s11s

set the channel description: All things content marketing

This was a great case study - the storytelling stood out.

Hi Vignesh. I am a Saas freelance writer. Let me DM you.

Really like chiclet keyboards but if I have to work on a mechanical one then definitely something like: <https://youtube.com/shorts/oaxr5kMpd4c?feature=share|https://youtube.com/shorts/oaxr5kMpd4c?feature=share>

:smiley:

Grown very accustomed to MacBook's regular chiclet keyboard. 

I primarily use two keyboards:

My Dell Lattitude laptop keyboard. I use this as little as possible because the keyboard is a little sensitive.

Second, a TVS keyboard that I can hammer on without a trace of guilt. Solid build. Has a nice response. Not so noisy that my neighbors will hear it. Perfect for typing long-form content.

Planning to upgrade to a TKL keyboard soon.

People! I am interested in companies that specialise in creating top of the funnel content. Similar to what the likes the Deloittes KPMGs etc do - Expert Voice / Trusted Advisor. Mostly looking for Enterprise AI / Platforms / Decision Intelligence Expertise. Any names you suggest will be helpful. Open to connecting to freelancers with this expertise too.

For thought leadership: have the person give you their general angle, with specific bullet points explaining their POV, then build the post around that.

Send them the draft in Google Docs and let them edit it to their heart’s content. If there’s no hard deadline, I wouldn’t stress too much about pushing for publication - let them edit it to oblivion. They’ll eventually push for its publication when they feel ready.

If there _is_ a hard deadline, set a date for publication (and notify them about it), then let them know they can make any changes they like in the doc before that date. The deadline acts as a forcing function for the editing process.

For expert pieces: Try as hard as possible to match your questions to their experience (you can pull that info from LinkedIn, their profiles/bio, their previous work, etc.). Whatever you do, don’t ask boring questions - you’ll have wasted your entire interview. Here’s <https://momentum.io/posts/how-to-triple-your-annual-growth-rate-ft-francoise-brougher-former-coo-at-pinterest/|an example> of something I’ve done.

Give them a bullet point list of questions so they can prep ahead - there’s nothing worse than someone uhm’ing and ah’ing on video trying to think of an answer to a question you’ve asked them.

This is especially important for ‘complex’ questions like “How do you approach your GTM strategy?” They need time to form a coherent answer - and advance questions help them with that. It results in a better, richer experience for your audience.

I usually record the interview via Zoom, run it through Rev to get a transcript, then craft the post based on that. More context <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shehuphd_contentmarketingtips-contentmarketing-interviewtips-activity-6891498977569722368-1wrm|here>.

Sometimes you might need two or three different subject matter experts (SMEs) to fully collect the info you need. Fill in the rest of the information gaps with online research.

I’ll let another expert handle the technical content part - but I highly recommend including lots of diagrams, code blocks, or screenshots for those.

Thanks <@U02VDMMC2Q5> for explaining it all in detail! That was really, really helpful.

Interesting resource on Nerdwallet’s content game which I so totally admire. Do check it out.
<https://blakespeare.notion.site/Nerdwallet-Growth-Playbook-faa8aafcfb45409cb0dc3ea7f1125f9b>

few pointers:
• don't think how many blogs, think how many keywords
• pick 2-3 top priority related keywords and produce kickass content on it for atleast 3 months before you go beyond
• how many to publish? let me answer it this way: how quickly can you produce blogs which are high quality, unique and useful? now answer how many of these can you distribute and do a good enough job? 
• the limiting function is not number of blogs but number of quality blogs and your distribution muscle.
• no advice is good advice here, just get started, measure everything like a maniac, optimize, iterate.

btw, traditional advice here is
• 1-2 blogs/week
• atleast 1000 words

<@U02VCBNPLSH> As Aniruddh suggested, write 2 blogs/week. I must say that:
• Start with low-hanging fruits. Pick keywords that have high volume and low KD that help you rank easily and bring some initial traffic.
• Write listicles so that you can cover multiple keywords at a time.
• Initially, focus on BoFU content so that it brings revenue along with traffic.

<@U02VCBNPLSH> both Aniruddh and Darshan already dropped some value bombs and their advices are spot on. Here is my 2cents:                        1.) Check  Animalz blog and grow and convert blog. these two will change how you see content. 2.) Publish as many as you can ( provided you have a proper distribution process). There is a Guy on LI, Josh Spilker from friday app. He claims he published 50 articles and it worked for him. I haven't tested that myself but the guy is legit. 3.) Like Darshan said, focus on BoFU at the beginning. 4.) Look up "product led" content. It's quite effective. Ahref and hotjar blog are great examples.

