
How do startups get their content marketing to work? - middle1
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/13/how-do-startups-actually-get-their-content-marketing-to-work/
======
sixhobbits
You can keep trying to hack Google all you want, and you can definitely be
successful for short periods of time if you invest enough time and money. But
there's also the difficult but straight forward way out -- write content that
people want to read.

Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, and others have adopted this strategy with great
success. Writing good quality content takes time, good copywriters, subject
experts, editors, and designers. It's not easy. It's not a hack. But you can
bet it will outrank any cheap hacks for the foreseeable future.

~~~
endorphone
_Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, and others have adopted this strategy with great
success_

This is a confirmation bias, however. There are a lot of orgs trying the same
strategy to absolutely no success, great content that doesn't have the social
proof rotting away in obscurity.

Even among the ones who yield success, that tends to come and go. It's a very
short path between "wow great content" and content that is cynically (and
sometimes accurately) seen as a thin veneer over self-promotion.

There was a period when Netflix, for instance, had tech pieces on here
constantly. The crowd lost interest. They're still pumping out the content,
presumably at a significant manpower cost, to seemingly little readership.

~~~
puranjay
I run a content marketing agency. The problem you're talking about is, indeed,
a massive one. But that usually happens when companies create content without
thinking about its distribution.

While you certainly must create content that your audience wants to read, it
is even more important that you have a clear plan for distributing it. If your
content isn't supported by a strong SEO plan, and if you don't have a clear
social media and PR strategy for it, you won't see results, no matter how good
the content is.

~~~
gregorygoc
Isn’t distribution of content is like just posting what you wrote on reddit or
on HN nowadays?

~~~
puranjay
Way more than that. It's a combination of SEO + PR + social media. So you'd
have some content that other sites might be willing to publish or link to
(say, in a weekly "best of" roundup). Some other content that would focus
purely on keywords supported by a backlinking campaign to rank well in search
engines. And some other content that would focus on topics that would resonate
with, say, the HN crowd.

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revvx
Some super-basic things I learned at a past job that might help newbies:

1\. Use a subdirectory instead of a subdomain for your blog. That alone helped
half of our customers get better ranking.

2\. Keep editing older posts so they always stay up to date. Somehow Google
picks this up, and people also bounce when they see outdated information. That
was a quantum leap for certain blogs where we tested this approach.

3\. Picking the right keywords is more important than relying purely on
feeling. Lots of our customers fought that and wasted money. SemRush, Moz, etc
can help you.

EDIT: And how could I forget...

4\. Outsourcing content (and content alone) has great ROI but outsourcing
strategy (at least to an agency or another company) is a money pit and a scam,
and you'll still end up having to do A LOT of work yourself anyway.

~~~
paulryanrogers
> Keep editing older posts so they always stay up to date.

Sounds like a bit of a rat race compared to just writing more timeless
articles, or just leaving dated topics for reference.

While newness may be a great metric for Google I'm not so sure it creates the
best incentives for building an Internet full of useful, quality content.

~~~
manigandham
Not everything can be "timeless". Plenty of content is about the state of X at
time Y. Things change and if your article is good and getting a long-tail of
visitors, it's in your best interests to keep it updated with changes, or at
the very least add a note to where newer information can be found.

------
tnolet
From experience, it's f __king hard. But common sense does apply.

I'm 100% in on content marketing for my business and after roughly 2 years of
dabbling, experimenting and honing my skills I think I sort of get it.

For anyone starting out, all the common advice is true:

1\. Create valuable, original content. This can be VERY specific to a VERY
specific niche. People LOVE reading about how the sausage is made.

2\. Go where your audience is. Took me a while to figure out. For me that is
specific sub reddits and HN. Twitter to a lesser degree.

3\. Keep a schedule. Once a week, once a month. Whatever works for you.

