitter you’re not bidding on keywords but rather specific actions that you want the person to complete.

You can choose from such actions as clicks, acquire new followers, engagement, app installs, leads or video views.

Next Steps

#5. Outbrain

I bet this happens to you all the time: You discover an interesting article, and just when you get to the end of it, you notice a link to another one.

And then another one.

And another one….

And before you know it, you’ve spent an hour consuming countless pieces of content.

The next platform I’m discussing here makes it possible to promote content by targeting this very behavior.

Outbrain is a service that allows you to target that very behavior and promote your post on other pieces of content in order to attract readers from other websites.

The platform displays a widget with a list of recommended articles below every post on the sites that use it. Here’s a screenshot showing the widget in an article in the Time Magazine:

Paid Content Promotion

Cost

Just like the other paid content promotion platforms, Outbrain works on a Cost Per Click basis, meaning that you pay only for the visitors who go to the page that you’re promoting.

Next Steps

Note: Outbrain is just one of many content discovery networks. Other, similar platforms include:

#6. Reddit Ads

Fact: Reddit is the front page of the web.

Just last month alone, the site received 231,625,384 unique visitors (subject to change, as you can see), viewing 8,194,956,819 pages and casting 29,170,122 votes.

Impressive, huh?

What’s more, the site offers incredible opportunities to promote your content.

Reddit is made up of “subreddits”, which are categories that users create to discuss related topics. You can submit content directly to a relevant subreddit or use Reddit Ads to ensure that a specific audience will notice it.

Targeting

Reddit allows you to target users by their interests, specific subreddit they subscribe to, location, or display your ad to all of Reddit, without any particular targeting.

Paid Content Promotion

(Image source)

Cost

Reddit charges for impressions (CPM), which means that you pay a flat fee for every 1,000 ad impressions.

Here are the rates as per Reddit’s FAQ page:

Next Steps

#7. BuySellAds

I agree: It probably wouldn’t make sense to use banner ads to promote every piece of content.

But if you’ve published a report, long-form guide, e-book or other lead magnet, banners might be a way to attract a new audience to them.

BuySellAds is a platform that connects publishers with publishers and allows them to buy and place banner ads on the sites.

On BuySellAds, you can purchase banner ad space, publish sponsored content, and buy individual ad spaces on thousands of sites.

Paid Content Promotion

Targeting

BuySellAds organizes publishers by categories and topics, so you can find websites with the audience you’re trying to reach:

Paid Content Promotion

(Image source)

Along with the basic information about the site, BSA also displays the most recent audience stats like monthly impressions and Twitter following:

Paid Content Promotion

(Image source)

Information about ad placements and types is available on the site along with prices:

Paid Content Promotion

Cost

Price per ad placement is determined by each site and can range from as little as $10 and as much as hundreds of dollars, depending on the site’s popularity and audience engagement.

Free Bonus Download: Get a list of  insanely actionable steps to launching Instagram ads – advice not found in this post! Click here to download it free.

Final Word

With so much new content published every day, getting your target audience to notice your content is one heck of a task. One way to achieve this goal is to always promote it via owned and earned media.

Or you could use paid ads to attract more targeted visitors to your site.

Now that you understand what the different paid content promotion platforms are and the pros and cons of each one, you’ll have a much easier time getting potential prospects to notice your content!

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Google Play Listen on Spotify

Greg Smith

Hey everyone, on today’s episode we’ve got Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific, an all-in-one platform for independent experts and entrepreneurs to create, market and sell online courses.

Listen as we discuss how cold calls got Thinkific their first 50 customers, how Greg created an online course that got $10,000 in MRR which allowed him to start Thinkific, the simple funnel that Thinkific uses to grow revenue 30% MoM, and how they saw success by figuring out why people read their content and then monetizing the ‘why’.

Special offer just for our Growth Everywhere listeners! As a special bonus, Thinkific is giving away one free month on their Business Plan (worth $99) AND $800 worth of premium training courses! Click here to start creating and selling your own online courses!

Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How Thinkific Uses YouTube to Organically Drive 3-4K a Month in Additional Revenue TRANSCRIPT

Time Stamped Show Notes:

3 Key Points:

  1. Adding amazing people to your company will exponentially grow your business.
  2. Help others succeed and you will succeed.
  3. Think about why people view your content and then find a way to monetize the why.

Resources from this interview:

As a special bonus, Thinkific is giving away one free month on their Business Plan (worth $99) AND $800 worth of premium training courses! Click here to start creating and selling your own online courses!

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Eric Siu:

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Google Play Listen on Spotify

Harry Campbell The Rideshare Guy

Hello everyone, today we have Harry Campbell, creator of The Rideshare Guy blog, an authoritative resource drawn from his own experience to help other drivers.

In today’s interview we’ll be talking about how Harry helps rideshare drivers with everything from getting started, to insurance and taxes, to maximizing profits, as well as how he earns $10,000 per month on driver referrals alone and the secret behind his content strategy that brings in $20,000 a month.

 

Episode highlights:

Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: The Secret Behind The Rideshare Guy’s Content Strategy That Gets Him 500K Page Views Per Month TRANSCRIPT

Resources from this interview:

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Eric Siu:

 

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Google Play Listen on Spotify

rohan gilkesHi everyone, today we’re talking to Rohan Gilkes, co-founder of the Wet Shave Club, a company purchased after a conversation on Reddit and that went from doing $400 in revenue per month to doing $350,000 in the first year.

Rohan’s got some great insight on using social media to drive traffic back to your site (particularly if you’ve got a consumer product) and how subscription box companies are (for him) some of the best e-commerce businesses out there.

An Accountant Gets Curious About Internet Marketing

Though he’s got a professional background in accounting, Rohan got interested in internet marketing five years ago, and started teaching himself different things while trying out various online business models.

He’s had a handful of successes and failures along the way, but Wet Shave Club is his latest project, and he’s ending his first year of business with around 1,500 subscribers and $350,000 in revenue, which is really something, considering when he bought it out it was only doing $400 per month.

Cutting Through the Noise on Reddit

Rohan says he hangs out in the Entrepreneur Subreddit almost every day, and he cuts through the noise to avoid wasting his time there by primarily reading posts that involve specific metrics, rather than reading about another guy’s ‘wonderful’ business idea.

A little over a year ago, his time spent on Reddit paid off because he came across a guy trying to sell his business (Wet Shave Club), and Rohan felt it was something he could try and have success with. So, he bought the guy out, did some re-branding, and re-launched one month later.

Getting Off the Ground with Customer Acquisition

After the re-launch, Rohan knew that they needed to get to work on customer acquisition so they could make the company profitable.

To do that, he reached out to two groups of influencers and asked them if he could send them a free wet shave box:

  1. Tribe leaders deep in the wet shaving community with an established fan base
  2. Subscription box reviewers

By spending $10 to $12per box, they were able to get about a 25% response rate of the bloggers they contacted in getting reviews posted online to people who were either already fans of wet shaving or interested in subscription box services.

But there wasn’t any special trick to finding influencers to reach out to or a magic bullet of an outreach email.

“This part is pretty boring because all we did was Google,” said Rohan about finding bloggers and reviewers to get in touch with.

Their emails weren’t very aggressive, and read something like this:

Hi, 

I’m Rohan from Wet Shave Club.

We’re launching our men’s shaving box in a few weeks and would love you to take a look.

If you’re interested, send us your address and we’ll get a box in the mail for you tomorrow.

It was short, straight to the point, included a link to their website, and that was it.

Customer Acquisition Now That They’ve Grown

Even though they’ve grown to doing multiple six figures per year, they still do outreach to influencers for reviews. Rohan says it’s probably the one thing that gives them the most predictable subscribers to their service.