I use a miro board to breakdown themes, which then get distilled into specific ideas and then specific ideas deserve specific form (ebook/whitepaper/blog) etc.

The planning for time of creation/publishing happens only at the end.

PS: I know it’s not a resource per se but hope this helps. Happy to help you plan it out.

Hey! Thank you. I'm doing this but just wanted to know if there's a resource for framework.

Can share a format I got from a client. Personally love the detail to it. 

I did come across a content planning framework which is pretty comprehensive. May help you for this too.

Hey! Thank you for sending that. I can definitely pick up a few elements from there.

Long-Term Content Planning Worksheet.xlsx

Courtesy Falguni: <https://s11s.slack.com/files/U030M1LS1L2/F0311UCQ3QT/long-term_content_planning_worksheet.xlsx>

45-60 days since the first email has been sent inviting customer for a case study

Depends on how long it takes to actually do the case study interview. The write up itself is fairly straightforward once you have a structure.

Story
Need
Strategy
Implementation
Results
Testimonial

We have turned around a few in 2-3 weeks.

What we did was to draft a case study with CS teams, refine it and share with customers/or walk them through it on a call, get live edits and ship it.

Not the best way to do it, but is fast. And customers like it since it is less of an overhead for them.

Depends on how quickly your product gives tangible results + TA (MSME, Enterprise, SMBs, etc.). Our highest to-date has been 3/quarter. We approach our enterprise clientele after 2/3 quarters from date of onboarding, enough time to build customer champions + a few weeks for legal and marketing approval.

6-8 weeks, IMO across 5 companies.

These are for existing customer who are already successful with the product. For new ones, it's way longer.

It is a kind of PR campaign to get backlinks from high authority websites to your website.
 Basically helps in:
1. increase the authority of your website which inturn helps Google trust your webiste more.
2. When Google trusts your website more, it helps your content to rank.

hey interested in figuring our PR link building

Are you talking about Wire services where you pay and circulate a press release that includes your company logo and upto 5 backlinks? Tried it but needs to be a constant part of your PR and SEO efforts across the year to feature on the top. Just 1-2 publications are usually good and others unknown in such packages. It is good only when you achieve 2000-3000 mentions and links as few only would show up. It can be okay as a part of your PR though for guaranteed coverage.

Absolutely <@U02V979LY03>, the business wire roll outs are not for India market. Again Indian media now a days give backlinks on an advertorial basis. Building a constant PR effort is the best practice.  

Yeah Business Wire fron Berkshire Hathaway has an india version - PR newswire . Seems many others have come in this year. It has become a cluttered space and one needs to find someone who aggregates good publications only to do this well.

This is a pretty insightful thread. I am quite new to link building. So i too had a few queries on this topic. Would be great to have your inputs on these.
 
1) Does link building include only getting high quality back links from news publications? 
2) Do guest blogs or back links from other blogs count? If yes, would love to have your suggestions on how one can maximize the chance of getting published as a guest blogger on other high traffic blog sites, especially as a newbie. 
3) There are a lot of paid backlink providers online. Any idea on how they work and how effective they are?

Aren't PR backlinks no-follow? I thought this tactic was blocked out by Google?

<@U02VDPB8CGH>, PRs bring in mostly no-follow links which Google counts as _hints_, and they do help pages rank in top SERP positions provided the PR effort is constant, like <@U030M4H0E30> mentioned. It's a chance game considering only a few publications that pick the story up might be good. It's not really blocked out by Google.

I've not done PR link building myself but have spoken to tens of PR agencies based in India and the US. They confirmed on the links being mostly or completely no-follows, no matter what package you pick.

Nope. Wire distribution doesn't help in authority link building efforts. Google knows this too well. However a story carried (Not picked up) out by a website (As a result of wire distribution) will have weightage. Link building (On a page level) is a relative game. You do one better than your competition ranking for the topic, you increase your chances. Doesn't matter if it's a no follow link, it always adds value. Take a look at companies selling research reports. Their only building strategy is wire distribution and it works for them. In fact the picked up article ranks better than their website page in most cases. Because their competitors are also doing the same thing. Can't say the same for other industries where competition is intense: 

Check out this guy to learn more about CRO <https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedrocort%C3%A9s/>

A friend and old colleague of mine has this great repository of SaaS hooks - maybe there’s something for you there :) 

<https://saashook.co/|https://saashook.co/>

Wow, thanks for mentioning SaaSHook, <@U02UM0SR45Q>! Got so many signups since yesterday :star-struck:

Power of content :smiling_face_with_3_hearts:
<https://twitter.com/shafiquegajdhar/status/1488771861421096960?s=12>

Image from iOS (6).jpg

a friend had shared this earlier, might be helpful

Hi Mayank,
I use <http://copy.ai|copy.ai> to brainstorm with myself and then write on good ol' Word (work) or gdoc (fun/freelance). I sometimes run my text through Hemingway Editor, but not always. I don't like Grammarly but use their Chrome extension. Keywords generally from SEO team or I check on Google Planner.

