How I changed my content marketing strategy to make it not suck anymore

👋 hey there. Over the last few months, I feel like I've made lots of improvements to my content marketing game. Thought I would share what I did to change things up and what it is working for me:

Spending time in communities and seeing what questions people are asking over and over again
I used to think of things I thought were an interesting blog topic, and then spend anywhere between a couple of hours and a day in total drafting it. But I didn't really have any idea if it was interesting to anyone else. So I ended up spending a lot of time drafting blog posts that no one cared about. Sort of like when working on a product I guess - make sure you are writing something people want.

Start with your MVC (minimum viable content)
As mentioned above, I always used to default to a full-on blog post that could take hours. Instead, post a smaller piece of content: a tweet, a post in a Slack group, a comment on Indie Hackers, etc.

This post I am writing now is an example. If it looks like people are getting value from this post, I might write a longer-form version and post it to our blog, or put it on Medium, and maybe include it in our newsletter.

Making content intertwined/a feature of our product
I treated content as separate from our product. But, we found a way to intertwine them a bit more.

Specifically, our product has a checklist/to-do feature. So we've been turning our content into easy to follow checklists or reading lists. We post a larger content piece and have a button that lets users quickly add the checklist to their Taskable account. This makes it easy to not try and hard sell what you are working on. Instead you show prospective users a bit of value first.

Keep sharing it
I used to write content, post it on social, maybe include it in the newsletter, and then forget about it.

But most times content is evergreen, so keep sharing it when it's relevant.

The nice thing is if you are writing content that people really want, you'll come across people asking questions about it a lot. Then you quickly share your insights, have a discussion about it, link to a longer post about it etc.