Best cheat sheets, guides and explainers on SEO, content marketing, emailing and more.
If you’re a tech founder getting down to the marketing is tough. Because marketing is not at all like coding: where you just write a line of code, run it and get the predictable response. If the response is not what you’ve been expecting you either fix the bugs and run the code again. Or, if you're stuck – go to StackOverflow and ask the community. You get the answer, you fix the code — and the response is there.
With marketing it’s totally different — no fast results, no predictable responses and most often, no one you can ask for help. Therefore, I've put together this List of 30 useful marketing resources — articles, cheat sheets and guides. As soon as you’re stuck with some specific marketing channel (emails low open rate, landing page is not converting, Google Ads are not working) just go to this list and check it out — hopefully, you’ll find your answer.
Content marketing
1. The Ultimate Guide to content ideas
Love this cheat sheet. It’s very easy to follow and extremely helpful when you feel that you’re totally out of ideas about what to write about in your blog, on Twitter or elsewhere.
2. 12 Things to do after you’ve written the blog post
Awesome, you’ve written this post. Now what? What do you have to do to get more traffic to it? And as a result, boost your site rank, and perhaps even some customers for your product?
3. How to create smart content
Let’s learn from the best, right? Canva’s blog is one of the most visited websites when it comes to design topics. How did they get there? Here’s the full story with explainers and step-by-step guides on how to do the same.
SEO
4. Keywords research cheat sheet
Cool, you want to move ahead with SEO but what does this “long-tail”, “short-tail” stuff even mean? What keywords do you have to optimize your website for and how to search them?
4. Keywords Research technique from Moz.com
2-page easy to follow guide on how to build your keywords list
5. Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Well, this one is a lengthy one but if you spend 2-3 hours just reading it you’ll get all the major concepts — how Google algorithm works, tools, metrics — everything you need to move your website to higher positions.
6. 3 ways to monitor your ranking
This is more advanced stuff — for those who want to dive deeper and constantly monitor how they are doing on the SEO side.
7. SEO for startups
Great and insightful piece written by a genuine SEO-master Roberto Robles who managed to get dozens of websites to the top of the 1st page in Google. He’s now running his SaaS business too and knows first-hand what challenges tech-founders face.
8. Weekly SEO activities checklist
This is a template that I have created for myself and I use it to improve my SEO. It helped me to get on the 1st page of Google with some long-tail keywords in 4 months! Just copy to your Notion account and use for free
Emailing
9. Email marketing for SaaS
This is a pain point for many SaaS founders – emails are not set up properly, the open rate is low, and as a result you’re loosing customers. Everything you should know about email marketing — on one page
10. Post-purchase emails 101
Yay! You’ve got yourself a customer! But wait, why do they cancel their subscription in a month? Why did they never even try to use your service? The reason is obvious — louse onboarding. To make it right with the simplest tools possible you need to learn how to craft post-purchase emails properly.
11. Free trial emails
You have lots of free users but very few who convert? Check out this article about free trial emails — perhaps, they just need a little push from you?
12. Email retargeting
This is more advanced stuff. And demands some special tools. But it can be crazy efficient.
13. Referral program in the emails
You can definitely join one of the referral programs but why don’t you use people who are already on your mailing list? They already work with your product or know you personally. The trick is to write the email that will MAKE them recommend you to someone else. Here’s how
Performance marketing (paid)
14. SMM check-list
You’ve finally found some $ to spend on facebook/IG/Twitter ads. Make your you’ve done everything by the book to make your posts really performing.
15. Instagram cheat sheet
Really useful for everyone who is just starting on IG
16. 9 Tips to create great social media ads
I used them a lot. Helped me to get 10% conversion from Facebook ad campaign
17. Step-by-step guide to running experiments
I love Trevor Longino’s technique that he uses to help SaaS founders grow their business to $2M in revenue. It’s all about small baby steps to prove the concept and then going all in. Here’s the guide, how his agency does it
18. Digital Advertising strategy
Advanced but useful if you make performance marketing one of your main channel of customer acquisition.
Copywriting
19. Do-s and Don’ts of Copywriting
I’ve been in the content marketing business for 18 years and can tell you — some of these Don’t were my biggest mistakes. Definitely check it out before writing your copy for landing pages.
20. Copywriting cheat sheet
All the important concepts to help you write better copy for ads, landing pages and emails
Landing Pages
21. Ultimate check-list to create mind-blowing landing pages
Oldie but goodie. Unbounce is definitely the leader in landing page automation business — now they have even launched a package where you can pay per converted customer, not per visitor or just per month. This is a guide they use to train their ML models that create top-performing landing pages.
22. Google Analytics and CRO
Basics of using GA for conversion rate optimisation
23. Conversion rate formula
“Hey, I’ve got 1000 visitors a day and 1 conversion! My conversion rate sucks” — if you have this or similar thoughts, definitely check out this article before trying to improve something. There’s a chance your conversion rate is where it should be and there’s nothing to improve.
24. Alternatives to A/B testing
I constantly hear from founders: “We need to arrange A/B tests to get a better conversion rate”. I’m all for going along. But when they tell me their traffic numbers I say a definite “No”. It makes no sense to arrange A/B tests if you have less than 100K visitors a month. But the good news is that there are other tools you can use to improve conversion. Here’s an explainer
25. Hero Image on landing Page
The crazy thing? Founders I work with sometimes pay agencies (or even me) to write a selling copy. But then they just slap a generic illustration from icons8.com that ruins the effect of the text. Please read this before adding the most important visual to your landing
26. Guide to create converting landing pages
Short and cool and to the point. If you have to choose only one thing to read before jumping into building your landing page — go with this one
27. Behavioral science to improve the conversion rate
One of the best articles from Lenny’s newsletter (and Free!) on how to use scientific methods to improve your pages
28. Use implicit values attributes to improve your landing page
This is a framework that I use quite often and that has proved to get great results for founders I work with.
29. Emotional dimensions of the landing page and how to get them
Detailed piece on how to create marketing personas and use the insights for crafting converting landing pages.
Metrics
30. All marketing metrics cheat sheet
This one is something that you would definitely use if you’re a novice in marketing — what parameters to track with your every activity.
