We’ve all heard the phrase 1,000 times in our lives. You know what i’m talking about. I know you do.

“Content is King” — A Pure Genius

As a writer, content marketer, and founder of a distributed content agency, I don’t agree with this statement. If anything is king, it’s revenue. Every company revolves around a product that solves a problem for a set of people. Ideally, these people pay for the solution to their problem. That’s what it comes down to, right? Revenue. Revenue is king in B2B land.

You are are writing a blog post because it will impact your company’s overall success, not to get one million views just for the hell of it. Content is made to support the product, because the product brings in the revenue. Content should help people discover the product, help people understand why they need it, and help people get value out of it once they commit in. Sound familiar?

1. Traffic and lead generation
2. Sales
3. Retention

If your content isn’t helping with one of these three categories, question why you are writing it in the first place.

Revenue Is King, But How Can Blog Content Grow Revenue?

Now we’re asking the real questions. Now that we agree that content supports the product that brings in revenue, we can get into strategies to best utilize content. Here are three ways you can use blog posts to generate more leads, turn those leads into sales, and make sure those customers stay for a while.

Use Blogging To Bring In More Traffic

One aspect that we talk a lot about at PubLoft is SEO. Many companies don’t realize that SEO could make or break a startup. If a startup can’t figure out a way to get customers without paying for Facebook ads, it’s not a sustainable model.

Why is that? It’s because if you get SEO right, you bring in a slew of new visitors every day who are potential buyers, FOR FREE. FREEEEE!

That sounds cool and all, but how does one accomplish this? Many people approach it the wrong way by thinking its all about just optimizing a home page. In our opinion, it’s all about optimizing for blog content that ranks on Google for long-form keywords. SO when people search those terms, your blog is right there to educate them!

See, when I search “How To Create Blog Content”, blog articles come up…. Not websites home pages.

So, writing blog articles that rank is a great way to get more traffic to your site, that you can then convert to paying customers.

Use Blogging In Your Sales Campaigns

If you are already bringing in inbound traffic through forms on your website, use your blog content in your drip campaigns for people in your funnel. If you plan to send out a 5 email sequence over a period of a few weeks, the only way to gauge interest is if someone responds to an email, as an open doesn’t mean much these days. Including a link to a blog post does two things for you.

1. It helps you find the people who are interested enough to click on a link. These people are innately a little more interested than people who didn’t click on the link, so you can proceed accordingly.
2. It establishes variety in your sales emails. If all your follows ups are just 2–3 sentences reframing the question of “just following up”, you’re not trying hard enough. Include links to your blog in there. Throw in a gif or two. (Or seven) Change it up, or your results will never change either.
3. It educates the people you’re trying to sell to, which is never a bad thing

Write content, and deploy it to move people along in the funnel to get them closer to being paying customers!

Use Blogging To Delight Current Customers

What’s more important: Finding new customers or keeping your old ones? You can answer that one, but if you do want to keep your customers, you need to delight them every chance you get. Using blog posts can educate them on topics in their industry, keep them updated on best practices, and make sure they are in the loop with happenings in your company. You can even use blog posts to highlight some of your best customers, which will keep them around for even longer.

Your goal is to make them SO happy, they will travel to a beach and take a jumping picture during sunset, FOR YOU (Pictured above). Once you reach that level, you deserve a break.

All joking aside, it’s no secret that happy customers are a good thing. Take care of them and they will take care of you.

Wrapping It Up

Blog posts can have so many benefits but many time, they just are stuck collecting dust on a webpage somewhere online. Content isn’t king…using the content to generate an ROI is king! You invested in the creation of this great content. It’s time to use the content to get you the ROI you were always looking for…visits that turn into leads, that turn into customers, and customers that turn into advocates.

Just promise me one thing. Every time you write a blog post, it’s tied back to a specific goal. Whether it be lead generation, sales material, or customer retention, don’t write for the hell of it. Another way to put it…write to help people. If what you’re writing isn’t helping someone… in some way, shape or form, maybe it shouldn’t be written. Live like that and at the end of the day, no one can fault you for that.

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Content Might Be King, But Does Your Content Sell? was originally published in The PubLoft Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First, it was Facebook. Then, it was Twitter. Then Instagram. Vine. Snapchat. Reddit. Anchor. Insert 180 other social products here. Somewhere in the mix, Medium was brought to life. This one was a little different from the get-go.

For starters, the founders, Ev Williams and Biz Stone, also were the cofounders of Twitter. Before that, Ev founded Blogger, which was eventually acquired by Google. It’s safe to say that the people behind this platform know their stuff. Additionally, they have amassed over 100 million dollars in funding and have 60+ million monthly active readers.