They also do traditional internet marketing things like Facebook ads, retargeting, and so on, but influencer outreach is the thing that lets them reach out to a very large customer base at a very low cost.

To take care of the outreach, they have a full-time staff member work on it along with other duties like getting press coverage and creating cross-promotional partnerships with other subscription box companies.

Are Subscription Box Services Dying?

Rohan says that while people like to grumble about the status of subscription box services, he says at their core, they’re e-commerce stores that have customers who’ve agreed to purchase from you every single month.

“If you have a company that allows you to have recurring revenue,” says Rohan, “you can do a lot with your customer acquisition. You acquisition costs can be a lot higher because the lifetime value of that customer is going to be higher.”

“It is the best situation you can be in as far as online e-commerce goes,” he says.

Customer Acquisition Beyond Influencer Reviews: Social Media Contests

Rohan says Wet Shave Club is doing really well on social media, though they started to notice after a while that their customer acquisition costs on Facebook were trending upwards.

They started running contests with Gleam.io, which lets people enter a contest by following you on Facebook, retweeting your stuff on Twitter, following you on Instagram, and so on. It helps them leverage their social media and get a lot of people looking at their product.

“Social media for us is probably the number two thing,” says Rohan. “And number three for us is probably emails.”

Instagram, For Example

Wet Shave Club’s Instagram account is full of high quality pictures, which they take using a product photo booth they bought on Amazon.

They also have an employee who’s really good at graphic design and uses photoshop to help create contest images to get attention and Instagram quotes that work really well with their audience.

Rohan says that if you have a product that connects to people visually and appeals to them on some sort of emotional level, you can do really well on Instagram.

But to boost their Instagram followers, they use a product called Instagress, which shows them people who use keywords that relate to their product, so they can follow and engage with those people in order to get a follow back.

The problem with these social media automation tools, says Rohan, is that the social media companies themselves could decide to suspend you for using them at any time. So use them at your own risk.

He advises to spend some time in the trenches building your following from scratch (2,000 followers worked for them) before you start automating.

Reaching the $350K Mark

Rohan says it took them six months to reach their first $100K in revenue – by September of 2014.

As their influencer outreach compounded and their service spread by reviews and word of mouth (and by fans sharing their own photos on social media), all the activity grew upon itself.

The more the word got out, the more returns they got, and they kept growing. Between September 2014 and April 2015, they did another $200K in revenue to reach that mark.

Rohan says the main drivers behind increasing their revenues was getting really good at social media and churning out contest after contest with Gleam.io.

‘By-Passing’ Reddit’s Self-Promotion Rules

Beyond advertising their contests on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Rohan says the put it up on Reddit too.

But since Reddit is notorious for its strict rules, they start out by asking people interested in wet shaving what kind of products they’d like to see in a related subscription service box.

They build the relationship and engage with people who are genuinely interested, then they can tell them about their contest with no problem.

Biggest Struggle: Product Sourcing

Rohan says that when they were starting out as a small company, it was better for them to find products on Etsy, because they wouldn’t have been able to get large companies to work with them.

It worked well for a while, but the problem became figuring out what to do when they went from only needing 50 aftershaves to needing 200. Or going from 500 to 1,500.

With Etsy providers, it becomes a problem because a lot of people are making the product in their homes or small product facilities and aren’t accustomed to producing thousands of pieces every month.

To solve it, they started needing very long lead times, which hurt their cash flow.

Reaching the Brink of Failure

Luckily, Rohan says they haven’t reached the brink of failure yet… but there’s definitely been instances where it looked like their company would be cut in half overnight.

For example, while they were waiting for a shipment of razors, the train the razors was on derailed so they had to push back their delivery by a few days. It pissed of some of their customers, and people threatened to cancel.

Luckily, he says, if you’re proactive and communicate well, you can bounce back from a lot of things.

Advice to His 25-Year-Old Self

“You just need to solve one thing at a time… Step by step, day by day, solve one problem and it all works out. But if you try to solve the whole thing before you even get started, you’re never going to get started.”

