This was inspired by (among other things) a thread earlier today about how to launch a beta (where Vaksel said, and I agree, get something out there and start SEOing -- this advice provides a bit of the "how").
I've also chitchatted with a few people here who asked me about this topic. Feel free to chime in if you want me to share what I told you with the group -- I default to Facebook 2004 privacy settings regarding specific advice. ;)
That's like saying marketing is making remarkable products. It is true but incomplete and doesn't tell you anything actionable to get working on today. I'm sort of hoping my blog post said something that was true and non-vacuous.
Right, my point is that making good content may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. If you aren't making interesting content, the other stuff amounts to a rounding error.
There are all sorts of people who will fiddle with tags and whatnot to try to perfectly shape their site because they're scared/lazy to not make good content. But there is nothing that has a higher ROI on time than making interesting content. Sure, try to make interesting content around the long tail terms that you can optimize for, but at the end of the day, you have to make interesting content.
A webshop selling airline tickets won't rank better if you add "interesting content", thats just not the way it works.
What? Yes it will. More recent links from people will give it more page rank score. If it's a new algorithm that helps find cheaper tickets and beats out the major competitors, for example, it'll get tons of links really quick from blogs talking about it.
Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5.
"What? Yes it will. More recent links from people will give it more page rank score. If it's a new algorithm that helps find cheaper tickets and beats out the major competitors, for example, it'll get tons of links really quick from blogs talking about it."
Right..so if e-commerce businesses just hired smart people to build algorithms and hope for viral effects they will rank high. You make it sound so easy.. unfortunately I would say this is unrealistic in most cases. In a realistic world you have to admit that it is very hard for businesses in saturated markets to just add "interesting content". Having a budget for online marketing, including seo, adds measurable ways to achieve sales. Spending a fortune on technology might be out of proportion compared to your business size. Having a sale, good customer service, coupon codes will give the same kind of buzz in the blog scene around your product. It is still part of the puzzle and you need more than one part to solve the puzzle.
"I don't think you get how this works."
Then tell me whats wrong with my statement about the appstore. Just telling someone he doesn't get it has no added value. You can make your statement more useful by, for example, adding some links to blog posts from people who write about the process of gaining a steady income stream using interesting content.
edit: oops deleted the original post, had to repost it :/
There are more types of websites than just content based websites and sometimes websites who have to compete for the exact same content. The one who understands internet marketing the best will have better rankings than the ones that don't. A webshop selling airline tickets won't rank better if you add "interesting content", thats just not the way it works. Also the "interesting content" might distract people from what they have to do, order tickets. People have to realize that internet marketing is here to stay and it is something you have to think about.
Also your statement about spending time on interesting content gives your the highest ROI is not true. Hollywood and the game industry prove from time to time that they can create hypes and market B quality productions and still make tons of money. This also counts on the internet. Content is evaluated by machines (Google, Bing etc) who determine if it is interesting or not. Doing A/B testing to test which landing page works best is better time spent than spending your time hiring people to create interesting content. Just changing your button can increase sales by over 100%.
Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5.
I think we all want to believe that because building interesting things is so much more fun than marketing them. Unfortunately, I think we're all wrong. White hat SEO and analytics seem like the most amenable techniques to the coder's way of thinking. Avoiding them because a large component of that world (marketing) is out of line with our view of how things should work will only hurt us.
I'm not picking on you here: I think one of the reasons this issue gives us fits is that we think about it in terms of "gaining and sustaining traffic", which is somewhere in the general vicinity of an actual business goal, but not quite there. "Traffic" is not valuable per se and often people optimize for it in ways which are counterproductive for the business. For example, if you get featured on TechCrunch, you will certainly get a lot of "traffic", but what does that get you, really? A few dozen comments saying the design of your front page would look better in blue, your VPS chugs under load, and "didn't Taxi.derm.me already do this last year"? And then tomorrow they'll have forgotten about you.
But people spend insane amounts of time and effort trying to get on TechCrunch, when they could spend that time writing pitches to blogs whose owners will melt to know anyone who is reading them, or writing systems to make pillar content which will be attract qualified, interested prospects for the next decade.
And even for those few (arguably) lucky folks who make it onto Techcrunch, they might assume that if getting a big splash "gains" traffic then subsequent big splashes are needed to "sustain" it, throwing an increasing amount of resources to further pessimize their business to fit the preferences of a narrow, fickle audience who does not spend money on the stuff they have to sell.
1) they send less traffic than they did back in, say, 2006. It's only 3,000-4,000 uniques.