So, Medium. What is it? According to them, it is…

“a place where everyone has a story to share and the best ones are delivered right to you.” — Medium About Page

So let’s be real. As a startup founder, this means pretty much nothing to you. Great, it’s a storytelling service. Why the heck does this matter to startups out there? Let’s dive a little deeper here.

Sure, on the surface, Medium looks just like a long-form version of Twitter, but when you peel back the layers a bit, you see why 60 million people come back to read something interesting on Medium every month. In this post, I’m going to tell you what Medium is in detail, what opportunity it presents, how brands have been utilizing it already, and you can utilize it yourself.

Let’s get started!

What is Medium?

My definition is a little different from theirs. I’d say, Medium is a collection of thoughts, organized in a way that matches what a reader is looking for at any given time. Breaking this down to its core, Medium has four important elements to it:

1. Profiles
2. Tags
3. Claps
4. Publications

Profiles

A profile is simply a user. All users have the ability to publish stories on Medium. These posts can be anything. They could be something intellectual, a rant, a poem they thought of, or anything else. Every user has a profile, and whenever they write anything on Medium, it is listed under their profile. So, I could write a post right now, publish it, and you could search my name on Medium and find that post.

If Medium was only comprised of profiles, with no tags or search fields, it would be a lot like Twitter. It would have a mix of quality content, garbage content, and everything in between. They bypass this quality control problem in a few ways. One of them is tags.

Tags

Tags are a way to categorize a post. If I write a post on “The Future of AI In Healthcare”, some tags i’d put down are future, AI, and healthcare. This is a basic way Medium categorizes its content. Users can follow or search different tags, so if a user is into baking, politics, and comedy, they can follow those tags and only see related content that they care about on the home page.

Claps

If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you’ll see an applause button on the bottom left. If you click that (or hold it), a lot happens under the hood. First, Medium see’s the activity, and makes a note that one person found this article useful. The more claps an article gets, the more valuable Medium thinks it is. So, Medium staff might feature this post on the home page, send it out in a tweet, or put it in an email blast. On Medium, the best content rises to the top, no matter who the writer is.

So far we have a few interesting elements. We have users who write stories. These stories are then hosted on our profile and can be shown to anyone else on Medium in their search results. A way to help users find topics that they are interested in is searching individual tags. A way to help with quality control is to assume that posts with 100+ claps is a high-quality story. Things are coming together. What’s missing? Publications, the backbone of Medium.

What is a Publication?

Think of your favorite newspaper or online news source. Let’s use Wired for example. Let’s look at their homepage.

Clearly, you have the Wired logo on top, you have a few different topics broken out into tabs like Business, Culture, and Science. Then you have your feature articles on the home page. Behind all this content is a team of editors and a team of writers working under the editors. Sound like a familiar model? Good. Now let me introduce you to the Medium Publication.

Here’s another one to give a second example.

A Medium publication is almost the exact same as a publication like TechCrunch, Wired, or People. The only difference is that it’s simply hosted on Medium. Note, you are able to link up your domain to your publication so it doesn’t even look associated with Medium.

Users submit their stories to be featured in publications. Some publications have hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of page views a day. The 60 million strong community of Medium prowls the site for content that bends their minds. Many of them get accustomed to reading content from a publication. For example, developers read Hacker Noon or freeCodeCamp, while founders read Startup Grind or Signal v. Noise.

Speaking of Signal V. Noise, that isn’t just any publication. That is the official publication of the company, Basecamp. This multi-billion dollar company hosts their company blog solely on Medium. Read about why they did it here.

Turns out, they aren’t the only brands hosting publications on Medium. Airbnb, Dropbox, The White House(Pre 2017), Facebook, and others use Medium to share their thoughts through their publication.

What Does This Mean For You?

If these big dogs are hosting their blogs on Medium, should you too? We say yes. We’ll write another blog post about this but Medium is in a similar position as Youtube was in 2005…It is quickly growing, yet somewhat undiscovered. The upside of posting on Medium, or at least cross-posting your current blogs onto Medium, is very high. The downside is minimal.

We’ll be writing many blog posts on how you can use Medium for your brand. This is only the beginning. From ins and outs of Medium to theory on what you should post on here, to inside tips, we’ll share it all. Our goal is to educate. Let us know how we can do that better. Until next time, see you on Medium.\

Did you get value out of this post? Ready to take on the world and dive into Medium? Awesome! Hold that clap button for as long as you’d like, and feel free to subscribe to the blog below. And as always, thank you for reading! ❤

What Is Medium And Why Should Startups Care? was originally published in The PubLoft Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Marketplaces are hard. I’m learning this as I build my own marketplace. The hardest part about it is that supply should always equal demand. In our case, it means we should always have enough writers to match the demand of customers. This has been a challenge so far, because when a customer is ready for posts, it isn’t efficient to start from scratch and find a new writer, because finding the best ones takes time.

