Feedback on a growth strategy we are trying (articles)
In our quest to get users we've decided to write some articles on companies decisions to manufacture local. We have a few reasons for these, let me go through them:
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It will appeal to our audience, and if someone hears about us from another source and ends up browses our site they might encounter and like it, and it will increase our sites trustworthiness/authority.
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It's shareable content, people might send it to other people who are interested in buying locally made goods, which would get traffic to our site.
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Sort of similar to #2, the company might retweet it/post it themselves. We have almost no audience currently, due to me no one at the company being an established authority on our subject. We are hoping that if we write pro-company content, then they will share it themselves and we will piggy back off of their authority.
Here is the article : https://www.buylocalized.com/articles/chemo-beanies-bringing-it-back-to-the-basics/
I would love any feedback on my approach, or the actual content in the article.
Hi there - I like the idea!
Your idea to focus on companies is a good one -- if you tag them on social media, they're likely to promote your content.
What makes that more likely is reaching out to them for comment. Then you can tell them about what you do, and get a quote for them to include in the article, and you can tell them when it's going live and ask them to promote. Worst case, they ignore you and you write what you would've anyway. It's a no-brainer.
I also think you could benefit from a copy editor. There are some small things in the copy that could be cleaned up to improve the readability. At points it feels like it's being written to hit a word count, not convey information (interviews can help with the word count, too, if content thinness is a concern).
A quick note about your point #1: trustworthiness and authority are words often used in association with improving your performance in search engines. Strictly speaking, site traffic is not a ranking factor. That said, links are, all the more reason to reach out to companies and tell them what you're doing.
Thanks for the feedback.
Ya so I did reach out to that companies, 15 companies in total actually, and 2 of them got back to me. I'm hoping that now that I will have a couple articles published I can include them in the outbound email and that that will improve my response rate. I'm wondering about asking them in that initial email if they would retweet/post the article once it's finished, if they like it. I'm not sure how normal that is in the industry, but it would be very good for us because one of the factors in choosing the companies is their social media presence.
That was actually ghost written. I agree with you too, I think the article was okay but not great. The other article that I will release in a couple days is quite a bit better.
Hmm I meant trustworthiness/authority on a broader scale than SEO. I think that the more decent content the site has, the more people will be willing to share content from it, as it makes us more legitimate. This is something I didn't realize when we started, just how import it is to have some authority in the subject, I would have started these articles 3-4 months ago.
When looking at content on how to get users so many of the posts are "well I was a frequent poster in a programming discord, I posted my tool and got 500 signups that day.". I naively assumed that once I started posting stuff at least some people would see it, not 1000's but some. Currently my tweets get ~15 views, and no one has ever clicked on one or the corresponding post on medium.
That Chemo Beanies article got posted in a daily online digest, but still has only been read 12 times. That highlights to me the importance of it getting shared by the subject company, and that I should make sure it's sort of good SEO-wise. I'm going to more actively request the subject company shares it, research more on SEO and do 5-10 more of these and see where I'm at after that.