This is pretty comprehensive, thanks Vishakha. I love Hemingway.

I’d do the following:
1. Create a great landing page and have quotes/insights from the whitepaper developed into sections on the landing page 
2. Having the founder’s or a key thought leader’s quote + picture also adds credibility 
3. Turn each sub theme from the whitepaper into an infographic/scrollable LinkedIn carousal and run ads 
4. Do demand-gen on LinkedIn with native forms on the platform 
5. For further amplification, try and link the whitepaper in your newsletters, emails and comms 
6. If you do all this, might as well do some ppc ads on Google with medium-low intent keywords that are more industry education focussed. 
7. Send it one on one to key clients/networkers and write a cover note (2-3 lines) on why it’s life changing. Share it personally over whatsapp, email and stuff. 
8. Put a pop up on the website/relevant pages with a clear value prop on why people should download it 
9. Create a short video that drives the whitepaper’s point but from your audience’s perspective and end the video with whitepaper download CTA
10. If you’ve access to communities such as this is one for marketers, see if you can float it there. (A whitepaper on growth marketing strategies would work super well in this group)
Pro tip: focus more on reads and reach and less on leads. Leads will come if people love and share your content :slightly_smiling_face:

11. Reach out to the media publications which cover the space, and offer them an exclusive pre launch. 

Any contact for media publications you guys have worked before with?

11/12 - Content Syndication (11, if that's what Ketan implied, otherwise 12)

<@U030PV0TCCF> did you get the white-paper done in-house or took help from any agencies?

Hi <@U030PV0TCCF> - it depends on the industry vertical you're writing for. 

<@U0318JZUESX> no I did not mean pure play content syndication. 

check out paperflite or gtmbuddy (<@U02UUCE1ASD>)

we’ve reached a stage where there’s so much content that sales teams find gsheets too cumbersome to browse and slack takes too much time to search

Folder and an excel sheet with all type of collaterals and their links mapped out. Make sure all docs/sheets/pdfs have edit access org wide and no restricted access. Apps such as <https://www.highspot.com/|Highspot> can be synced with Salesforce and used too.

<@U02U94HSBV4> Thanks for the helpful info.

As a free of cost solution, I have found Airtable + URL shorteners to be the best.
Each content van have multiple columns (like industry, stage of funnel, last modified, and many more) and the URL can be the short URL. You can track clicks as well.

Use <#C0318NH5G3C|> to post this. And please delete it from here

Irrespective of the work, will always recommend a second larger display. So easy on the eyes + also keeps distractions on another screen

Hey&lt;

A Chromebook is all the power that’s needed to get the job done (if one is just writing and save stuff).

I do have an elaborate setup, [monitor on an arm, custom mechanical keyboards, and some RGB coz why not. lol]— set up is powered by an M1 pro laptop.

It just feels good overall to work on this setup.  That’s it, there’s no other reason.  And I’d like to believe I’m more productive. lol.

Disclosure: I’m not a content marketer, my role is more of a growth PM.  Sometimes I also push some code (alternate weekends or so).

<@U02UY3EPQDA>, I wanted to feel less guilty about an elaborate setup despite not necessarily needing it, so this helps. Thanks for sharing :relaxed:

For any nature of work these days, I'd prefer to go with a sit and stand desk, a good ergonomic chair, an external monitor and a decent system. Somehow I'm more comfortable on a high-end windows PC  than a Mac (use both).

Yes, this is the essence of ‘personal branding’ — breaking down a problem in different ways each day to help a specific audience understand and buy into the solution (and the better future you’re painting for them).

In short: Know, Do, Share — ad infinitum.

And then asking people to buy. It’s not just enough to post every day — once you’ve built up an engaged and eager audience, don’t forget to actually send them to your course, product, or service landing page to buy.

You have to ask for the sale.

