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How do startups get their content marketing to work?

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Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#21

Post by povertyworld »

pascalxus wrote: post #13

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

Oh, is that why so many blogs seem to be bloated with filler content for what could have been a page? I always thought it was because those writers are hired guns with a word count to hit, but gaming the engagement metrics makes a lot of sense.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#22

Post by 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.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#23

Post by endorphone »

sixhobbits wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#24

Post by TeMPOraL »

ollerac wrote: post #18
pascalxus wrote: post #13

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

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.

> 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.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#25

Post by ollerac »

snazz wrote: post #16
revvx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#26

Post by nine_k »

endorphone wrote: post #23
sixhobbits wrote: post #8

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…

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…

Would you mind to link some of these quality articles of not so successful companies? Maybe HN crowd would bring them some of the deserved success.

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#27

Post by davidjnelson »

tyingq wrote: post #22

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.

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!

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#28

Post by wslh »

sixhobbits wrote: post #8

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…

There is another strategy that doesn't need high quality content. Companies like Zapier created thousands of pages with little variations following the rule of "how to integrate X with Y".

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#29

Post by revvx »

ollerac wrote: post #25
snazz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I avoid talking about because I don't want people getting ideas, but it's easy to detect voting rings with HTTP referers and voting history alone

Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?

#30

Post by tnolet »

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.

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