One Productivity Hack

If you feel stuck, or like you’re in a procrastination mode, set yourself a timer for 15 minutes.

If you stop after 15 minutes of working, that’s fine, but very often, within that 15 minutes, whatever feelings of procrastination or laziness you had are gone and you can push through and get quite a bit done.

One Must-Read Book

Rohan recommends Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive & Others Die.

It’s a book about communication and selling feelings rather than products. He says he goes back to it over and over again about how to communicate online for branding, selling, and making things as simple as possible.

Resources from this episode:

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Eric Siu:

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Google Play Listen on Spotify

jackson palmer pictureYou probably wouldn’t have guessed that a co-founder of Dogecoin works as a full-time marketing product manager at Adobe, but today we’re talking to him. Jackson Palmer gives us all the details behind how digital currency works in an easy-to-understand way, and tells us how Dogecoin started as a Twitter joke but ballooned into a currency worth $30 million with an incredible community behind it.

How combining two viral elements as a joke on Twitter led to a living & breathing economy

A little over a year ago, Bitcoin was getting a lot of press (good and bad), and the currency’s value was bouncing all over the place. Needless to say, it got a lot of media attention and became a household name for a while.

Around that same time, Jackson read a blog post on Gawker by Adrian Chen about how Doge was the meme of the year.

He put two and two together, blasted it out to his Twitter following, and said, “The rest, as they say, is history.”

First, a little background on how digital currency works

“Just think of it as a digitized credit,” says Jackson.

But it’s a little different than how online banks and services like PayPal – if one of these gets hacked and goes down, the whole system gets messed up.

In crypto currency, blockchain technology is utilized to create a massive public ledger of every transaction that’s ever taken place on that currency’s network – and it’s hosted on every single device that has a record of a balance in that currency. So if one gets hacked, the rest of the network can still carry on business as usual.

The difference here between regular currency systems and digital currency systems is that digital currencies are decentralized, and the public ledger (now around 30 GB for Bitcoin) gets updated every 10 minutes.

When you open an account for Bitcoin or any other digital currency, you get a long stream that is your public key. (This can also be represented by a QR code.) Anyone who wants to can send money to your public key, but since you have the password to it, you control what goes in and how it gets managed.

There is a small fee for transactions, but it’s minor in comparison to the PayPals and Western Unions, who kind of have a monopoly on the money transfer industry. The fee goes to the data miners, who are the ones powering the public ledger updates – when a miner successful pushes through an update, they get rewarded with some of the currency.

How digital currency is resistant to corruption

With such a steady, decentralized infrastructure, no one person (even the creators) could be able to abuse digital currency for their own gain.

If a developer wanted to change the code on how a digital currency worked, said Jackson, they would have to get more than 51% of the network to agree to it.

The backstory behind Dogecoin’s beginnings 

After the tweet went out and gained a little bit of popularity, Jackson’s co-founder got in touch with him because he’d figured out a way to change the Bitcoin code to make the font Comic Sans – which matched the doge perfectly, because it was always present in the memes.

Jackson said it only took them a few hours to put together and launch a web page, and they went ahead and did it even though they only thought the hype would last for three days.

“It took us by shock when it grew,” said Jackson.

Dogecoin

How Dogecoin’s community grew it to a $30 million economy

Even though Bitcoin got a bad rap for being associated with the silk road and drug scandals, Dogecoin didn’t really have those problems because from the start it was a project that never took itself too seriously.

Jackson said Dogecoin appealed to a different demographic than Bitcoin – they saw a lot of younger people and women who weren’t necessarily interested in touching Bitcoin, but did have enough curiosity to play around with funny money online.

What really helped Dogecoin grow, though, was a bot that was developed about 10 days into the currency’s life that let people send online tips with Dogecoin.

The concept was that instead of just hitting a ‘like’ on a certain comment or piece of content, you could add more value to that ‘like’ by sending approximately $1 to the author.

