A personal blog about productivity, Notion templates, and other things I find incredibly interesting.| Nick Lafferty
In May 2023 I quit my stable full time job to work for myself. There’s a lot of information about Solopreneurs out there but they didn’t have enough details. I wanted to know exactly how they got started: How much money did they make starting out? What does it cost them to run their business? How did they grow? So I started my own newsletter. It’s called The Early Exit Club.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Mediavine Programmatic Advertising (Ver 1.1) The Website works with Mediavine to manage third-party interest-based advertising appearing on the Website. Mediavine serves content and advertisements when you visit the Website, which may use first and third-party cookies. A cookie is a small text file which is sent to your computer or mobile device (referred to in this policy as a “device”) by the web server so that a website can remember some information about your browsing activity on the ...| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What is DKIM? DKIM, short for domainkeys identified mail, is a way of authenticating emails to prevent spoofing. DKIM works by allowing the receiving email server to check that an email was actually send and authorized by the domain owner. The DKIM signature is encrypted and added to the email headers. Implementing DKIM could improve your email deliverability, especially if used with DKIM and SPF records.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What is DMARC? DMARC is short for domain-based message authentication reporting and conformance. It’s an email protocol designed to prevent spoofed or phished emails from being appearing to be sent from your domain. It’s free to use and works by authenticating an email to align the SPF and DKIM records. DMARC essentially broadcasts to the world, and specifically inbox providers like Gmail, what to do with unauthorized use of your email.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What are Marketing Emails? Marketing emails are sent with a commercial intent in the hopes that you purchase a product or service. Compared to transactional emails, the user did not take an action to trigger the emails. Marketing emails also typically have lower open rates and click-through rates because they’re not expected. Marketing emails often take the form of promotional emails designed to generate revenue and sales, such as Black Friday emails.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What are Transactional Emails? Transactional emails are triggered emails that a user is expecting to receive. They often have higher open rates and click-through rates because the user wants to receive that email. One of the most common uses-cases for transactional emails are password resets. If a user forgets their password they can click a button to have a new one emailed to them. Examples of transactional emails: Password resets Purchase Receipts| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What is Email Deliverability? Email deliverability happens when your email is successfully delivered into the inbox. Gmails promotional folder is considered the inbox, so deliverability is considered successful if your email lands there. Failed email deliverability means your email ended up in the spam folder.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What Is Email Delivery? Email delivery is the measure of how many of your emails were accepted by an inbox provider. Often confused with email deliverability, delivery is not the act of making it into the inbox (and avoiding the spam folder). When your email is delivered that means the ISP (inbox service provider, like Gmail or Yahoo) has accepted your email. Your email has yet to be sorted into a folder like Inbox, Spam, or Promotions.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What Are Email Open Rates? Open rates are a measure of what percent of users opened your email. Open rates can be calculated on a unique and non-unique basis. Unique open rates only count one open for each recipient. Non-unique open rates count all opens regardless if a user opens the same email multiple times. Open rates are tracked by adding an invisible tracking pixel to emails. When a user opens the email the tracking pixel fires and tells the email sending service that it was opened.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What is Click-through rates? Click-Through Rate(CTR) is the percent of users that click a link from your email compared to the total amount that opened it. Unique CTR only looks at one click per user. So if a user clicks multiple links then only the first click will be counted. Click-through rate is a metric that can help determine the success of your email campaigns. A high CTR means that your email was engaging and that users wanted to click through to read more or buy your product.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I’ve had long hair for the last 6 years but I decided I wanted to cut it all off and donate my hair to charity. The charity I chose is Children With Hair Loss. I started growing my hair out after I got my first full-time job. I work in technology so as long as I got my job done my bosses never cared what I looked like. But after 6 years it was time for a new look.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