Question 2: here's how to think about efficient content creation: <https://blog.austinlawrence.com/blog/how-to-supercharge-your-sales-pipeline-with-content>

Since you're hiring a freelancer I would suggest:
• Scout for someone who's had background in the same/similar domains. That will make things more easy. 
• Judge them on - past work, timeliness, content not requiring grammatical edits, general flow of the pieces they have written so far. Goes without saying you'll have to work with them on a couple of blogs/articles to get a sense else rely on gut or portfolio.
• In my experience, quality freelancers charge on per article basis and decide on pricing basis the depth of articles. The ones pricing on per word basis won't make the cut for your requirement. You can work with them for a couple of articles and then increase the scope. 

This is helpful. Would you have some freelancers in your network whom I can talk more to understand?

<@U031XJT84RY> What’s your niche? Might know a few people.

you can check <http://www.thewiseidiot.in|www.thewiseidiot.in> for writers.

if you include outside (stripe/algolia comes to mind)

100ms.live (I work here, but it's not a self-promotion. Our sign-ups are driven by our docs, so we know :) )

This is hands down my favorite <https://spiti.xyz/|Spiti: Your team's private YouTube>

Cometchat is WOW. thanks for sharing <@U02VCFWDZ5J>

Complicated question :smile: Some open-ended thoughts without any numbers.

Honestly very hard to isolate SEO's true impact vs other channels. In modern time, SEO and organic discoverability is good for  industries which yield themselves very well to long-tail discovery. So products and use cases which have a very wide variety of use cases and entry points, so typically horizontal products. Not to say it is not useful for others.

SEO should be seen as a brand marketing effort and not as a lead gen channel in my view. What drives people to your content is their willingness to learn about something, which is a great opportunity to help them learn without being too salesy. This is why you see many companies moving to a hub-and-spoke approach aka pillar page approach in SEO.

I agree — SEO today now has to be more of a brand marketing approach (than a typical lead-gen mindset).  I don’t know (or rather I’m curious to know) if the SEO as a lead-gen channel has now reached its diminishing returns wala phase tbh.

Still doing SEO for leads in 2022.
Using data to build programmatic SEO pages.

This work is independent of content team. Some content is still written to rank but a lot of of it is SEO independent.

30% of inbound leads came from SEO last month.
Trying to push this up to 40% for 2022.


 Actually though, we are building more content for Seo in 2022 as well. We have 3 separate content repositories planned for SEO.

I missed the effort Vs returns bit-
In terms of generating revenue, it's great. Most of cost is in resources(engineers, designers, marketers) which are cheap in India. So the CAC is almost nothing.
And we're closing deals from these leads, so there's a lot of impetus to actually ramp it up even more.


Payback time is difficult to quantify but the work we do typically starts displaying traffic increase within 15-30 days.
Sometime we make mistakes, and that actually cuts down the traffic. This happens within a week. 

So assuming I take the result of work =increase in traffic= leads from increased traffic= deals won from leads from increased traffic.

This process will take around 2.5months.

But of course, we then continue to get increased traffic and leads. It's not a one time thing.

<@U02VB8K88CT> would love to catchup with you, I am new to everything marketing, i have plans to something simialar to what you mentioned, would be nice to grab some learnings :slightly_smiling_face:

<@U02VB8K88CT> even I am curious, how can SEO be content independent, interested to understand same from your experience and also learn more about the ideal approach that we can take up.

<@U031PPF9LTG> I said Content that is SEO independent by which I meant content that is not written to rank.

Nowhere did I say SEO that is content independent.

Programmatic SEO starts with having data. eg <http://shiksha.com|shiksha.com> has data curated on colleges and they generate pages for each college based on that data. 

<@U030SDYNX7V> You can dm me or find me on LinkedIn

<@U02UY3EPQDA> there is a channel called <#C02V6F2JYSH|> and its feeling lonely and left alone

<@U030SDYNX7V> maybe for a reason! :stuck_out_tongue:

maybe its just me, but this is borderline <#C0318NH5G3C|>

Yes. Please put it in <#C0318NH5G3C|> <@U02VDMMC2Q5> and delete from here.

We used Pepper Content to get our landing page copy written.

Took 2-3 revisions since we were ourselves not clear on the TG.

Quality is good if you can provide detailed instructions.

There are others also - WittyPen, SoftwareSuggest, Narrato (I've never used the content services from these though.)

Such content agencies are good for basic  instructional and informative pieces if you can provide them with clear pointers. They aren't helpful for insightful content pieces. 

Even though they claim to have SMEs, the content is basic and the writing style is mundane. 

However, they are reasonable and have a good TAT. You can test them with a few blogs before signing up for a big project.

Agree with Shivani. My experience has been the same with Peppercontent. They wouldn't be much helpful in writing insightful, high-quality articles.

