How do startups get their content marketing to work? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

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…

You mean, like Duck Duck Go?

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

#72

Post by dhimes » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

vonnik wrote: post #53

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 Somehow Google picks this up, and people also bounce when they see outdated information.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…

Can confirm: long posts that you update as new knowledge surfaces actually work well. Think of your site as a wiki.

"Think of your site as a wiki."

That's an elegant way to put it.

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

#73

Post by revvx » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #68

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 Somehow Google picks this up, and people also bounce when they see outdated information.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…

When outsourcing content have you always just hired freelance writers or hired agencies? I didn't want to manage a bunch of freelance writers so I went out looking for an agency to help execute our content strategy but it seemed almost all agencies were pitching way more on helping with strategy and less on their ability to create content.

Actually I've been in this business for 5 years and worked in both agencies and content companies, so I have more insider knowledge rather than experience as a customer, hope it's ok.

Most agencies are just hiring freelancers and putting a 10x markup on it. Since they're probably using multiple freelancers per customer, they can't guarantee consistency, which is why they need internal reviewers (which adds to their overhead).

The strategy part is not a lot of work, and I've seen the people that do it working with up to 50 customers simultaneously, so it's not as if it takes a lot of time. 75% of the secret sauce is just picking words out of SemRush. I'm not even joking.

The best ROI right now, IMO:

1. Have one or two good freelancers you trust. You'll have more consistency in your texts and you won't have to manage much. Most freelancers already know how to do the SEO part, because agencies already hire them to do it. They're cheap, so it is easy to "test" them before committing. Good freelancers are low-maintenance.

2. Outsource the strategy to a freelancer. This way you won't be tied to an expensive contract with heavy fines and they'll be able to spend more time. Sometimes they'll also produce content, other times they'll be able to manage other freelancers for you.

3. In my experience, most agencies use run regular consumer tools behind the scenes: Buffer, Semrush, Moz, Mailchimp, Hubspot, and A LOT of Google Docs. SEO checking is done using Yoast, which is free. Most of those tools are simple to use.

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

#74

Post by dhimes » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #4

rdlecler1 wrote: post #2

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.

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…

"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.

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

#75

Post by hammock » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

thirdsun wrote: post #69

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

The article addresses this issue and suggests the opposite is true: > In 2019, what do most of the top-ranked blogs have in common? They skip filler introductions, keep their paragraphs short, and get to the point. Maybe those approaches of needlessly long text with irrelevatn backstories are simply outdated?

It could be both: that the top-ranked recipes are content-dense with no filler, but the recipe space is just so HUGE so anyone else in the long tail HAS to intro their recipe with an entire article in order to even have a chance at breaking through.

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

#76

Post by bgrainger » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

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

There's a Chrome extension to fix that: https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

> It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.

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

#77

Post by alexmingoia » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

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.

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

#78

Post by rchaud » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 5:49 PM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #45

wslh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Like all those "how to resolve missing xyz.dll driver" autogenerated pages?

Those pages are the worst. They were everywhere in SERP in the late 2000s, and I still a few today. "Alternative to [software name]" type searches bring those pages out in hordes.

It is so obvious they are auto-generated, do people still fall for them?

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

#79

Post by capkutay » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

#80

Post by capkutay » Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

tnolet wrote: post #30

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…

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.