On the flip side, I don’t want to bring on so many writers but not have work for them to do. This frustrates everyone involved and eventually turns away some great writers that could have made a good living off of PubLoft. With every challenge comes a solution. Before getting to the solution, I need to make one thing clear.

PubLoft Attracts Writers

Many people apply to PubLoft and try to rush through the vetting process so they can start getting paid to write. The downside to this is that they never get to the “paying part” because they don’t actually know how to write. It’s clear to see someone who is a writer versus not. PubLoft is designed for writers, and the solution to our marketplace problem will attract the writers and deter the rest. And what do writers do? They write, and I’m going to give them an opportunity to do just that.

PubLoft Is Adding An Additional Layer To Vetting

Once writers go through a two post vetting process with PubLoft, they will be added to a Medium publication where they can write freely whenever they want, in whatever format they want. This is the pool that I will pick from when looking to find writers for new customers.

Why?

The biggest reason is that it gives me an indicator of how well someone writes over time…and how much they write in general. If someone vet for PubLoft but never wants to write again until they are paid, they likely won’t be a good fit for PubLoft. See, if I could pay anyone the moment after they finish vetting, I would. But due to our marketplace problem, this isn’t possible. The next best step is to weed out the fakers and bring to light the true writers, which is who I want to attract in the first place.

Another reason is that I believe in Medium and think that anyone consistently writing there in 2017 will be avidly successful when the rest of the world catches up with it in 2020. Medium is starting to pay their own writers as well, and this is only going to increase. I want to give PubLoft vetters the best chance to succeed, inside and outside PubLoft, which is why i’m picking Medium.

The way I see it, I could keep having writers vet and write posts that never see the day of light, or I have that vetting period and then get out of the way and let writers do what they do best…write, in a free and open format.

I’ll be picking writers to write for customers from the people writing on this publication. I’ll pick writers who are consistently putting out good work. The consistency is up to them, but as writers, that they are trying to prove to me why they’d be a great writer for my customers. The best way to prove this is through consistent writing.

Note — I won’t be setting limits on the format people write in or the specific topics they write on. Once they are through vetting and in the publication ecosystem, they have much more autonomy than they do during the vetting period.

Who?

Anyone can still vet. Anyone with skills can get through vetting. But only writers will get through this last part of vetting. You can’t fake that you are a writer. The only way to prove you are a good one is to…write. So anyone can vet with PubLoft, but know that this process is designed to weed out the people trying to make a quick buck off of PubLoft .

What?

The publication is called Robot Survival Guide. It’s a publication focussed on technology, the future of work, and automation. Once you vet with PubLoft, you will, get more information about it.

That’s it, folks. When business problems arise, it’s all about solutions. This is our solution to our marketplace problem. I look forward to seeing how this plays out. Send any questions to Mat@publoft.com.

PubLoft Is Tackling Our Supply/Demand Problem was originally published in The PubLoft Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As I said in my blog post announcing Startup Marketing Plan, I was going to do marketing, and specifically, SEO audits on PubLoft. We plan to document how we grow over time using the same methods we use for our customers. We should have done this earlier in our existence, but just like our customers, we have a business to run and its hard to find time to dedicate to marketing when you are working with customers all day.

Still, this isn’t an excuse. We need to start executing on marketing strategies. The first step is going to be doing a backlink SEO audit. But why an SEO audit, versus another channel?

As you know, there are plenty of marketing channels to try as a startup, so it’s overwhelming to work on + track all of them. That’s why we care about a few channels and then go all in on those channels. So what channels do we care about? Before we answer that, the question is what outcome are we looking for? We care about organic traffic from owned media.

This automatically eliminates any ad strategies or referral programs. Many of the popular ways to get organic traffic are social media, blogging, and SEO. We believe social media has reached the point where the law of diminishing returns applies, so we won’t be looking at social media just yet.

This leaves our blog presence and SEO. Rank #1 on Google and reap the benefits for years (as long as you continue ranking). Out of all the marketing channels we could attack, these are the two we’ve attacked for our customers and the two that we’ll attack for ourselves. In this post, we’ll focus on our SEO presence, and specifically on our backlinks.

Overall SEO Presence

We have practically no SEO presence currently. Luckily we rank #1 for “PubLoft”, but that’s not very useful to get new traffic to our site. The only other keyword we rank for is “content writing for startups” and we’re at a whopping #20 on Google for that. We haven’t put together a backlink strategy yet to improve our domain authority and we haven’t had a blog to leverage so we can rank for more keywords (until we started this blog). Let’s look at the specific stats on our backlinks. Note, we’re using the tool SEMrush to collect all these statistics.