People liked the idea so much that they started tipping their friends who had never heard of Dogecoin, so it created a sort of in-built virality.

Today the Dogecoin community is worth $30 million, but with the fluctuating price of Bitcoin, it’s been worth as much as $60 million.

Real-life examples of Dogecoin use: buying & donating

Outside of the digital sphere, there’s plenty of other ways to use digital currencies to buy real-world products.

For example, Overstock accepts Bitcoin payments, and so does New Egg. For them, it’s almost as simple as taking another payment method in addition to credit cards. A handful of services will automatically convert Bitcoin into US Dollars at the point of sale and send money to the vendor at the time of purchase.

In fact, there’s even been a Bitcoin Black Friday where a company like New Egg would run their regular specials, but offer exclusive discounts on certain products if you paid in Bitcoin.

The Dogecoin community has done some cooler things than product purchasing though: they sponsored a Nascar and sent the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics. And according to Jackson, it was all funded by the community, who could elect to send small amounts of money to the cause (like $1) without getting slammed with money transfer fees.

To this day, everything Dogecoin’s done has been funded by the community – no investors.

But, Dogecoin might not be the best place to invest

When Bitcoin got a lot of media attention due to its skyrocketing  prices, a lot of people saw it as a get-rich-quick scheme and wanted to buy in as an investment.

Jackson says that when a currency’s value fluctuates so much, it can discourage merchants from accepting it and consumers from using it.

“Ultimately my advice is not to think of it as an investment opportunity,” he says, “but think of it as a way to transact online.”

Raising digital currency awareness

From his position as a co-founder of a digital currency, Jackson likes to use the opportunity to speak and educate the current generation about online payments as a whole.

He talks about the work Stripe is doing, Apple Pay, Square Cash and so on. He thinks it’s possible that cash could be obsolete in 20 years.

How Jackson keeps up with his knowledge in marketing, crypto currency, and coding

Jackson says he’s always seen himself as a technical marketer, and as a marketer, you should at least be semi-aware of what you’re selling.

To do this, he’s taken on small, side projects throughout his career as a way to keep learning. For example, at a point when he was marketing a certain product for Adobe, he got into web development to make sure he could relate to the customers he was communicating with on a daily basis.

A piece of advice to his 25-year-old self

“Be open to everything and don’t be afraid to fail,” said Jackson.

He said that all too often, people are afraid to get something off the ground because of what might happen, but you never know until you try. He says not to worry about what will happen if something fails, but think about what you’ll get out of it in terms of personal growth.

Jackson Palmer’s idol: Bill Gates

Jackson said he doesn’t necessarily have an idol per se, but he is a big fan of Bill Gates.

He likes Bill Gates because of his philanthropy efforts, and it seems like all the money he’s made hasn’t gone to his head. It’s easy to see him as a the same humble, dorky guy he always was.

One productivity hack

Even though a lot of people don’t use it anymore, Jackson says he’s a fan of RSS.

He doesn’t like how social sites have recommendation algorithms based on advertising dollars and your past behavior. He sees RSS as a clean feed that he can skim through and pick out the titles he likes to read at the end of the day.

One must-read blog

Jackson says he’s a big fan of The Verge, simply because he loves everything they do.

Resources from this Episode:

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Eric Siu:

GB_Episode35

Hello and welcome to another episode of Growth Bites. Today we’ll talk about what you can do when the going gets tough: when revenues are down, employees are quitting, your business is in flames – this happens to everyone.

Resources from this Episode:

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Eric Siu:

Learn EffectivelyWelcome to another edition of Growth Bites. Today we’re talking about what resources and tools I use to help learn and innovate. We’ll discuss how I strategize what to read and learn and how to streamline the process.


Show Notes:

Selected Links from this Episode:

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Eric Siu:

Free 1st Chapter Of Leveling Up

Submit your email below for free instant access