Founders share their content marketing approaches

If you want to build and grow your own online business, a good place to start is by growing an audience. And to that end, content marketing is key.

Odds are that your first couple business ideas are going to fall through or require some pivoting. These ups and downs are a little easier to deal with, both psychologically and financially, if you've got an existing audience or a steady flow of incoming traffic to catch your fall.

Trouble is, "content marketing" is a broad subject! Different founders go about it in different ways based on their skillsets and circumstances.

So I reached out to a number of successful indie hackers to learn about the approaches they've found effective. Check out their answers below.

👤 Manuel Frigerio of ReferralHero ($18,000/mo)

In absolute terms, we've found content marketing to be the most effective growth strategy for us. We constantly write on our blog and on others, especially evergreen pieces that create a long tail of searches on search engines, which is good for SEO juice. This strategy has paid off really well, and in a relatively short space of time. After just six months, we rank in the top three results for competitive keywords like "viral waiting list" and "growth hacking waiting list".

Now that we have a bit more cash, we employ a freelance copywriter who writes an average of 2-3 long pieces a month, plus my co-founder and I write one or two a month. Some of our articles, like The Definitive Product Launch Checklist or Real Life Marketing Strategy Examples still drive thousands of visits every month. My small advice for content marketing is: start writing from the beginning, because at some point you will see the results.

👤 Thiago Obaid of Proposeful ($400/mo)

The Proposeful blog (where we write about sales, prospecting, and negotiation) drives most of our traffic. We are ranked number one for most relevant keywords in Brazil and, with the recently launched English version, will soon be in most countries.

We send all these posts out on our mailing list, which averages a 30% open rate and a 15% click rate, and eventually converts some clients.

👤 Yaphi Berhanu of Simple Steps Code ($650/mo)

I've guest posted on various sites. I started with the ones that were looking for submissions. Sitepoint turned out to be an awesome pick because their editors are fantastic people and the articles get plenty of visibility and SEO. To get the first post approved, I submitted a pitch following their guidelines, got a friendly rejection, tried again with a new set of topics, and succeeded. It was generally a similar story for the other sites I pitched, which were also wonderful to work with.

Current traffic is around 2,000 to 4,000 visitors per month, and most of it has come from guest posting. Some has come from SEO too, but that was not through anything intentional I did besides writing some posts. The email signup rate is around 10%, so that means 200 to 400 new email subscribers per month.

👤 Zach Shefska of Fundraising Report Card ($15,000/mo)

I began writing content on fundraising analytics and metrics. I simply wrote about what I was learning — how to calculate donor retention for example. I don't like to think that I got lucky, but one of those articles I wrote got reposted on an industry group "top ten" list, and that led to a huge spike in traffic. I immediately logged into the email marketing automation program that I use (Drip) and created a simple call to action widget to convert some of the traffic to become blog subscribers.

Inbound marketing efforts are definitely a primary focus. Blog posts are great, but so are infographics, cheat sheets, webinars, videos, podcasts, etc. Fundraising metrics and analytics is a relatively new marketplace, especially for smaller organizations. That means that a lot of our marketing efforts are spent on education — we need to help develop the marketplace before we can capture it. A focus on inbound marketing helps accomplish that.

We've also seen a steady increase in organic search traffic, which is always nice!

👤 Aleksey Weyman of Millennial Moderator ($500/mo)

Never having grown a blog before, I spent the majority of my time researching methods and strategies for generating organic traffic from other bloggers who have had success. SEO became increasingly important, but also the importance of just having high-quality content.

We started implementing various giveaways and contests on social media that involved following our accounts, or signing up for our mailing list in exchange for a free e-book or something similar. We also branched out to other social platforms for exposure such as Pinterest and Medium, both of which we still use to this day. As we continued to add third-party accounts and consistent posting cycle to our content marketing plan, we began to see an increase in monthly readers.

Some of our most effective methods for drawing traffic to our site have been our mailing list and social media referrals, where we combine organic engagement (commenting on people's posts) with automated content using platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

My advice for anyone trying to attract users is to start by pushing your content through as many channels as you can, then evaluate which channels are the most effective and doubling efforts on using those.

👤 Daniella Mancini of Scribly.io ($18,000/mo)

I feel very strongly that, as a content company, I need to have a shit hot content section of the site. Organic traffic is definitely where I want to focus my marketing investment, so I'm in the process of building out the blog section of the Scribly site into a Knowledge Hub, offering copywriting and content marketing lessons.

I've just started publishing twice weekly, and have now decided to use LinkedIn and Twitter as my distribution channels for the time being.

👤 Alexandru Paduraru of Creative Tim ($106,000/mo)

Most of our marketing strategies have been submitting our content to different communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, Designer News, Hacker News, etc. (Some important subreddits that work well in our area include /r/web_design, /r/html5, /r/frontend, and /r/webdev.)

We've also paid between $100-200 for newsletter campaigns a couple of times. The campaigns were not so good, and the ROI matched the amount that we invested. (Maybe it was just our case that wasn't profitable and it works better for others.) Then we paid $400 for Get Shit Done Kit PRO to appear in the Sidebar.io newsletter, a curated list of the 5 best design links made by Sacha Greif. This was a very rewarding newsletter for us, generating about $1,500 in sales. Then we purchased the "Review + Newsletter" package ($550) from eWebDesign. There were about 5,000 users who participated in the giveaway, and the total sales amounted to $2,800.

👤 John Wheeler of Old Geek Jobs ($1,000/mo)

Revenue is largely driven by my blog posts. The plan going forward is to keep posting around two themes: You're never too old, and you don't need a cofounder to succeed. My other business gives me the credibility to say that, and I want to make a second and better example with Old Geek Jobs.

The best traffic source for this content has been Hacker News. I've made the HN front page three times: first with a direct link to my site followed up by two Medium posts (here and here).

👤 Puneet Sahalot of PowerPack for Beaver Builder ($22,000/mo)

To maintain visibility and gain more users, we started writing content about Beaver Builder, such as how-tos, tips, in-depth tutorials, etc.

We also started a "Friday Freebie" series as an effort to give back to the Beaver Builder community by providing free Beaver Builder templates. These efforts helped us increase website traffic by 30% in the first month. Within the first three months revenue ranged from $8,000–$9,000.

👤 Dom Wells of Human Proof Designs ($90,000/mo)

Good content is a huge part of what we do. We focus on teaching affiliate marketing, so that attracts an audience to us, and many of them end up hiring us for our services. We've started to sell courses, which are taking time to get traction, but content marketing is a large part of this.

Initially we focused on SEO, and while we still do this, we also do content that is designed for an existing audience, so not every post we create is with the aim of ranking on Google. Sometimes your audience just needs to read something, regardless of whether or not there are people searching for it.

Want to see more round tables?

I'll be aggregating knowledge from from successful indie hackers once a week on all sorts of topics, like:

• how they found their first customers
• their strategies for growing successful social media accounts
• how they came up with their business ideas
• etc.

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(Photo credit: Miguel Comancho)