How do startups get their content marketing to work?
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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?
#2That’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.
Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?
#320 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.
Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?
#4That’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 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.
Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?
#5That’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…
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.
Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?
#6I 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)
Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?
#7Some 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.
Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?
#8You 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.
Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?
#920 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.
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.
Re: How do startups get their content marketing to work?
#1020 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.
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"