This article first appeared on GrowthMentor. Have you seen those Youtube ads about how to make money online? “Youtube ads beat Facebook ads every time. Let’s face it…” I don’t believe a word they say because I run Youtube and Google ads for a living. I’ve spent over $6 million on Google Ads and I’ve successfully grown Youtube campaigns from zero to 2,000 sales/month. I also don’t believe in paying for information from sketchy people claiming you can make six figures a month on...| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I have strong opinions about this topic. In fact, I hate one of the options. Vehemently. I’d throw it in a fire and watch it burn while laughing maniacally. Come along to see if I prefer WordPress or Static HTML websites, and what this blog uses. It’s All HTML Anyway Here’s the thing, no matter what you choose to build your site with, the end result is HTML. HTML is the foundation of all websites.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Conversion copywriting is a skill worth developing and it’ll pay dividends across all areas of your life. I Here’s why it’s worth setting a professional goal around it improving your conversion copywriting skills. I use conversion copywriting all the time both in my day job as a growth marketer helping billion-dollar companies like Loom grow and as I build this blog into a $20k/month income source. I bet you’ve used conversion copywriting without even knowing it.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
To whom it may concern. Dear sir or madam. Dear hiring manager. These common opening lines to cover letters all have one thing in common. They’re terrible. They sound like they were written by a poorly trained AI. I’ve hired for dozens of roles throughout my career and the most common problem I’ve seen with candidates has nothing to do with their resume. Their cover letters use outdated and incorrect advice.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
How to Hire A Content Writer Clearly define your project Create an application Post on a job board Review writing samples Ask for a paid test project Have a short video call How To Hire A Writer on UpWork I suggest not using UpWork. While you can use Upwork to find writers I advise against it for several reasons: Writers charge on an hourly basis You have to pay up front You have to use Upwork I have nothing against the many talented writers who sell their services on Upwork.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
A Note on Book Reviews I am guilty of scouring the best seller lists on Amazon, and Goodreads(now owned by Amazon) to find the best rated books to read. I’d spend hours scouring those lists, combing through books that have thousands of reviews. If a book has an above 4-star average rating on Goodreads, surely that means I’ll like it, right? In pre-covid days, I’d use my phone inside Barnes and Noble to lookup reviews of books in-store.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Overview I want to track how many clicks I send to specific external website, then I want to compare total clicks to how many views that page gets to calculate a click-through-rate. This isn’t enabled by default in the old Google Analytics, but it is in the new Google Analytics v4. Google Analytics is only as useful as the data you feed into it. Google Tag Manager(GTM) is a powerful and fast way to send data into Google Analytics.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What is a Landing Page? A landing page is designed to convert an anonymous visitor into a customer or lead. Landing pages typically have a single goal and they remove any links or escape points that could entice a visitor to leave the page. In Google Analytics, a landing page is the first page that a visitor enters your website from. It’s the opposite of an exit page, which is the last page a visitor looks at before leaving.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
When it comes to email sending, sometimes you need more than the press of a button to get your message across. You may have heard of email subdomains, but you may be wondering - how do you use them? And, wait a minute, what exactly are they? Well, have no fear, because we’re going to use this post to tell you all about email subdomains and why you need them. It’s everything you ever wanted to know about subdomains but were afraid to ask.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Quitting video games was one of the best decisions I’ve made. I wasn’t having fun anymore and I wanted to spend my time in more productive ways. So I quit playing and decided to create content for this blog instead. One of my blog posts hit the front page of Hacker News and it completely changed my life. I originally wrote this post in 2020 and now a few years later in 2023 I quit my full-time job.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What is growth marketing? Growth marketing, also known as growth hacking, has been on the rise since 2010, coinciding with the growth of tech start-ups after 2008’s global recession. You can see this fast rise in recognition in the graph below, and the term’s speed into the mainstream fits its definition. Growth marketing is all about rapid and iterative experimentation with the ultimate goal of growing sales, revenue, and profit for a business.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I had almost 18,000 visitors to my website yesterday. Maybe you were one of them. If so, welcome! I average about 50 visitors per day, so yesterday was quite the spike! Some very nice person posted my article about spending $6 million on Google Ads to Hacker News, and it hit the front page. It peaked at around #5 on HackerNews and got around 270 comments. Not bad! Thanks, kind stranger.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Hi friends, followers, and other people interested in my words. It’s been a while! Many of you will have found my work when I was writing and publishing new content every day in February. In March I wrote quite a bit less because as it turns out, publishing for 29 days straight is hard work. And with March came COVID-19, aka the Coronavirus. Suddenly my Medium feed was filled with articles about it.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
