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13 Comments

How do you do content marketing (early stage)?

We are developing tractific.com and in the meantime we are creating content to drive traffic. We publish an article everyday and post it on multiple subreddits, IH, and Discord. What do/did you do to drive traffic before the launch?
P.S we want to drive traffic because we need people to join the beta. Right now we have 95 people and we opened it 2 weeks ago.

  1. 4

    Agreeing with what has been written before,
    I would suggest taking 'Blogging for Businesses' course by Ahrefs Academy. It's a free all video course and I'm pretty sure you'll get all content marketing answers from there. A few notes from that course;

    • Focus on creating really good & in-depth articles. In most cases, 1 very-good-detailed article once a week is better than a few rather superficial ones. These articles are far more valuable + promoting 1 article is much easier than a couple of articles.
    • Write articles with a purpose. If you are just posting articles, but not turning your readers into customers, you won't get much out of it.
    • Try guest-blogging. But don't stuff your guest-articles with links to your content. Do it with max 1-2 links per article.
    • Do research: What are your competitors posting about? Check their content, you might get post inspiration as well as some lessons from their mistakes.
    • Other than reddit & IH, some slack channels (about product) may be useful for feedback & also gain more users.
  2. 3

    Hi @emiratli248, in my experience, what works is to write a handful of solid pieces of content and then market them extensively.

    So instead of say, publishing one article every day, build a mega-comprehensive article and publish once a week or fortnight. Then, start promoting that. You would perhaps see better reception to that.

    Another thing I would suggest is guest blogging - not plain old guest posts but targeting websites that are already pretty solid in authority and proposing articles where your website can be mentioned.

    This is a website I would recommend: Business2Community.com. You can propose to write an article on the topic like "5 Tools To Increase Website Conversions" - write a super detailed article that includes your website as well. If possible, build links to this article from other guest posts you write.

    Now it's easier to rank these pages on search than it is to rank your own website. So within a month or two, you will start seeing targeted traffic come to your website.

    1. 1

      Thank you! I have never heard of business2community will post there!

  3. 2

    What's worked best for me lately is don't think of content solely as blog posts, and spend more time in communities where your users hang out and discover the questions or headaches you see mentioned over and over again. Then create content that answers those questions and help them solve those headaches. It doesn't even need to be a blog post initially - post things in forums, if they get a lot of traction create more content around it (blog post, tweet storm, post in another community) and share.

    I wrote something about it here

  4. 2

    I'd start with content all about selling the problem you're solving as well as possible solutions. Stuff like, "5 reasons why [target market] struggles with [problem your solving] and how to fix it"

    The goal is to resonate as much as possible with your target market. If you resonate and show how your product is a good solution (without overselling it), you'll find that many relevant people will want to join the beta.

    Make sure you post wherever your market looks for information to drive traffic. If you're selling to marketers then I'd also add LinkedIn, Growthhackers and possibly Zest for distribution.

    1. 1

      I heard zest from you and just signed up but there seems to be a waitlist. Is it worth it?

      1. 2

        It's worth a test. Their audience is made up of marketers.

        You can contribute content here without the wait list, which I think is for a different product of theirs: https://zest.is/contribute-content

  5. 1

    Hi @emiratli248, one format for content that, in my experience, has been quite effective is to tell a story of how a user achieved results.

    For example, for tractific, you could say, "How a software product manager got key insights of his product without relying on a data analyst."
    Or you could say, "I am a data analyst, and now I can do my job 5 times faster. This is how."

    Then, in your article, Tractific can be part of the story.

    @emiratli248, if this was helpful, then I think my website SplashPad (https://getsplashpad.com) will also help you. SplashPad helps you promote your product more effectively by suggesting marketing language that attracts attention and sells. In fact, the suggestions above came straight from SplashPad. Good luck!

  6. 1

    @emiratli248 "We are developing tractific.com" What do you mean? Is your site real & functional? Or is it just a page to gather potential customers for market validation? There isn't a free tier for me to sign up to check it out if it works or how it works.

    1. 1

      We will launch the private beta soon.

  7. 1

    This is a great question @emiratli248!

    I think in the beginning stages it is best to focus on high quality content and building up a solid portfolio of valuable insights for your company and niche. Once you get this ball rolling, you can then begin to create more and more "micro-content" based upon these larger pieces of high quality content. At least that is what I am trying to do with Startup Sanctuary at the moment. Focus on high quality articles in the beginning, and then begin to repurpose some of the insights from these pieces into "micro-content" shortly after.

    Sounds like you are doing all the right things so far. Think of it as a long term strategy, but don’t underestimate the role it plays in kickstarting the growth of your business organically.

    1. 2

      Yeah, my strategy works well actually. We have no product, just a landing page with beta request CTA and we receive 200-250 users visiting the site every day. But some subreddits banned me :D

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