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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

One assumption that goes more or less unchallenged is that "content marketing" == "writing blog posts". It's what they are really good at and what they've optimized and hired for.

However, for developers, I think there is a much easier path in the form of building online tools and mini experiences that just destroy "blogging" in terms of ROI and traffic generation.

This is things like WPEngine's speed test, Site Checker's, Buffer's Pablo Image tool, ForAGoodStrftime.com, etc. purposeful, useful tools that people love to share as they are genuinely helpful.

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Definitely agree with this. I'm surprised so many companies still bother to produce content in the form of crappy articles on beat the horse to death topics.

It feels like having a blog is a must-have to be a legit company these days so a lot of companies hire someone to churn out $30 articles just to have one.

I definitely think companies need to reimagine content. First by moving away from the incredibly boring blog format.

Examples:

Beautifully designed beginner SEO guide (almost feels like a choose your adventure book): https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Interactive visualizations: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/20...

Collection of email templates: http://www.artofemails.com/sales-follow-up

>>> First by moving away from the incredibly boring blog format.

There is nothing wrong with the blog format per se. The problem is, as you correctly identified, crappy articles.

What your examples have in common is that they provide value to the user. That's the key no matter what's the medium you are using to do so. There's nothing wrong with the blog format that prevents you from providing value.

But blogs do tend towards presentism, by virtue of how they present their information... and those in the know are well aware of how easy it is to set up a blog, making the medium a little contemptible compared to a well-done "roll-your-own" webpage.

Disclaimer -- I work at Moz

Another great resource on, and as, content marketing similar in depth to the aforementioned Beginner's Guide to SEO:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-content-marketing

One company whose content I really admire is HelpScout.net

They do incredible stuff, especially with their design and presentation. The content itself isn't as compelling as, say, Priceonomics, but it is still very, very good.

I'm a big fan of the Helpscout content. It's an almost guaranteed click from me every time they send an email.

Building such tools and making them successful is not at all easy. People assume they'll just throw some code and make it open source and this will bring loads of traffic.

Unfortunately things don't work this way - even a free tool needs to be marketed, and if marketing is your weakness this is not an easy task.

Full 100% agreement that even a free tool needs to be marketed, but if we're comparing apples to apples, so does a blog article.

My experience has been that it's much much easier to market a free mini-service than it is to get somebody to pay attention to a blog article as it's just a better "frame" to put the content in.

As opposed to "talking at people" marketing, I just really like the tool creation approach as it feels much more like "helping people" marketing.

Totally agree. You don't even need to invest in building engineered "tools." You can simply build guides, wikis, etc. that are "content tools."

In fact, building evergreen resources like that can be incredibly powerful because it doesn't necessarily have a date stamp on it, and can build quite a lot of backlinks as a definitive resource for something.

Case in point, Google for "beginners guide to SEO" and see how high Moz ranks. Rand and the Moz team get content marketing, and SEO-related terms are some of the hardest out there to rank for. Now go look at how they organize/structure that content and what they are actually writing about. It is largely evergreen.

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

This is a good point though I hear that written content is king from a long tail SEO standpoint.

We've done a few of these "tools" at Open Listings and haven't had much luck with them in terms of SEO but the initial mini-launch traffic can be nice and we've been able to use them to introduce our main offering to new audiences. Shitty Listings helped us find an audience in the small-time real estate investment community for instance [0]. The advice I'd give from our experience with these mini-launches is to make sure they tie in well with the larger product and make sure not to let these traffic spikes mask underlying problems with retention in your main business. Especially when you're small, it's easy for the whole team to get distracted by shiny launches and getting signups when the real growth opportunities are usually "boring" stuff like tweaking transactional emails.

[0]: http://www.shittylistings.com

Text is king for SEO because search engines have been most strongly optimized for text content. Google is much better at finding high quality written content than it is at finding high quality data visualizations.

BUT, the key insight is that there is a lot more to content marketing than SEO. In fact social channels eclipsed search engines a long time ago for a lot of content marketing programs. And cool apps/images/visualizations/games tend to do better on social than just straight text, no matter how well written.

Well said, and you just inspired me to start thinking about some new ways to look at "content". I feel like I just had an epiphany. Thanks for sharing!

Edit: to expand on this, and idea I've been chewing on for a while, but haven't had time to implement, is to setup a Moodle or Sakai server, and build some interactive course content that relates to our domain, and offer free online courses. Note: Not talking about a MOOC or anything that general. Just a free online class on a specific issue / topic that relates to what we do. The idea is to offer something genuinely valuable tough, not something that's just a thinly disguised sales pitch for our products. Of course we want it to help raise awareness of our name and our products, but I don't think people want to sign up for something that's just pure marketing. I mean, I wouldn't.

Shameless plug: I wrote an article about how simple marketing tools brought more backlinks than blog posts for some marketers.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building-with-tools/

The conclusion was the same: these tools were incredibly easy to build, and each of them got 2-10x more backlinks, shares and leads than equivalent blog posts.

How do you market your online tool: if you build it, will they come?

I believe the movie Field of Dreams existing had the single most detrimental effect amongst app developers and executive producers than any other movie, because they keep thinking if only they build a good app, then the audience will come to them. NOT TRUE.

A more useful mental model is "your website will only get the traffic you drive to it." Substitute app, software, tool, etc. for "website" if necessary.

But this makes the reality more clear: building it is not enough. You must take active, focused marketing action to build an audience or customer base.

That doesn't have to mean running ads, although I would not rule out ads. It can include PR, SEO, events, social media, etc. The point is that if you want a product to succeed, you have to be ready to spend time and money to make it succeed.

Now, it's true that a few special products are so awesome that they take off on their own. But most products don't. And if you happen to build one that does, it certainly won't be hurt by some marketing.

Neil Patel wrote a nice article along those lines you'd probably enjoy: https://www.quicksprout.com/2013/10/14/move-over-content-mar...

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