A great LinkedIn profile can literally make you more money. I haven’t cold-applied for a job in years because I have recruiters reaching out to me non-stop. If you’re serious about growing your career, the only social network you should use is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is full of inspiring stores and people. But here’s the thing, everything you post will be seen by every professional connection you have. Your grandma isn’t on LinkedIn.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I’ve been working remotely full-time for the last 12 months out of my house in Austin, Texas. I’m not a digital nomad. I have a wife, dog, and cat that prefer to have a stable home. Now that everyone is writing about work from home tips I thought I’d write about what it’s like to work remotely for a long period of time. There are some simple things that everyone talks about:| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I wrote about Spending $6 Million on Google AdsIt’s done almost 10,000 views on Medium since then. A few days later I wrote about the initial viral experience: The anatomy of a 5,000 view post. You can see it’s been viewed even more since I wrote that. I knew that the post was good. The headline was strong and I picked a good image that was colorful. But I never expected that kind of response.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I’ve stopped working out countless times in my life. I don’t even count how many times I start going to the gym because I inevitably stop for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s motivation, a lingering injury, or some other bullshit reason that I drum up in my head to give me a reason to stop. Consistency is hard, whether it’s writing on Medium or working out. That’s why not everyone is Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tim Denning.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
It’s not what you think. I spent years behind a computer screen, consuming content on the internet without contributing much in return. I’m 31 now and the internet has been a major part of my life since I was about 12. The internet I knew when I was a kid is vastly different than the one kids know today. My childhood internet was connected by AOL dial-up, communicated over AIM instant messenger, and was spent hearing that “You’ve Got Mail” audio chime.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I’ve been doing some form of digital marketing for over 6 years. I’ve done everything from affiliate management, lifecycle email campaigns, to PPC ads in Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. I’ve spent over $6 million dollars on Google Ads alone in a single year. And there’s one tool I can’t live without. Supermetrics . It helps digital marketers pull data from many different ad platforms, send it to Google sheets, and then pipe in revenue from Mysql, RedShift, or any number of pla...| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
This is it. The last day of my 29-day writing challenge to publish new content every day this month. I almost can’t believe it’s over. It’s been a long, sometimes hard road to get here. But I stuck with it, publishing something new every single day. Some of them better than others. Here are the highlights: Christmas in July Is The Worst Fake Holiday Ever What I learned After Spending $6 Million on Google Ads How to Quit Playing Video Games Why Notion Is the Best Productivity App of 2020...| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
It was 9:30 pm and I was watching a blank cursor flicked off and on in my writing application. I had committed to writing a weekly newsletter, and it was due at 6 the next morning. I had to finish the content, design, and get it scheduled before I could go to bed. I haven’t procrastinated this bad since college. I spent all week trying to find the inspiration to write my newsletter, and I came up with nothing.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I wrote a post about how I Spent $6 Million on Google Ads Last Year. The title was catchy, the image was bright and colorful, the content was useful, it had clear takeaways, and I was positioned like an expert because I spent a bunch of someone else’s money. I thought it was a good little post and had moderate expectations for its success. It was published on Medium and got about 200 views on the first day.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Introverts can seem shy, standoffish, or rude in social situations. In my experience, and trust me, I have a lot of experience here, that’s not often the case. Maybe it’s because I was homeschooled, but I straight up do not know how to behave like a normal human in large groups. I want to have meaningful conversations. I want to connect with people on a deeper level and get past all the superficial bullshit.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I went on a 5-day business trip at the start of February. Most days I started working at 8 am and didn’t stop until 8 pm that night. My days were filled with meetings, brainstorming sessions, and team-building events. I’d get back to my hotel room every night exhausted. Knowing I had to get up the next day and do it all over again made it so much worse. But I still found time to write.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I started playing music on the internet in 2006. I was 16 at the time and had started an internet radio station that would eventually get me nominated as a Texas Youth Entrepreneur Of The Year. My radio station grew to house 20 DJs from Paris, Sydney, Canada, and the United States. Every week they would volunteer their time to play music on my radio station. I was the first DJ and performed like one from a traditional FM radio station like KISS FM.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
