7 ms·

How do startups get their content marketing to work?

231 points by middle1 7y ago

rdlecler1 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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?
  - dhimes 7y ago
    "It’s very simple: write A LOT and cover A LOT of keyword variations." This is exactly what you shouldn't have to do if the search engines were reasonably close to accurately measuring relevance. In fact, a site with a single article that nails the response should outrank a site with thousands of pages of fluff.
gopher2 7y ago
20 points in 58 minutes looks like it gets you on the top of HN, so as far as content marketing strategies "get your friends to upvote your HN submission" doesn't seem half bad.
- gumby 7y ago
  Not clear that you can really monetize HN subscribers except if you have something that would probably rise in the rankings on its own. Of course that's what all anti-SEO people would say. Hmm.
- julianshapiro 7y ago
  i'm the article's author. a moment ago, i came to hn as i normally do throughout the week. my heart skipped a beat* when i saw my tc post was on here; i didn't tell anyone to upvote. for whatever that's worth. * it's unfortunate that my reaction to seeing myself on hn is less "cool, readers!" and more "oh no, i'm about to get ripped apart in the comments"
- revvx 7y ago
  HN has a lot of anti-voting ring protection, so I doubt it would have stayed in #2 for long if this were the case.
  - snazz 7y ago
    There’s been some talk about this in other threads, but I’m still confused how it could tell the difference between a voting ring and a legitimately popular article without having many false positives.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Content marketing is usually easy enough to tell; even if upvoted by a voting ring, it'll be mercilessly flagged down.
    - ollerac 7y ago
      I’m curious about this too, but I don’t think they’ll talk openly about it. For some hints, you could probably look at what data Google reCaptcha collects. The newest version (v3) doesn’t even require a user to click anything except a single button. I bet Reddit and HN use timing, browsing time, clicks, and mouse movements, among other things to tell if a lot of visitors are just coming to the site to upvote a single story or are genuinely browsing the site before coming across something interesting.
trpc 7y ago
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)
revvx 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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.
  - throwaway_9168 7y ago
    That's a somewhat odd thing to say. StackOverflow would be better off not leaving dated topics for reference (as you can see when someone leaves a comment about how they wish the highest voted answer was actually up to date with the latest changes in that technology), and aspiring to be the StackOverflow of your niche is actually not such a bad idea (in the sense that they do allow and encourage updates to the answers). Besides, in some domains which overlap heavily with technology (e.g. marketing automation), writing timeless articles is pretty hard. Lastly, updating genuinely out of date content is a big favor for your readers and one that they will appreciate, even if your overall view is simply "Fk Google!".
  - revvx 7y ago
    The metric isn't exactly "newness" but relevance. Timeless or "evergreen" content doesn't have to be updated. It's alright to keep them as is. But keeping obsolete content online is a pain in the ass for users, so they will increase your bounce rate. Either update them or show a big notice on the top with a link to a newer article. Google will hopefully pick them up and the internet wins.
sixhobbits 7y ago
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.
- baddox 7y ago
  To be fair, that’s essentially what this article is saying, particularly the parts about Google now being able to track engagement and thus using that signal to boost results rather than just backlinks or domain rank.
  - trpc 7y ago
    I think Google these days link the information they get from Google Analytics and their DNS service requests to boost some domains and links over the others.
- pascalxus 7y ago
  Not if you r niche is too small for Google to recognize
  - omarchowdhury 7y ago
    If there was any niche too small for Google search to recognize, Google search wouldn't be Google search.
- endorphone 7y ago
  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.
pascalxus 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    > 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 7y ago
      Tried duck duck go? In my experience it’s better for getting to Wikipedia for stuff like you describe
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Years ago; didn't stick to it. I guess it's time to try it again, thanks for the reminder!
pascalxus 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- joncrane 7y ago
  I'm sure a lot of anti-vax content has excellent engagement metrics, too.
tyingq 7y ago
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.
- davidjnelson 7y ago
  It’s weird, but I have a site where google has indexed tens of thousands of urls and drives hundreds of clicks from google search a day before even launching it, without any backlinks. Backlinks will obviously drastically increase both the number of urls indexed as well as the ranking for queries and give an associated click through rate and corresponding traffic increase. Kind of blew my mind traffic would start coming pre launch though, certainly unexpected. SEO is way different now than when I started getting heavily into it in 2003!
- rchaud 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    "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.
tnolet 7y ago
From experience, it's fking 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.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  I use plain markdown. I can create content anywhere - if I am on another machine I can just email myself the file and get it on the site later. To get it on the site, it's just add/commit/push in git with Netlify.
- capkutay 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    I have a list, but this is somewhat optimised for technical people hackernews indiehackers twitter reddit linkedin stackshare
sonnyblarney 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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)
randomacct3847 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
huxflux 7y ago
They don't.
sbhn 7y ago
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.
mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
Anyone in search of highly effective content marketing should check out grow and convert by Devesh and Benji.
dalbasal 7y ago
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.
pkalinowski 7y ago
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.
petercooper 7y ago
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.
alexmingoia 7y ago
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.

