Welcome to Growth Cheetah, the blog where I will share my firsthand experience and knowledge about digital marketing and growth hacking. I’m a Product Marketing Manager in the IT industry, with over 5 years of experience, and this blog is intended to help beginners and up-and-coming digital marketers learn about, and most importantly understand, this always-evolving and exciting field of work.

I probably won’t be able to tell you something that you can’t learn somewhere else. And I’ll never claim that I’m some kind of all-knowing, industry-leading, growth-hacking wizard that will make your dreams come true. But, my plan for Growth Cheetah is to make it unique with my commitment to transparency. I’ll share my success stories and failures with you, so we can figure out which digital marketing methods work (and which don’t work).

Also, I think it’s time to start my own project and make some money with it. So I’ll probably start doing affiliate marketing at some point. In order to get to that point, my plan is to:

  1. Launch the first version of this website
    • I had a fever dream about this project, and the name Growth Cheetah came to me then.
    • After I woke up, I checked the domain and Gmail account availability – and they weren’t taken (Destiny, right?).
    • Hooked the domain with my (already owned) hosting provider.
      • I’ll probably change it soon.
    • Started working on this website in WordPress (I have around 5 years of web development experience under my belt).
      • The minute I started working on this project, my initial reflex was to overcomplicate the site structure, create a content calendar based on the research of numerous different affiliate programs which I could register on, prepare 30 blog posts before publishing, and do the whole branding (at least the logo + typography + colors), and start working on setting up a Twitter and Instagram account, and much more stuff (trust me). I’ve quickly realized that this couldn’t be done since I have my 8-hours, but realistically 10-hour, daily job. After a lot of self-doubt, I’ve decided to just launch and worry about everything later. Currently, it’s important to start rolling out some blog posts and gaining some traffic and content momentum to stay motivated.
      • Time spent: 10 hours
    • Used the Astra theme (free version, has great load speed, which is all-important for SEO and overall user experience), and threw in a couple of important plugins (for now).
      • Some of them are YOAST (free version, for SEO essentials), All in One WP Security (free version, for basic security), Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP (free version, haven’t used it before, just want to play around a bit), Simple Author Box (free version, we should always think about Google’s EEAT principles).
      • Creating and verifying a Google Search Console property was a must. After that, I quickly created a Google Tag Manager account and implemented Google Analytics 4 through it.
      • Time spent: around 4 hours.
      • Now let’s compare the time I’ve spent on researching and brainstorming and the time I’ve spent on actually creating and launching the site. After getting out of the vicious cycle of brainstorming followed by perfectionism, and focusing only on the essentials, now I’ve got a live website and can start focusing on the content. And don’t get me wrong, strategy is important, but it’s also important to recognise when it’s time to just get out of your head and just do something. All in all, I’m happy that I went with my gut feeling on this one.
  2. Start covering some important and relevant topics and start getting some real traffic (not just the friends and family I’ve shared my site with).
    • I’ll probably start off by writing about some WordPress basics, and then branch out to the essentials of Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4. Then we’ll see.
  3. After getting some helpful content on my blog, I’ll revisit the website architecture, and add more informative pages (like About and Contact) and blog post categories (depending on the content I wrote until then).
  4. When the traffic starts getting higher, I’ll probably start working on the Growth Cheetah branding a bit more, and giving the website an overall nicer look.
  5. Then it will probably be time to launch a “Reviews” column on which I’ll do most of the affiliate marketing, and hopefully get some passive income.
  6. After that, I’ll start thinking about branching out of Google’s SERP and starting doing some Social Media marketing or launching a Newsletter.

My plan is to cover and break down all of these topics more in detail over time. I’ll also expand them with relevant blog articles that I’ll write. Don’t want to overcomplicate and escalate – for now.

Hopefully, someone will find this website useful. If not, I would feel Cheetah-ed out of my fate. Just kidding, sorry, couldn’t help myself.

Anyways, feel free to always write to me at igor[at]growthcheetah.com.

Best,
Igor Cijan – Growth Cheetah founder