What kind of metrics would you say define a great blog? What should one aim towards after year?
The following is based on a Q&A session I did at Saleswhale.
For any company, you would want to have company that’s respected as industry standard. A lot of companies – intercom has posts about what intercom does, people will share content about their stuff. Buffer. Zapier. Product blogs – there’s a slight difference between wanting to be the best blog and wanting to serve the product – there are probably companies that might even over-invest in the content efforts but the product is not that great, and eventually they’re talking about general stuff but they can’t even celebrate the product. You can spend 2-3 years making a great blog that everyone likes but if your product is not doing well, then your product blog will also kind of stagnate by extension.
I think ideally the product blog should challenge and inspire the product team to be better. What to expect… you should have some things that you’re personally proud of. It shouldn’t just be traffic. Optimising for traffic can lead to not good traffic – but Starbucks white girls… I’m proud of the incentives post. Writing a very good “how to” post is something to be proud of, because then that piece of content is now like a living document that supports with people, and you can share it now they feel helped, you have improved their day. Sounds fluffy but it has measurable impact. Do you track the shares, yeah – actually the thing I care most about is backlinks – ahrefs – who are the people who are linking to your content?
Super simple level how google works – page rank – who’s linking to who – and one way to bootstrap – the measure of significance according to google is page rank, who is linking – a single backlink from gov.sg is worth more than 100 crappy backlinks from random sites. In a sense you can reduce the act of content marketing for a startup into a “game of backlinks” – to get that you have to have stuff that is worth linking to, so it’s kinda circular. You can almost celebrate when you get good links from good places. Wanted to go knocking door to door. A thing I tried to start once but never got around to doing was content marketers in a region – without being deceptive or malicious – but it has to be honest and legitimately relevant, real currency.