[edit]

4\. Get a tool / platform that removes obstacles. Probably why Medium got so
popular. It makes writing and adding pictures really easy. No subliminal /
subconscious blocks on writing that next post. I use Ghost now. Same
experience, just private. The cost is trivial if this is your only marketing
outlay.

~~~
capkutay
This might be a stupid simple question, but where do you post your blogs once
they're live? just share on linkedin or other social media? HN is obviously
one destination but its a tough place to get large visibility.

~~~
tnolet
I have a list, but this is somewhat optimised for technical people

hackernews indiehackers twitter reddit linkedin stackshare

------
pkalinowski
I think it was Intercom CEO who said something along the lines “Everyone wants
to do content marketing until they discover how expensive it is.”

You can decide you want to start content marketing, take one guy from
marketing team and tell him to start pumping out “relevant” content.

Or, you can acknowledge that content marketing is like a product: it needs
target audience, needs to solve problem for this audience, have a distribution
and promotion process, PR backing, have a goal for your company and, the most
important, it needs to be good stuff by default.

So many people treat content as “build it and they will come”, which is
exactly how to achieve nothing remarkable.

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pascalxus
I hope google catches onto the fact that, as a user, I don't want a bunch a
dwell time when I'm looking for a recipe. Right now the winning strategy seems
to be to write really long stories, forcing the user to search in the article
endlessly before giving the recipes

~~~
ollerac
This might be a blind spot for Google because the longer you stay on any given
webpage, the better it is for them, since 50% of all webpages have ads served
by Google or one of their subsidiaries.

I wonder if this will be Google’s downfall one day. Some AI enabled competitor
will come up with a search engine that delivers _exactly_ what you’re looking
for instead of the most _engaging_ content.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I wonder if this will be Google’s downfall one day. Some AI enabled
> competitor will come up with a search engine that delivers exactly what
> you’re looking for instead of the most engaging content._

A search engine that consistently delivers English language Wikipedia as the
first link for any query that has a related term on it is a search engine I'd
switch to today. Google used to be like that, with a Wiki link in the top 3
results for pretty much anything I searched for. These days, I'm happy if
it'll be on the first page, and this is the first time after dropping
"verbatim search" that I _felt_ Google search engine to significantly decline
in quality.

~~~
NegativeLatency
Tried duck duck go? In my experience it’s better for getting to Wikipedia for
stuff like you describe

~~~
TeMPOraL
Years ago; didn't stick to it. I guess it's time to try it again, thanks for
the reminder!

~~~
ColanR
It's seemed to get a lot better in the past 6-12 months.

------
rdlecler1
That’s great and all but Google still ranks Forbes articles much higher than
content we produce which to anyone in our industry we are the circa TechCrunch
for Food and Ag circa 2007. Unfortunately good doesn’t see it that way and
favors bigger name publications with much lower nutritional value.

~~~
paulcole
It’s very possible to outrank them but you’re not going to like the process.
It’s very simple: write A LOT and cover A LOT of keyword variations.

Over the course of about 3 years, I wrote around 500 blog posts about Amazon
and specifically its 3rd-party marketplace. I wrote for a small startup making
software in that space. This is a heavily covered topic by the mainstream
media.

MANY of my posts were shit that never got any traffic after the first couple
of days they were posted. But many others still rank very highly for topics
also covered by the mainstream media.

Nobody wants to hear it but spray and pray is the approach that really works
but you have to put the time in. You can do more research and be more
systematic, but that just eats into the time you have to write and you’ll just
get frustrated by the time you wasted researching what you thought was going
to be a home run of a blog post.

~~~
rdlecler1
We have published nearly 2,000 articles and Have ft journalists and a half
dozen expert freelancers. We’ve done all the SEO optimization and are usually
responsible for coining new terms and trends. As I mentioned the industry sees
us as THE go to news source but Google doesn’t.

~~~
QuantumGood
Are you saying that Forbes shows up significantly higher in search results for
highly specific topic searches that you should rank higher in, or for more
general searches, or something else?

------
pascalxus
For nutrition, there's a ton of really bad clow quality half true content that
ranks really well in Google because people spend time and engage with that
content

~~~
TeMPOraL
And it's all garbage whose authors and publishers deserve a special place in
hell, for propagating bullshit that's occasionally dangerous to health, often
wastes money, and it's a drag when dealing with friends and family members who
end up believing it.

