41–50 of 86 posts
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.
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 thin…
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)
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 thin…
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 me…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 me…
"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.
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".
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 wher…
To get it on the site, it's just add/commit/push in git with Netlify.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
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…
Amplification (getting your content out) is the other part, and unless you've got an audience already, it's even more time consuming than preparing the actual content.
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.