Read This Before Starting Your Content Marketing Efforts

Why so many startup founders and marketers start content marketing and fail and how to avoid that path.

Published in

ART + marketing

7 min readMay 18, 2018

During the last couple of months, many fellow startup founders have asked me about content marketing. The main questions are usually the same: should they do it and how should they start. There are hundreds of articles on this topic, but still, I decided to share my ideas and experience. Hope this helps.

Content marketing is a hot topic already for several years. It’s getting more and more difficult to get noticed in this cluttered marketplace where everyone seems to have a blog. But there are two news; one good and one bad.

Good news — It’s still possible to get value from content marketing and grow your business.
Bad news — It takes time, patience and consistent efforts.

It may feel like the competition is tough, but please note that content is a long-term game and you need to accept it before starting. Not all marketers have the patience and willingness to publish articles for several months to see solid compound return. So many marketers publish only 2–3 articles of low or average quality, then don’t see any results and stop their content marketing activities. This leads to new opportunities for the ones who are persistent. For YOU!

How to do content marketing the right way

1. Ask yourself “Do you really need to do it?”

In most of the cases, the answer should be “yes” (you are reading this post for that, right?) not because it’s trendy, but because it’s one of those channels that can work for almost every industry. It will not provide immediate results, but if you do it consistently and publish high quality and relevant content for your audience, then in a few months you’ll start seeing the first results.

When we started our blog at Inapptics around 10 months ago I wasn’t sure what to expect and if that was a good decision to invest our time and money in content. Fast forward 10 months and it’s the best marketing decision I have made. Why? Because it helped us become one of the go-to blogs for user experience, mobile analytics, product design and app marketing. It helped us rank pretty high in Google search results which leads to an increase in organic traffic. And last, but not least, we now spend zero budget on getting new signups, as content is currently the number one source for our signups.

2. What kind of content to publish

Content marketers usually categorize content into these two categories:

Evergreen content - these are the articles covering topics that are interesting and relevant to your audience not only today but in future too.
Temporal content - these are the articles that are interesting and relevant only for a limited time, e.g. articles covering a specific event or a product launch.

In most of the cases, it’s better to aim for evergreen content, as it will provide a compound return.

Do keyword research to find keywords that your target customers are searching. Choose the ones that are low or medium in competition and high in search volume. Create your content around one single focus keyword. The old days when people were using 5–10 keywords in a single article are gone. Google’s Keyword Planner (free) and Ahrefs (paid) are a great starting point for keyword research. I’d also suggest using Buzzsumo, SEMrush Topic Research tool and Ahrefs Content Explorer tool for topic research.

Also, when choosing topics for your articles, I’d suggest thinking not only about promotional content about your product but also about topics that are relevant to your audience and will provide them value and help them in their everyday work/life. In fact, this kind of non-promotional and educational content should be at the heart of your content marketing efforts. It will pay off, believe me. You can always find a way to link back to your product or service, but first, give value and help your readers.

3. How often should you publish

It really depends. It can be from every day to several times a month. You need to find what works for you best. When just starting, I’d suggest publishing at least once a week. This will help you build an audience and become one of the leaders in your space. But you should publish only quality content. Quantity should not win over quality. Never. Ever.

Inapptics and most of the startups I help publish once a week and we also republish the content on Medium and other platforms.

4. What is the ideal length of an article

It can be anything from several sentences to thousands of words. You should experiment with that too, but my suggestion would be to target articles with around 800–1200 words.

Usually, very short articles that have less than 400–500 words can be considered as not serious ones unless you are Seth Godin. Articles with more than 1500 or 2000 words are usually considered too long and can be boring for your readers and not all of them will read until the end. So articles containing 800–1200 words seem to be in a sweet spot. That’s what we do for Inapptics and for Looma.

5. Self-hosted blog or Medium

My favorite question. The short answer is BOTH, and I will explain why and how.

Of course, we all prefer that our blog and domain get all the SEO juice. But, in contrary, Medium offers a highly engaged and active community of people who like to read and share ideas. So it turns out there is a way to combine both.

Here is what you need to do. Publish your article on your blog (preferably Wordpress) first and submit it to Google and Bing so search engines can index it quickly. Then republish your article on Medium using its built-in Import tool. Then share your Medium article link with your subscribers, followers and also post it on different relevant communities and forums.

This way you’ll get the initial boost and people will start visiting your Medium article. The more people read it and clap, the higher are the chances you can get featured on tag pages or in newsletters. And your original blog will get all the SEO traffic. Nice, right?

6. What happens after publishing

Inexperienced founders and marketers tend to think that by hitting the ‘Publish’ button the game is over. But in reality, the game is just starting. I have met and chatted with so many startup founders who adopt the so-called “publish and pray” attitude which simply doesn’t work.

I believe that content marketing includes 3 components and you can unlock the full potential of your content and see compound results if you devote equal efforts to them. Those 3 components are:

Research (keywords and topic ideas)
Content creation
Distribution and promotion

So after you publish your article, there is still a lot to be done. Here are some activities I’d suggest to do:

Share the article on your social media
Send your article to your newsletter subscribers
Head to communities/forums and join discussions where you can add value and also share the link to your article. Quora is especially great for this. Find questions on Quora that are relevant to your article and answer those questions. Try to do your best to provide real value and link to your article in each answer. The better answers you write, the higher is the chance that people will check your article and read it.
Share your article on popular websites like GrowthHackers.com (mostly marketing related topics), Hacker News (tech topics), Reddit
Submit your article to Zest.is (mostly for marketing related content)
Share your article on relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Don’t spam, only provide value
Find Slack communities with your target audience and share your article there

Conclusion

Content marketing is a great way to build an audience and become a leader in your space. You can then utilize your success to get new customers and grow your business. Make sure to keep the balance between quantity and quality. And always remember to provide value to your readers. Make those 5–10 minutes of reading your article their best investment of the day.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this piece, please hold down the 👏🏼 button below so others can find and read it. You can also follow me to be the first to see my stories. Comments are always welcome.

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Digital marketer, startup founder, entrepreneur. Director of Marketing at TruePublic.

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