The Content Manifesto

As a founder, I had always viewed content as something we would do when we were staffed for it, and were doing well as a business. I had always viewed content as something we would do in addition to everything else, not as a driver of growth and revenue. Furthermore, I knew that writing a couple of articles per month would not instantly move the needle, but would take substantial nurturing and time — to germinate, and then sprout — into something beautiful. So, content remained in the backlog of my to-do list, far removed from the day-to-day efforts of our team — until last summer, when that changed…

I was still incredulous to the fact that a bunch of coders and growth marketers focused on building a startup could produce high-quality content. Even if some on the team had a natural ability to write, we certainly didn’t have the time. But more and more, we felt the need to add quality content to our marketing efforts. Then, the answer came to us. We were building a marketplace — a community rather — and we were missing out on the opportunity to utilize that community in the creation of high quality content.

I realize not all startups are focused on building a community, but involving customers in the content creation process is something that has worked surprisingly well for us, and that I believe all startups can do. We started by identifying the customers who were vehement believers in our product, and began asking them for help. We found customers who were expert genealogists, and who could help us bring really great content to the genealogy community. We were genuinely surprised when everyone we talked to said yes to our offer. To this day, we haven’t had a single customer tell us no. What we have seen is that customers are flattered that a company is willing to connect with them in order to seek their expertise and wisdom. Because they feel honored by this gesture, they strive to come up with the best work they can. They don’t end up seeing it as doing us a favor, but rather are honored to have been selected out of our thousands of users to help us create content.

Apart from seeking out expert genealogists with vast experience, we also looked for customers within our community who were already blogging about genealogy, and approached them if we liked their stuff. We would contact them, tell them that we were impressed by their blog, and that we would like to explore the option of having them as an author for our community. This relationship was synergistic because these bloggers already had great content buried deep in the web, but without the know-how to get that content in front of large amounts of people — something that we could easily help them with because we already had the following and distribution strategies in place. I think most startups are in a similar situation, but more often than not — including us for a long period of time — founders don’t connect the dots, and fail to harness the power of their own users and crowd.

Once we had a sound model in place for crowdsourcing our content, we began to grow the number of authors writing for us. With each author, we tested the effectiveness of the relationship before formally committing to them. This was very similar to our process for adding new talent to our team (See Why We Don’t Hire in Our Startup). This allowed us to gage how well each author’s voice blended with our overall content and mission before committing to a long-term relationship.

Throughout this content journey I have learned a number of important tactics that I want to share. I know content can easily become something ancillary, and that the returns from generating content can seem distant, or even imaginary. I know that it can be overwhelming figuring out how to make your content lead to growth and revenue, instead of just wasting your time. Here are a few of the insights we have gained as we have built a successful content strategy that is getting a lot of attention:

It’s all about content market fit

Before you begin the content marketing process, be sure that you know two things:

1. Who will read this content?
2. Why are they reading it?

In order to answer these questions, you have to engage in a discovery process similar to that of your user experience. To add value with your content you must have a clear understanding of who your user is, and what their habits and online behaviors are. Having a deep understanding of your customer will automatically lead to unique content that they want to consume. Not doing so is like building software that doesn’t solve a problem. It will waste your time and kill your resources. Stop writing content in a vacuum, and start treating content like you treat your user experience research. If you want to write unique, quality content, turn to your customers, and learn from them.

Harness the power of compounding traffic

As I mentioned above, we were a team of laser-focused individuals, constantly engaged in our individual crafts. We didn’t believe we had the time to write content, but we started to realize we couldn’t afford not to. With passing time we realized that content is a lot like saving and investing for retirement. You always hear those Northwestern Mutual guys saying, “You’re young, you have time on your side.” I’m telling you that this same principle applies to a startup’s content. Start as soon as possible to generate content, and you will reap the rewards of compounding traffic.

You’re planting seeds, not harvesting

Having experienced blackhat, instantly gratifying marketing results in the past, I had to keep reminding myself throughout this process that I was building a content library — a domain reputation — that would not yield immediate results overnight. Building up momentum behind your content takes time, optimizing, and testing to find the right pieces that have sharable results. The good news here is that, unlike blackhat, instantly gratifying methods of growth, you can continue to benefit from any piece of content hosted and shared by your company. Your content could lead to traffic months and even years later. It’s always there, available, and searchable to people looking for insights. Over time, with a lot of careful, consistent effort, your content will continue to positively affect your brand and user acquisition.

Build a following

Building a following is powerful because it leads to customers, and customers lead to money. Just look at any influencer on any social network, be it, Snapchat, Vine, Youtube, or Instagram, and you will see the power that comes with having a following. Although social media is an important tool in building your following, it isn’t the best channel for monetizing your content. Email is where you want to focus your content distribution. People live in their inboxes. Just ask yourself how many times you have checked your inbox today, whether on your phone, or on your laptop — it’s the latest addiction. We have found success in growing our newsletter list almost 5% a week using this tool.

Our strategy is to hold off on “asks” to our followers until we are absolutely confident that the value we add is significant to them. Right now we are simply giving away value. We are more like the fishermen who cast nets, rather than dropping a single, targeted line. Although this leads to more exposure and user registrations in our community, we rarely ask them for things or directly market to them — not yet at least.

Quantity over Quality

Content starts out as a numbers game. Remember the seed analogy? If you wait a week, a month, or a year to plant your crops, it will be a week, a month, or a year later when you can finally harvest. Get seeds planted — get content shipped and distributed. Eventually, you will want to put quality over quantity, but early on you want to test, measure, iterate, and repeat. Once you identify a niche that you can serve with your content, and you build a following around that niche, then you can start to focus on quality over quantity. Until then, get your content out as quickly as possible.

I hope these learnings resonated with you, gave you some ideas that you can execute, and motivated you to find content market fit, harness the power of compounding traffic, plant seeds now, build a following, and focus on quantity over quality early on. Thank you to all of those customers and authors in our community who have been helping us provide the genealogy world with insightful content. We couldn’t do it without you.