A 2013 study by two economists at The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that only 27% of new graduates found a job closely related to their degree. More recently, a study based on 125 million professional profiles in 2019 found similar results. With the exception of engineers, the degree you graduate with does not often lead to a job in that field. The authors found that those with engineering degrees often end up becoming an engineer.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I was lying in bed, minutes away from sleep, when a strange thought popped into my head. I want to start running. Why that thought, at that particular time? I have no idea. It was a strange idea at a strange time. But for some reason, I seized it. I thumbed open the App Store and downloaded the fitness app Strava. One of my good friends uses it to track his runs, so I figured I could track mine too and draw inspiration from him.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I had an unlimited budget. I could spend as much money as I wanted on whatever ads I wanted. But I had to be profitable. I was working in-house for a technology company. We had aggressive revenue targets and I wanted to play a major part in making that happen. I managed to grow ad spend from $3 million to $6 million per year because I found creative ways to profitably scale my campaigns.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Millennials aren’t buying a lot of houses. At least they’re not buying as many as our parents did. There’s a lot of reasons for that and I won’t get into them here. What I will get into is once you decide to buy a house, and the finances line up, how to find the perfect one. My own home buying journey has been fraught with disappointment. My wife and I have been searching for almost 6 months.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I recently purchased this external keyboard to use with my Mac’s home-office setup. I wanted a minimal, mechanical keyboard that was not bluetooth. That one is great and under $30. But it’s a windows keyboard, so the keys aren’t mapped correctly. Specifically the Alt key is where the Mac Command key should be, so I needed to swap them. Swapping the Option and Command Keys Googling this problem lead me down a rabbit hole of results, all linking to different software you need to download ...| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I created a newsletter. Wait, before you go. It’s different. Like, really different. The premise is this: each email is only about one word. That’s it. How bad can a one-word newsletter really be? I’ve promised not to track any of the normal email marketing stats. No open or click rate tracking. Definitely no conversions. No selling. No affiliate marketing. No amazon links. No calls to action. I won’t even check who’s subscribed to it.| Blog on Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
A script to automatically exclude domains from your Google Display campaigns.| Nick Lafferty
Supercharge your career by setting and achieving the right career goals. Here's exactly how high performers do it.| Nick Lafferty
Are you tired of staring at a cluttered email inbox? Do you dream of reaching that elusive state of “Inbox Zero”? You’re not alone. With the constant influx of emails and our increasing reliance on digital communication, managing our inboxes has become a real challenge. But fear not! In this article, we’ll explore strategies that can help you achieve and maintain Inbox Zero, bringing you peace of mind and boosting your productivity.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
It sounds cliche but traveling will change your life. I’ve personally traveled to some amazing places that have transformed how I see the world. But planning your next adventure can be chaotic. How do you organize your flights, accommodations, other transportation, and important sights to see while you’re there? You’re spending tons of money – you should make the most of it! That’s where these Notion templates for travel come in.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
OKRs are the most common goal-setting framework I’ve used in my 10+ year career working for high growth tech companies. OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results and it’s a way of aligning your personal work to the overall company objectives. OKRs work by setting Company Objectives, which then cascade down to Department objectives (.e.g marketing, engineering, etc) then down to Team and Personal objectives. Your personal OKRs will support your team’s OKRs, which then support the departm...| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Framer is the hot new website builder that competes with Webflow. Fun fact: Framer as a company didn’t begin as a website builder. Even after raising their $24M Series B in 2018, Framer was a design and prototyping tool. More like Figma than Webflow. Business growth had slowed and they had (I’m assuming, based on my startup experience) months of painful conversations about pivoting the business. They pivoted away from prototyping into web building.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I quit my job in May 2023 to pursue a life of self-employment and solopreneurship. At the time I had no idea what a portfolio career was. I stumbled on the idea of a portfolio career about 2 months into my self-employment journey, and it turns out it’s exactly what I’m doing. Here’s what I’ll cover in this article: What is a portfolio career? What does it look like in practice?| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
If you struggle with ADHD then this is the perfect list for you. These Notion templates offer a structured system to conquer those scattered thoughts and overwhelming challenges. Say goodbye to chaos and hello to focus! This post explores how popular ADHD Notion Templates can change your life. They’re like supercharged boosters for your focus and productivity. We’ll uncover the secrets behind these templates and show you how they empower you to manage tasks, goals, and projects like a pro.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Alright, folks, buckle up because we’re diving into the wild world of the 10 best Joe Rogan podcast episodes. Now, keep in mind, these summaries are in the voice and tone of your friendly neighborhood Joe Rogan. So let’s get it on! Best JRE Podcast Episodes Guest Name Episode Number Elon Musk #1169 Neil deGrasse Tyson #1159 Graham Hancock #1284 Matthew Walker #1109 David Goggins #1212 Bob Lazar #1315 Elon Musk Round 2 #1470 Sam Harris #543 Lex Friedman #1696 Matt Taibbi #1386 Dr.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I exchanged over 30 emails with the Notion team when they were building their current affiliate program. At the time I was growing Loom’s affiliate program and I’m always happy to help a company out that I respect like Notion. But here’s the thing: Notion’s goals for the affiliate program don’t benefit smaller creators. They want you to refer teams to Notion: workspaces larger than one person. Most signups from affiliate links are single person workspaces, based on my experience doi...| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