231 points by middle1 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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?
- dhimes 7y ago
  "It’s very simple: write A LOT and cover A LOT of keyword variations." This is exactly what you shouldn't have to do if the search engines were reasonably close to accurately measuring relevance. In fact, a site with a single article that nails the response should outrank a site with thousands of pages of fluff.

gopher2 7y ago

20 points in 58 minutes looks like it gets you on the top of HN, so as far as content marketing strategies "get your friends to upvote your HN submission" doesn't seem half bad.

gumby 7y ago
Not clear that you can really monetize HN subscribers except if you have something that would probably rise in the rankings on its own. Of course that's what all anti-SEO people would say. Hmm.
julianshapiro 7y ago
i'm the article's author. a moment ago, i came to hn as i normally do throughout the week. my heart skipped a beat* when i saw my tc post was on here; i didn't tell anyone to upvote. for whatever that's worth. * it's unfortunate that my reaction to seeing myself on hn is less "cool, readers!" and more "oh no, i'm about to get ripped apart in the comments"
revvx 7y ago
HN has a lot of anti-voting ring protection, so I doubt it would have stayed in #2 for long if this were the case.
- snazz 7y ago
  There’s been some talk about this in other threads, but I’m still confused how it could tell the difference between a voting ring and a legitimately popular article without having many false positives.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Content marketing is usually easy enough to tell; even if upvoted by a voting ring, it'll be mercilessly flagged down.
  - ollerac 7y ago
    I’m curious about this too, but I don’t think they’ll talk openly about it. For some hints, you could probably look at what data Google reCaptcha collects. The newest version (v3) doesn’t even require a user to click anything except a single button. I bet Reddit and HN use timing, browsing time, clicks, and mouse movements, among other things to tell if a lot of visitors are just coming to the site to upvote a single story or are genuinely browsing the site before coming across something interesting.

trpc 7y ago

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)

revvx 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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.
- throwaway_9168 7y ago
  That's a somewhat odd thing to say. StackOverflow would be better off not leaving dated topics for reference (as you can see when someone leaves a comment about how they wish the highest voted answer was actually up to date with the latest changes in that technology), and aspiring to be the StackOverflow of your niche is actually not such a bad idea (in the sense that they do allow and encourage updates to the answers). Besides, in some domains which overlap heavily with technology (e.g. marketing automation), writing timeless articles is pretty hard. Lastly, updating genuinely out of date content is a big favor for your readers and one that they will appreciate, even if your overall view is simply "Fk Google!".
- revvx 7y ago
  The metric isn't exactly "newness" but relevance. Timeless or "evergreen" content doesn't have to be updated. It's alright to keep them as is. But keeping obsolete content online is a pain in the ass for users, so they will increase your bounce rate. Either update them or show a big notice on the top with a link to a newer article. Google will hopefully pick them up and the internet wins.

sixhobbits 7y ago

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.

baddox 7y ago
To be fair, that’s essentially what this article is saying, particularly the parts about Google now being able to track engagement and thus using that signal to boost results rather than just backlinks or domain rank.
- trpc 7y ago
  I think Google these days link the information they get from Google Analytics and their DNS service requests to boost some domains and links over the others.
pascalxus 7y ago
Not if you r niche is too small for Google to recognize
- omarchowdhury 7y ago
  If there was any niche too small for Google search to recognize, Google search wouldn't be Google search.
endorphone 7y ago
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.

pascalxus 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    Tried duck duck go? In my experience it’s better for getting to Wikipedia for stuff like you describe
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Years ago; didn't stick to it. I guess it's time to try it again, thanks for the reminder!

pascalxus 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
joncrane 7y ago
I'm sure a lot of anti-vax content has excellent engagement metrics, too.

tyingq 7y ago

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.

davidjnelson 7y ago
It’s weird, but I have a site where google has indexed tens of thousands of urls and drives hundreds of clicks from google search a day before even launching it, without any backlinks. Backlinks will obviously drastically increase both the number of urls indexed as well as the ranking for queries and give an associated click through rate and corresponding traffic increase. Kind of blew my mind traffic would start coming pre launch though, certainly unexpected. SEO is way different now than when I started getting heavily into it in 2003!
rchaud 7y ago
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 7y ago
  "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.

tnolet 7y ago

From experience, it's fking 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.

quickthrower2 7y ago
I use plain markdown. I can create content anywhere - if I am on another machine I can just email myself the file and get it on the site later. To get it on the site, it's just add/commit/push in git with Netlify.
capkutay 7y ago
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 7y ago
  I have a list, but this is somewhat optimised for technical people hackernews indiehackers twitter reddit linkedin stackshare

sonnyblarney 7y ago

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 7y ago
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)

randomacct3847 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

huxflux 7y ago

They don't.

sbhn 7y ago

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.

mrhappyunhappy 7y ago

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

dalbasal 7y ago

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.

pkalinowski 7y ago

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.

petercooper 7y ago

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.

alexmingoia 7y ago

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.