I know an agency which is really good with content but charges high…. Based out of India. Let me know if you need a connect

Hi <@U030ZR9D0FK>, we've onboarded Pepper 2 months back and have had a good experience with them so-far. However, not using them for BOFU content, only for mass ones

For all high value content, we're still keeping it in-house

<@U030PQRLHEH> Yeah, that's what I also felt after glancing through the samples they've shared so far.

Initially we were thinking having product mentioned in url / sitemap structure always mention the product or use meta description but it doesn't seem practical

Create a new segment in Google Analytics. You can group your pages, apply different conditions &amp; sequences.

<@U02UZ4T10PQ> yes GTM data layer is the best way to do it. You can import all your wordpress categories, authors and tags into GA for analytics. Creating segments in GA is not a sustainable way to do it (+it is very manual, you would need to do it everytime you add/update pages and human errors can creep in).

1. you simply install GTM in your wordpress instance
2. go to GTM, create variables using datalayer for whatever you want to track (category, tag, author)
3. within GTM, configure your GA tag to receive this info from the data layer variables you created in the above step.
4. create custom dimensions in GA from these GTM events
i found a <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc_XAIG2oMA|very good video> explaining this step-by-step

Sending it to the DL is clever. Thank you for sharing the video.

yup, another reason to love GTM :slightly_smiling_face:

As an analytics geek, I'm definitely not doing justice to GTM.

LI 1.png

LI2.png

try adding a https:// before the website address

My current fave tools for SEO/content are: search console, screaming frog, semrush and buzzsumo. You could also look at online PR groups like media movements, HARO, etc for link building.

thanks <@U031KD0PNTX>
• do you suggest having an in house seo expert 
• or suggest outsource to seo agency + analytics tool?

I have not had a good experience with a SEO agency yet, so am biased against them. Smart in-house folks are worth it with their long term view and context around the product, market and content opportunities.

An in-house seo expert will be a better option. They can help with long term strategy, website content, and become the POC for writing agency.

Outsourcing is great but only if your POC from the team has enough bandwidth to constantly engage with the agency.

SEO tools: Ahrefs is good.

Hey,

If you want writers, I can share the agency name.

For SEO tool: I am liking Ahrefs, it is pretty much same as Semrush, just cheaper.
 extensions like  keywords everywhere is useful but for overall strategy, you must use Ahrefs or something similar which has multiple options

<http://Growth.cx|Growth.cx> - i got a website done from them. They are a creative bunch

:star-struck:  This is spot on in a way that for B2B, PLG takes the purchase decision away from ‘decision makers’ and puts it back into actual ‘users’ and hence cutting out the ‘selling’ involved.  True PLG is enabled at a product architecture level.  So, all companies that do good PLGs are ‘user-centric’ — meaning their architecture allows ‘users’ to be part of different spaces. (example: I can be part of different Notion accounts as a user. And also have a paid space for my personal use independently).  And note that, almost always, PLG products are billed per seat — as the value is delivered to each user of the product.

In the B2B SaaS world, PLG is still mostly confused with bottom-up (aka Self-serve), freemium, referrals programs, etc.  But these are pre-cursors of a PLG product.  Not PLG itself.

For example: With Freemium the value is delivered before the actual ‘sale’!  Well, even free trial does the same thing but with a deadline attached - this doesn’t make a product PLG.

The onus of PLG is more on the ‘product’ camp than demand-gen or any other marketing functions.

PLG is a fad :slightly_smiling_face: It doesn’t need to apply to all SaaS.  One way to see if it applies to your SaaS is to see if value derived is for the _business itself (ex: bottom line)_ or _business professionals (ex: productivity)_.  If it’s later, then you can PLG the shit of that product.  *But ALL pre-cursors (above) applies to all SaaS irrespective!*

Lastly, all SaaS companies that have ever contacted me saying we want to do PLG only in essence wanted to do ‘bottom-up’ (with an objective where users can sign up and purchase without talking to a sales person).

<@U02UY3EPQDA> mechanical keyboard typing

…with all it’s THOCC

(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mL1ARXX0ow>)

Just the top of my head: 

• Announce removal of pay disparities arising from gender issues
• Announce a mom friendly, maternity leave policy 
• Educate men on inclusivity
• Allow them to finish sentences in the meetings
Hope this helps! 

What <@U030KV8R8RL> said. The announcement should follow a tangible action or change in your workplace, not just be another forgettable piece of content to mark the calendar.

<@U030KV8R8RL> the last one got me :joy: It's so true it hurts