The Cozy Life Dashboard for Notion is a template to track your habits, movies, life goals, and more in one aesthetic place.| Nick Lafferty
Did you know it could take 18-24 to publish a children’s picture book the traditional way? That’s mostly due to how long it takes to get high quality illustrations made, but now AI tools have shrunk that time down to days. 14 days, to be exact. My wife and I had the idea for a children’s book a week ago and today we’re publishing it on Amazon. In 14 days I went from an idea, to writing the content for the book, creating the illustrations, learning about Kindle Direct Publishing(KDP), ...| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
Template Titans is a podcast unpacking the secrets of the best Notion template creators.| Nick Lafferty
The Ikea Kallax is probably the most recognizable piece of furniture out there and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This shelving unit is all-function and is priced affordably at $70 so it’s no wonder everyone has one or two or six. We have a grand total of three Kallaxs in our home and have had them for years- one of which since we moved in together in 2014. Our primary one is used as our TV stand and our second and third are used as storage in the sunroom and office respectively.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
It’s that time of year where people around the world start setting ambitious new years resolutions. We list out things we want to do differently, habits we want to change, and how we’re finally going to join a gym next year. One of my new years resolutions is to be more productive. I want to be more efficient with my time at home and at work But exactly how can I do that?| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I love New Years. There’s something comforting about closing out a year and starting a new one. I’ve done the traditional new years resolutions thing before and they never stick. In my opinion a resolution doesn’t need to stick for the whole year. But it should stick long enough to make a significant impact on your life. So I put together a list of 6 realistic new years resoutions for 2022.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
This website was hosted on Netlify since I started seriously blogging in 2019. After a major issue, which I detail below, I ended up moving to Cloudflare. Read on to learn why I moved and why I think Cloudflare is a fantastic host for modern websites. My Netlify Issues At the time I chose Netlify because it was free and supported my static CMS of choice, Hugo. But the larger my website has grown the more I’ve noticed Netlify’s shortcomings.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I started freelancing in 2020 without any experience or knowledge of exactly how to do it. I didn’t know how to create contracts, send invoices, manage multiple calendars, or even how to set my hourly rates. I figured it out eventually and there were a lot of aha moments along the way. I’ll take everything I learned freelancing my way to almost $100,000 in revenue as a side hustle, while working a full-time job, and share my suggestions for the best freelancer tools.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I’ve been sending emails since Gmail was first released as a beta product in 2004. Since then I’ve graduated from high school, college, graduate school, and have been working professionally for almost the last 10 years. I’ve sent a lot of email. I even worked at Mailgun, a company that sends 10+ billion emails a month for companies like Pinterest and Substack. But for a while I wasn’t clear on the difference between CC and BCC.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
What is a digital workplace? A digital workplace is one that exists online as a virtual repository of information, knowledge, and services. Employees can access and share documents, files, and view things like organization charts or sensitive files. What is digital workplace software? Digital workplace software enables employees to do their job quickly, effectively, and efficiently from virtually any location and achieve their professional goals. The modern workplace has shifted away from a p...| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
AI has taken the world by storm over the past few months, promising to overhaul our productivity both at work and in our personal lives. Although artificial intelligence has been on our radar for years, the launch of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022 has created a giddiness (and anxiety) about the infinite potential for using AI in our daily workflows. Software companies like ClickUp and Notion have snapped up the potential to incorporate AI into their own platforms allowing users to ask qu...| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I’ve worked with many executive assistants in my time advising and working full-time as a growth marketer at billion-dollar companies like Loom and Mailgun. It’s a hard and often under appreciated job. I’ve seen that managing calendars for multiple executives is hard as hell. As someone who has to book on my boss' calendar, finding a free spot in the next 2 weeks is like voodoo magic. I wrote this list by talking to a few of my former EA colleagues and asking them what their favorite to...| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert
I’m on a never ending quest to reduce my screen time. I have a widget pinned to my home screen that shows my daily screen time so it’s front and center. I average between two to three hours of screen time per day, depending how much I’m working and if I workout that day. Imagine reducing your screen time by 50%, what would you do with that extra time? I realized I spend too much time checking out on Twitter and it distracted me too much.| Nick Lafferty | Growth Marketing Expert