How do startups get their content marketing to work?

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&#x27;s also the difficult but straight forward way out -- write content that people want to read.<p>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&#x27;s not easy. It&#x27;s not a hack. But you can bet it will outrank any cheap hacks for the foreseeable future.

Some super-basic things I learned at a past job that might help newbies:<p>1. Use a subdirectory instead of a subdomain for your blog. That alone helped half of our customers get better ranking.<p>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 Somehow Google picks this up, and people also bounce when they see outdated information.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.<p>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.<p>EDIT: And how could I forget...<p>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&#x27;ll still end up having to do A LOT of work yourself anyway.

From experience, it&#x27;s f<i></i>king hard. But common sense does apply.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>For anyone starting out, all the common advice is true:<p>1. Create valuable, original content. This can be VERY specific to a VERY specific niche. People LOVE reading about how the sausage is made.<p>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.<p>3. Keep a schedule. Once a week, once a month. Whatever works for you.<p>[edit]<p>4. Get a tool &#x2F; platform that removes obstacles. Probably why Medium got so popular. It makes writing and adding pictures really easy. No subliminal &#x2F; 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.

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.”<p>You can decide you want to start content marketing, take one guy from marketing team and tell him to start pumping out “relevant” content.<p>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.<p>So many people treat content as “build it and they will come”, which is exactly how to achieve nothing remarkable.

I hope google catches onto the fact that, as a user, I don&#x27;t want a bunch a dwell time when I&#x27;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

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.

For nutrition, there&#x27;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

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

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&#x27;t work at all without links.

The undercurrent here is online ad markets, how big they&#x27;ve gotten, and how little value is left for seo&#x2F;content to target. Basically, advertising ate the world.<p>15 Years ago seo&#x2F;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.<p>Google: &quot;snack subscription,&quot; &quot;divorce lawyer&quot; or &quot;cloud database.&quot; These are valuable &quot;high intent&quot; ads. Most&#x2F;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&#x27;ll need to take my word on this) their conversion rates are much higher. This is because the advertiser can control&#x2F;optimize the UX: what the ad says, what the landing page says, etc.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;seo.<p>Getting to the point:<p><i>1. Write articles for queries that actually prioritize articles.</i><p>With a lot of exceptions, this also means &quot;write articles for &quot;low intent&quot; queries. IE, queries with far lower commercial value. You could also pay to appear on these queries. It&#x27;d be much cheaper than &quot;high intent&quot; 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 &quot;<i>flatshare in London Docklands</i>&quot; and those interested in &quot;<i>average rent per sq ft</i>.&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>This is not just searh. Social media &amp; &quot;content&quot; advertising have grown even faster, also cannibalizing organic.<p>Anyway.... Content markerting is now a niche strategy. If you are building the next wikipedia, quora or stack overflow, seo&#x2F;content would be a great. If you are building a snack subscription, accounting software, or online babysitting service... the deck is stacked against you.

I run a family of newsletters that go out to over 450,000 developers and to be honest I&#x27;m surprised how <i>few</i> 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.

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.

Writing the most amazing article with the perfect keywords, with all the right metrics, shared on the best channel, won’t convert if <i>your product sucks.</i> 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.<p>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.<p>Make something people want.

They don&#x27;t.

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

There&#x27;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.<p>Aside from curated sites, the whole thing is becoming low-value carbs.<p>Often, finding a &#x27;help&#x27; article or video, you get tons of low-grade content surrounded the little thing you need to learn, along with a deluge of ads.<p>This model isn&#x27;t really working, I don&#x27;t think it ever has: junk content with junk ads, it&#x27;s a big value destroying entity.<p>Google now knows a lot about individuals, it&#x27;d be nice to have maybe some kind of user-rated systems so we can just use each others knowledge to avoid the junk.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s not as it used to be 5 years ago. It&#x27;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)