Three growth tactics you can ship this week (with the traps to avoid)

The point of a growth tactic is that you can run it this week, not next quarter. Here are three plays a founder or a two-person marketing team can ship in days, with the mechanics, the costs, and the traps that waste budget.

1. Buy a domain that finishes your hook

If your product has a strong promise ("ship faster", "ten-minute legal", "2x your gains"), register a domain that says it back. tenminutelegal.com. builtinaweek.app. Forward it to your landing page and use it as the destination URL in every social ad and out-of-home placement you run.

What it costs: about $10 a year on a .com, slightly more for a short alt-TLD.

What it buys you: a second reinforcement of your hook every time a prospect sees the ad: once in the copy, once in the URL. On print and OOH placements where there's nothing to click, the right domain becomes the call to action.

The trap: redirecting to a landing page that doesn't repeat the hook. The whole play is consistency between the URL and the destination. Break it and you've paid for confusion.

2. Bid on your competitors' brand names

Your competitor's customers are typing your competitor's name into Google right now. Some are unhappy. Some are price-sensitive. If you convert even 1-2% of that traffic, the math is absurdly good. These are buyers who already want what you sell.

The mechanic:

1. Build a competitor-specific landing page that names them and addresses the pain point they're known for: slow support, expensive plans, a missing feature.
2. Run Google Ads on the competitor's brand keyword pointing at that page.
3. Keep the comparison factual and current. Exaggerate and you'll hand them a legal letter and lose the trust of the exact buyer you wanted.

What it costs: brand keywords are usually cheaper than category keywords because most advertisers ignore them. Start at $10-20/day and watch the search-term report.

The trap: sending competitor traffic to your generic homepage. The searcher was looking for something specific; your page has to acknowledge that or the click is wasted.

3. Run a raffle that actually converts

Giveaways have a bad reputation because most of them collect freebie-hunters. The fix is prize selection: give away something only your target customer wants. A year of your product. A paid tool your audience already uses. Never an iPad.

The mechanic:

1. Pick a prize with strong appeal to your niche and zero appeal outside it.
2. Run the raffle for 14 days: long enough to compound shares, short enough to keep urgency.
3. Make entry a single email field, with bonus entries for referrals.
4. After the draw, send the "you didn't win" email with a consolation offer, like a trial extension or a discount. That email regularly outperforms the raffle itself.

What it costs: the prize plus a landing page. If the prize is your own product, the marginal cost is near zero.

The trap: measuring success by entries. Entries are vanity; measure activated signups 30 days later. A raffle that adds 200 real users beats one that adds 5,000 dead emails, and a niche prize is the only reliable way to get the former.

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Run any one of these and you'll have a measurable lift to point at by next Monday's standup. Each issue of the free MAXRadius newsletter breaks down one tactic like this, with the numbers from our own runs attached. Subscribe from any button on this page and the next one lands in your inbox.