The Digital Marketing Secret Societies You Didn’t Know Existed

Imagine a group of top rank marketers standing in a circle in cloaks and candles chanting away to the internet superpowers for massive traffic gains to their sites. The very next day, their website traffic shoots up exponentially. Welcome to the marketing underground secret society, where you are given all the traffic you could ever ask for. 

Just kidding… but there are private groups where top rank marketers hang around and where you can improve your marketing skills from them. These private groups are found in Slack.

Private Slack groups are some of the internet’s best resources to blow up your expertise. Researching the latest methods eats up valuable time as there are too many different sources to choose from. Private Slack groups eliminates this time sink by effectively delivering the content you’re looking for in one place.

When it comes to learning the latest methods there are lots of places online to look for. As a result, just looking for content eats up valuable time. Private Slack groups deliver all the content effectively all in one place. 

Why Join a Private Slack Group? 

An Evolving Place to Learn

The best learn from the best. These private groups are filled with industry experts that share ideas and are open to learning new techniques. People in these groups keep up and teach each other of the latest trends when it comes to marketing, and when collaboration happens, innovative strategies are created. 

Active Slack groups provide tons of value and the people in it are like-minded and experience the same issues you will run into. Solutions to these issues are shared around and everyone is there to support each other and learn from each other.

Accessibility

You’re already using it at work (most likely), so it makes sense to explore Slack’s full potential. 

Instead of having to switch through different browsers, windows or an aptitude of tabs, you are able to stay in a single app with a clean interface. 

Everything you need and are looking for is all in a single app. Less clutter; fewer distractions; better productivity!

Network with Other Professionals

Surround yourself with peers with common goals. These are your new accountability partners.

Private Slack groups are filled with people trying to achieve the same goal. For example, when you join a marketing group, you connect with other marketers. This is a great way to network with fellow people in your field and possibly work together on a project. 

Build Your Personal Brand

Joining a Slack group is a great way to build your own personal brand. The more you contribute and give others value, you are setting yourself up as an authority figure in your space. 

You would be the one that people would turn to for questions and answers and the one to be trusted. 

Boost Productivity

Facebook is a great source to join groups within. However, Facebook is filled with tons of noise and distractions with endless scrolls of memes and recommended videos to watch which is the nature of social media. Slack is purpose-built and isn’t a social media platform. Work happens in Slack and the distractions are kept to a minimum.

Unbiased Feedback

If you have a new idea or a strategy you’d like to try, these private slack group can help you determine which direction you should take. People in these groups may have had similar ideas and have experience and could help guide you with where you need to be.

Which Slack Groups to Join?

Paid Groups:

Slack is a free service to use, but not all groups on Slack are free. The best private groups on Slack are paid because they contain the highest quality members. The downside of free Slack groups are the trolls, spammers, and freeloaders. These people are the type of people to not give value to the group and having a lot of these people in the group results in the group is inactive. 

People that are willing to pay an entry fee have serious intent in learning and sharing. These are the type of people that continue to help increase the value of the group. Because money has been invested, these members tend to make the most out of it and actively engage with each other and stay dedicated long term members rather than freeloaders who check out the group and leave after a few days.

Here are a few paid private Slack groups we recommend: 

Traffic Think Tank: $119/month

This is a private group dedicated to SEOs. The best and latest information on anything SEO related is found in this group. 

Joining Traffic Think Tank also gives you hundreds of hours of exclusive content and access to live events and webinars hosted by big-name marketers that can’t be found anywhere else. 

This group is filled with industry experts that share what is working and isn’t working in today’s SEO climate. SEO is constantly evolving so it is important to keep up with the latest trends. Because of the volatile nature of SEO, this group remains active to keep up with changes.

Learning SEO takes up tons of time and joining Traffic Think Tank is probably one of the best ways to significantly decrease learning time.

Creative Tribes: $27 One Time Fee

The purpose of Creative Tribes wasn’t to be a marketing group. It is a group dedicated to startups, entrepreneurs, marketers, and creatives where they can collaborate and share different ideas and strategies. The great thing about this group is that because it isn’t focused on just marketers, there are tons of opportunities for creative approaches from a non-marketing perspective. You won’t be stuck to the ‘traditional’ methods of marketing.

When marketing for other companies, it is crucial to know the ins and outs of their industry. Creative Tribes is filled with industry leaders that you can learn and gain knowledge from. Understanding the industry makes your marketing efforts a lot easier and more effective. 