Not just in nutrition - in pretty much everything pertaining things common to
all humans - health, cooking, childbirth, etc., the search results are
dominated by information-free garbage that wastes a lot of time for people
seeking information.

------
randomacct3847
FWIW the only reason I’ve heard about Lambda School is because people I follow
either liked, retweeted, or mentioned Lambda School so many times that I could
not have heard of it.

I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but it’s basically “get your CEO and
influential investors” to incessantly tweet about your company.

Not sure if it’s considered pure content marketing but a mix of content +
influencer marketing.

~~~
manigandham
That's called "word of mouth", essentially people personally recommending
something to other people because they like it. Social media has allowed for
amplifying your reach to anyone who follows you but it's fundamentally the
same thing.

"influencer" marketing is bullshit. The only real part of it is the same old
celebrity/talent-agency business that has existed for a century.

------
tyingq
I feel like they are dismissing the value of backlinks too much. Google is
better now at spotting unnatural ones. But (real) backlinks seem to still
overcome everything else. They work better with good content, titles, etc, on
the page. But those other things don't work at all without links.

~~~
rchaud
Who even does backlinking anymore? If you link to an article on social media
(where people are most likely to share), Google doesn't count it as strongly
as an organic backlink that appears on a website.

Back in the day, people would create infographics and request other sites to
embed it with a backlink. That type of link building strategy is old hat now,
and feels skeevy to do if you're a funded startup.

~~~
tyingq
_" Who even does backlinking anymore?"_

Those "organic backlinks" aren't all so organic. There's a lot of grey between
outright buying/begging a link and just hoping some links appear solely
because you wrote such great content.

------
dalbasal
The undercurrent here is online ad markets, how big they've gotten, and how
little value is left for seo/content to target. Basically, advertising ate the
world.

15 Years ago seo/content marketing was the biggest customer recruitment
method. The whole online ad industry was probably $5bn-$10bn. Today, the
online ad industry is $300bn-$500bn.

Google: "snack subscription," "divorce lawyer" or "cloud database." These are
valuable "high intent" ads. Most/all of the screen space is dedicated to ads
(I need to scroll on both laptop and phone to see organic results). They get
most of the clicks and (you'll need to take my word on this) their conversion
rates are much higher. This is because the advertiser can control/optimize the
UX: what the ad says, what the landing page says, etc.

Most of the customers have been harvested by the ads. Not much is left for
oorganic. Organic is less visible, less clickbait-ey and coverts worse.

For highly valuable queries like the one above, whatever is left after ads
have taken a lions share is often scooped up by aggregators (who may also bid
for ads) This leaves very little for content/seo.

Getting to the point:

 _1\. Write articles for queries that actually prioritize articles._

With a lot of exceptions, this also means "write articles for "low intent"
queries. IE, queries with far lower commercial value. You could also pay to
appear on these queries. It'd be much cheaper than "high intent" queries, but
either way, these are unlikely to be directly en route to acquiring customers.
There is a massive difference between users who arrived looking for "
_flatshare in London Docklands_ " and those interested in " _average rent per
sq ft_." Leading into the pitch is great, but the conversion rate will still
be 10X lower or worse. Advertisers also like to convert cheap traffic, and it
is much harder for content marketers.

My overall point is that the 50X-100X growth of the online ad market over the
last 15 years is directly proportional to the number of customers acquired via
online advertising. The competing channels have gotten proportonally smaller.

This is not just searh. Social media & "content" advertising have grown even
faster, also cannibalizing organic.

Anyway.... Content markerting is now a niche strategy. If you are building the
next wikipedia, quora or stack overflow, seo/content would be a great. If you
are building a snack subscription, accounting software, or online babysitting
service... the deck is stacked against you.

------
petercooper
I run a family of newsletters that go out to over 450,000 developers and to be
honest I'm surprised how _few_ companies I see get it right. We are always
looking for content that would be interesting to our readers, and the number
of companies that can consistently produce such content is quite small.

------
sbhn
