Content Marketing Tips from Experts at First Round Capital and A16Z
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Their breathless hypey, smarmy tone yet content-free nature of their posts makes them come off as profoundly silly and unserious. They sound like something a Silcon Valley HBO writers room would reject as too cliched.
Given that they often make the front page of HN perhaps my opinion is an outlier, granted.
I think we all want more women in tech but Jesus, their arrogance is cringe worthy.
But it's really too bad you are commenting on the women in tech thing as if that's the point, or that it's a favor to us (when we earned our jobs through expertise and competence and results).
I am a content producer. I am both a blogger and someone who gets paid to produce content. So, I was hoping for something meaty to enhance my work.
I have read most of the way through this and, so far, the only solid tips are things I already know: Use bullet points, subheaders, etc to make written content more scannable, accessible and digestible.
They talk a lot about personal process. I am usually very interested in things like that, but I don't think that fits the title of the piece and I am finding it surprisingly yawn worthy and irrelevant. I was looking for actionable advice on content marketing and I don't feel I am seeing much of that.
They also talk a lot about how hit or miss their work feels to them, how challenging it is to measure its effectiveness and that they don't really know how to do that for sure, etc. The impression that gives me personally is that they don't really know what they are doing.
Which seems like it can't be right because they have had prestigious positions etc. But, I look for meaningful metrics and they talk a lot about going with their gut or just having a sense of something. Your job is communicating information and this artsy, fartsy hand wavy gut intuition is the best thing you can say?
Okay, great. So you are telling me you are some great artist with amazing good taste. This in no way whatsoever tells me how to develop the same skill.
So, color me unimpressed.
As a professional in the field, do you happen to have any recommendations on sources that do have actionable advice? It's an area I love to learn more about but haven't done enough work in it to suss out the good sources from the fluff pieces.
Most of it is specific to their platform. It is intended for their clients and their writers. But I work for them and I learn a lot from working for them and I have viewed a number of their videos at various times.
That is all that readily comes to mind that I can easily direct you to. I hash a lot of stuff out related to blog development with my sons. But that isn't some readily curated set of info. We share links via email and we talk about things, some of it from personal observation, some of it from research we know about.
So, for example, I like reading articles about Jeph Jacques, the highest grossing web comic artist on the planet (or was at one time) and, at one time, I read through all the footnotes on his main comic Questionable Content. People buy merchandise because of stuff in his comics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15470216
Best.
As devs we have a tremendous advantage in that we can build tools as a form of "content engineering" that easily have 10 to a 100x the impact of just writing articles.
An article that gives advice and a tool that actually helps you put that advice into practice while seemingly related - in terms of execution are in wildly different categories in people's heads.
I'm deep in the mix of this right now and the one tool we have on our site [1] has about double the traffic of our dozen (well written, authoritative, 1500+ word) blog posts combined [2].
I always hear from other developers that they aren't good at marketing. I'm telling you - this is like a freaking marketing superpower.
[For example, in this case I asked and edited Mikeal Rogers (who was involved with Node then) to speak more broadly about a broader shift in identity for developers and open source (i.e., the bigger trends): https://www.wired.com/2013/03/github/]
But if you have a larger mission. More than growth. Priming humans for a multi-planetary future for example. Then you need to think deeply about design and innovation. Not just for the messaging, but also the channel you will be delivering upon.
It's like the difference between a marketer who reads an article in Wired and thinks "we need to get our brand on VR". Then they assign a budget, hire an agency to make some thing fast and drop it. Adding another bit of litter to the already noisy and crowded airwaves.
Versus some thing like LEGO or IKEA's experiences that allow you to virtually place new products in your living room and purchase on the spot. Serving as an incremental move to a place where consumers can customize designs and even 3D print products.
- a lot of episodes have too many people. It makes it really difficult (for me) to follow the discussion while constantly trying to distinguish different voices from one another.
- a lot of episodes seem „jump cutted“. Question - answer - question - answer. There really is no conversation coming up (which make Podcasts attractive) and I immediately press next.
100% agreed, its tough to follow who is saying what, and especially difficult to get what each part of differing views is really saying.
And it's ironic that they mentioned the toxic culture of HN and there are some pretty negative comments here.
Though I would like to know if there are any free tools that let you know the point in the page where someone dropped off, or if those are all premium products.