Creative Tribes is also a diverse community of people with different strengths and skill sets, not just marketers. This provides an opportunity to collaborate with others on various projects or even gain a long term client. The value of this group is building relationships with people who will give you a fresh look on growing your business.

Startup Chat: $29 via Startup Deals Membership

One of the largest Private Slack communities aimed at startups. Running a startup is challenging and there are tons of obstacles along the way. You aren’t alone. 

Although this isn’t directed at marketing, the people here are all focused on the same goal; to grow their startups. People in startups work their way up from level zero, so being creative and innovative is a must. When creativity collaborates, a whole new approach to marketing is born.

There are people ahead of you that you can learn from, people in the same boat as you to keep you accountable, and people behind you that you can help bring them forward. It’s a community where startup entrepreneurs continue to help each other grow.

10xFactory: $147/month

10xFactory is a highly engaged group made for entrepreneurs. The community has tons of education and training including videos done by the founder of BigCommerce and other SaaS companies. 

10xFactory values networking as most of the communication between members happen over the phone or through group conference calls. The 10xFactory Slack group can be seen as a meeting place

A great feature of the group is the ‘hotseats.’ In ‘hotseat’ sessions, a member hops on a video call with 5-20 other entrepreneurs and discuss their top obstacles holding them back, while the others collaboratively solve that problem. 

10xFactory values problem solving and tackles problems that prevent businesses from experiencing growth.

Free Groups:

Joining a free Slack group has its ups and downs. The obvious reason to join is that it is easy to join and has no costs to it. You have free access to valuable information that would otherwise be hard to find other places online. 

However, there are tons of people who are in this category; looking to gain free valuable information, aka freeloaders. When a group is filled with freeloaders, there is no engagement going on. A trend we noticed is that even though a group may have thousands of members, it feels like a ghost town as no one is interacting within the group. 

One of the biggest issues when it comes to free groups is spam. Slack groups are a target for spammers as members are looking for the same thing. As a result, people would post links to their own sites and position themselves as ‘giving value’.

When this is paired with a non-engaging group, the non-engagement continues to grow as new members are turned off by the spam and won’t visit the Slack group again.

However, there are some free group that although don’t give as much value as a paid group, they still can help give value. Here are some free Slack groups to join:

Online Geniuses:

Online Geniuses is one of the largest marketing groups on Slack. Popular marketers such as Neil Patel, Gary Vaynerchuk, Rand Fishkin, etc.. host AMAs in this Slack groups.

Although Online Geniuses is free, membership isn’s guaranteed. Members are thoroughly vetted and may even take weeks to get approved after submitting an application. This is to ensure that there are only quality members in the group and keep the group quality strong, which is an issue when it comes to free private Slack groups.

Growmance:

Growmance is a Slack group that focuses on growth hacking. It’s a group to develop, brainstorm and share new ideas for marketing. Growth hacking is the type of marketing that doesn’t rely on ‘traditional’ methods. In fact, it actually tries to do the opposite; prove ‘traditional’ and ‘safe’ methods wrong.

Growmance is not only a place to improve your marketing skills, but to observe the creative angles people are taking in their marketing efforts.

If experimenting with new methods and taking risks is your thing, Growmance is a group for you. There are thousands of experts in the group that you can throw your ideas and strategies at, and get feedback on them and they could be up for experimenting with you too.

Backlinks:

If you manage a website, then you know that acquiring backlinks is important. Backlinks play a factor in SEO and the more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the more likely Google will rank your site higher, as long as those links are legit links, and your site’s technical SEO is on point. 

However, acquiring backlinks can be a challenge and takes time to do organically. Fortunately, with this free Slack group, you are able to network with other site owners to either give or receive backlinks from them. This Slack group’s main purpose though isn’t for backlink exchanges, but to learn and share SEO and other marketing knowledge with each other, with opportunities to share and receive backlinks. 

Keep in mind, you don’t want to have reciprocal links with other site owners as Google can see this as unnatural and potentially can penalize your website.

Taking Your Skills and Knowledge to the Next Level

Joining private Slack groups is a great way to boost your skills in whatever field you’re in. It’s a great place to learn and get real-time answers to your questions and also a place to share your experiences and expertise. 

By keeping active in these groups, you are building up the value of your personal brand, and as you continue to grow and learn you are building up authority within your industry. The fastest way to get to the top is to surround yourself with like-minded people who have made it.