2) one backlink from them doesn't appear to be worth crap any more in Google. Google (as far as I can tell) looks much more at the heterogeneity of your linkbase than it does any individual link from a high PR site (maybe Wikipedia's excluded here, but I don't know).
Patrick and Peldi's advice to target 40 smaller blogs with personalized pitches (there's that interesting content thing again - interesting to an audience of one each time) is probably better than TechCrunch traffic in every single way you slice it.
Traffic coming a TechCrunch link still converts way higher than most traffic. Why? Because the article is read by ~50,000 people and only those actually interested follow the link.
interesting content doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't get linked to.
And to get linked to, you need to become some sort of an authority/celebrity. A good example is Jason complaining about ComScore and getting posted about on Techcrunch. If you or I wrote that same post, we wouldn't get a single link out of it. But when you are a celebrity, every little tidbit gets your more coverage.
Granted sometimes you do get some recognition. i.e. I got linked to from LA Times for my post comparing Techcrunch to Kid's Choice Awards....but that was because the post got some recognition by being on HN front page for a day.
In my experience it's more like "make interesting content and don't make all the stupid and/or not-all-that-obvious mistakes many web designers make."
Mo matter _how_ good your "interesting content" is, if your web design has it hidden behind a flash splash page or your entire site navigation is in some dynamic javascript menu system with no regular html links for spiders to find, you will not get traffic.
Good content is the number 1 best thing you can do for your website. Not wasting the potential of that good content is, however, equally important.
Patrick, incredibly spot-on and valuable, as always. Thanks.
In my experience with ViEmu and Codekana, recommendations by highly respected bloggers are what help sales the most. In most areas, there already is a "network of trust" out there, and getting in through someone up in the food chain can make a great difference.
I do think some presence in Reddit, Hacker News, etc... are helpful in order to establish credentials and a solid background from which to do more specific actions.
One other little addendum that I think is important: make sure that you blog on a fairly regular basis! Nobody will bother to subscribe if you don't keep making good content for them to come back to.
This is something my startup does poorly. We haven't yet gotten into that habit, and since we don't pay attention, weeks go by without a post, even though we have great ideas on things to write about. This is one thing we've talked a lot about making sure we improve upon in the future.
make sure that you blog on a fairly regular basis!
A few years ago, prior to starting my current day job (and long before I started participating on HN), I blogged three times a week or more. I wrote a few gems and a lot of, ahem, filler, got a wee bit of traction but not too much (though it was PR6 at one point, which is great for geek bragging rights and of no use whatsoever otherwise), and burned out eventually.
I think blogging regularly is a practice which auto-commoditizes your content, which is probably not the best idea for a time pressed startup which has sharply limited resources. For instance, a fairly typical article for me would have been a 30 minute exploration into a thought I had that day. Roughly one of those in ten would attract attention outside of the folks already reading my blog.
These days, I blog about a fifth as much or less, but am much smarter about topic selection. While I still have scratch my own itch articles every once in a while, if I'm going to spend my time on something, I try to do it right such that it doesn't just fall into the background noise on the Internet. That means being choosy on topics, going for stuff I know will probably be popular, making smart tactical choices like writing self-consciously for reading on the Internet (H2 tags, bolded call-out bits, visual engagement, etc) rather than doing my usual stream-of-consciousness rambling, etc.
To give some numbers from my own experiences, I've been blogging for about three years and have 700 posts under my belt. I'm up to 300 RSS subscribers and 400 visitors a day.
It's definitely not a quick fix for any startup, and you might well be better off focused on improving your landing page conversion rate if you want an immediate return on your time. It's been a massive long-term help for me though, both teaching me how to communicate and market much more effectively, and making connections with my readers. Multiple times I've walked into meetings cold and it's turned out someone knows me from my blog, which has been a massive help.
I would agree with what you're saying. You said this in your post itself, that content has to be interesting. Blogging once a day with short, filler content won't get anyone interested in what you're saying.
However, at least in my situation, I've got double digit numbers of ideas of things that would be interesting to write about, that I could probably write up in just a few hours (each). But I just haven't, because I haven't made "write an article for the blog" into a legitimate to-do item yet.
I guess the other nice thing is that I'm in a niche that few people know about. I could blog about things that are fairly basic, but many people would still find them interesting.
>> the site at the top of the rankings for teddy bears (almost certainly Wikipedia, I can tell you without looking) is the first people go for teddy bears
I've also chitchatted with a few people here who asked me about this topic. Feel free to chime in if you want me to share what I told you with the group -- I default to Facebook 2004 privacy settings regarding specific advice. ;)