Produce something which is mostly accurate, but not 100%. so then discussion
happens, and you get shouted at, or down voted. User interaction is very
important, and if it divides, it’s even more important.

------
alexmingoia
Writing the most amazing article with the perfect keywords, with all the right
metrics, shared on the best channel, won’t convert if _your product sucks._
Build a product that markets itself. Build a product that people actually
love. That’s useful. That’s remarkable. That people want to recommend to
others and talk about.

Nobody cares about your product or your company just because you spent hours
writing a blog post, or labored over the right keywords, or posted it at 9AM
instead of 5PM. Or spent thousands of dollars on content marketers.

Make something people want.

------
huxflux
They don't.

------
mrhappyunhappy
Anyone in search of highly effective content marketing should check out grow
and convert by Devesh and Benji.

------
sonnyblarney
There's an underlying problem of spam here, that Google is still not detecting
very well, and that is the filler that is filling up the entire internet.

Aside from curated sites, the whole thing is becoming low-value carbs.

Often, finding a 'help' article or video, you get tons of low-grade content
surrounded the little thing you need to learn, along with a deluge of ads.

This model isn't really working, I don't think it ever has: junk content with
junk ads, it's a big value destroying entity.

Google now knows a lot about individuals, it'd be nice to have maybe some kind
of user-rated systems so we can just use each others knowledge to avoid the
junk.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Part of the problem is that it's nigh impossible to make money on simply
providing useful information. People use ad blockers, they find ways around
pay walls, they scoff at the idea that writing good information is real work
worth actual money.

I've blogged for years. It doesn't make adequate income to support me. I get
all kinds of flak from people who tell me to "get a real job" rather than
helping me find some means to get traffic, develop a good niche and monetize
it.

I also work for a writing service as a way to help pay my bills. I try to
write stuff I can feel good about, but the reality is I am sometimes guilty*
of adding to the kind of online "spam" that gets routinely decried as having
ruined the internet.

I would prefer to be "part of the solution, not part of the problem." But it
mostly doesn't pay to try to write high quality information with no pay wall,
no product you are shilling, etc.

We have designed an internet where the only way to make money for the
information you write is to be selling something else. And then we complain
endlessly about the lack of quality information.

Pointing out the obvious connection between these various things mostly gets
me grief. People want excellent information available online for free and they
just refuse to see how and why that's a broken mental model.

If you want an internet where you can find good writing whose only goal is to
provide good information for the reader without selling you something, then
find some way to make it profitable and worthwhile for people to do that.

* To be clear, I don't feel guilty. I don't think it's morally wrong. I think what's morally wrong is the vast majority of people expecting excellent content to be completely free. That is a de facto expectation of slave labor from content producers.

In practical terms, we are incentivizing the creation of the kind of content
that gets decried as low value "spam" and disincentiving the creation of
independent, quality content.

"You get what you pay for." This is what pays. I've gotta eat.

(shrug)

~~~
sonnyblarney
"Part of the problem is that it's nigh impossible to make money on simply
providing useful information"

I think again this is a Google problem - there is inherent value in 'good
help' it should be profitable at some level, accepting the fact that there is
a commodification to that as well.

------
trpc
I saw with my own eyes people on some freelancer websites requesting 200
ProductHunt upvotes for like 200 US dollars. Getting SEO ranking today on
Google is much much harder than it used to be until around 2014-2015, now
everything is exponentially harder, Facebook doesn't get you reach until you
pay them tons of money to even reach a tiny fraction of your own organic
subscribers and they even cause automatic unlikes among your organic
subscribers to extort you further, Twitter is less shameless when it comes to
extortion for reach but it's not as it used to be 5 years ago. It's really
very hard to go viral even with a good product unless you have at least tens
of thousands of dollars to throw on direct (i.e. ads and promoted posts) and
indirect marketing (e.g. paying blogs, journalists, youtubers, etc... to
promote your products)

