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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?

#31

Post by NegativeLatency »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #24
ollerac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #31
TeMPOraL wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

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

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

#33

Post by marktangotango »

revvx wrote: post #11
gopher2 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

The flip side I don’t hear about is using up/down votes to shape discussions. You’ll often read discussion on the same topic with drastically different sentiment at the top.

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

#34

Post by 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.

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

#35

Post by captainredbeard »

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…

At Netflix's level, the tech blog content shifted from being content marketing to content recruiting.

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

#36

Post by paulryanrogers »

revvx wrote: post #7

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. Pi…

> 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.

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

#37

Post by btown »

wslh wrote: post #28
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".

They also did a lot of work to make it appear that these pages were bespoke, even if they were autogenerated. A nontrivial accomplishment.

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

#38

Post by njsubedi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #24
ollerac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use DuckDuckGo for the exact reason. And sometimes when I'm sure I need a wiki for a keyword, I search for keyword !w and it takes me directly to the wiki page.

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

#39

Post by omarchowdhury »

pascalxus wrote: post #14
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…

Not if you r niche is too small for Google to recognize

If there was any niche too small for Google search to recognize, Google search wouldn't be Google search.

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

#40

Post by joncrane »

pascalxus wrote: post #17

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

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