Number Of Backlinks

We have 108 total backlinks. This ultimately means on the internet, we have 108 different links that point back to www.publoft.com. Sounds like a solid number, right? Think again.

Although we have 108 backlinks, we only have 8 referring domains. What does this mean? It means although there are 100+ links linking back to us online, they only come from 8 different domains. So in Google’s eyes, it’s more like 8 true backlinks than 108 backlinks. More backlinks don’t hurt, but the goal is to increase the number of referring domains.

You might be asking, how do we have so many backlinks with so few referring domains? The answer? Medium.

See that Domain +97 under there? That means we have about 97 links from the Medium domain. The reason for this is because I blog on Medium a lot, and I mention PubLoft in many of my posts. Still, a link is a link, right? Do we still get the SEO juice from it? No. There might be a little juice coming through, but each link proceeding link has less juice than the previous one.

Nofollow Links

Turns out that two of the referring domains have “nofollow”.

What is a “nofollow”? It ultimately means that the referring domain doesn’t want to give us the SEO juice that would usually come from a link. This is common on sites with user-generated content…For example, if I went onto a forum and posted PubLoft’s URL, would we get credit for that link because technically it’s another domain referring to my site? NO. Why? Because of that site, and most sites, set a “nofollow” attribute to their links which means you can still link it, but it doesn’t impact SEO for either party.

Out of all my backlinks, here is the breakdown of which ones are going to give me the juice versus not.

So Medium doesn’t even give us the SEO juice for most of those links. Neither does Angelist. Thanks for nothing, losers! If you think that’s lame, say it with me…

Okay okay, settle down settle down. All jokes aside, nofollow links are a key part of the interwebs, and any good SEO is going to need to know how to navigate them. They aren’t all bad, but you sure want more Follow link than Nofollow links.

That’s all there is to backlinks for now. As we get more backlinks, there will be more to look at like the trust score of our backlinks, the type of backlinks we get, and even disavowing backlinks that are toxic to our SEO strategy.

What Did I Learn?

We need to spend more time building quality backlinks! We pretty much don’t exist to Google and for a company helping other companies with their SEO, that’s no good. Although we don’t do link building for our customers (yet), it’s still important to practice on ourselves and get the practice so we’ll be ready to do this for our customers in the future.

Until next time, my friends! Keep hustlin’.

Friends. Strangers. Founders. The random 12- year old who snuck onto his mom’s computer. There’s A LOT more coming from Startup Marketing Plan, and we think it could be really helpful for you. So, if you’re picking up what we’re putting down, put down that email address and let us retarget you for the rest of your life!!!!!! Kidding, we do zero retargeting because that means we’re using ads and ads are lame. Kids, don’t use ads. You’re smarter than that.

SEO Audit On PubLoft was originally published in The PubLoft Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hey everyone. Today I have some big news. PubLoft is launching our own blog focussed on marketing tips for startups. I know we have The Pub, but we realized that the types of stuff we were posting on there (and let’s be honest, we weren’t posting a lot) were all about PubLoft and weren’t bringing YOU, the startup founder, any value.

We wanted to create a place where we can document what we know about startups and marketing in a way that is useful to our customers and to strangers on the interwebs. So with that said, let’s get into the nitty-gritty details of what this shindig is all about.

What The Heck is The PubLoft Blog?

In short, it’s a niche blog site to help startup founders of the earliest stages of their startup marketing efforts. When you’re a couple of founders and you’ve built something awesome, you are tasked with the job to get people to try it, love it, and even pay for it. You might be a product person or a tech person, and no one told you the startup marketing playbook. Wait, yes they did.

All you need is $10,000 ad budget, a social media presence, an active blog, and SEO strategy, influencer marketing plans, optimized funnels, pages that convert, analytics to track all of it, and….dare I go on? The marketing world is a wild one, and it’s easy for a startup to be caught up in the BS of it all.

The PubLoft Blog is aimed to dumb down marketing to startup founders, not because they that aren’t able to understand the full stack of marketing, but because there are more important things they should be working on instead of mastering the art of marketing (like building a product users love).

In The PubLoft Blog, we’ll break down our methodology of marketing, the way we approach it, and you’ll also see me use this plan on PubLoft over time. Sound good? Groovy.

Who The Heck Am I?

My name is Mat Sherman and I’m an alcoh…..wait, wrong place. All jokes aside, I’m Mat, I reside in the great city of Phoenix, Arizona, and I’m extremely fascinated by startups. I started my own about a year and a half ago, built “the killer app”, then the startup was killed. As I was building that app, I got really involved with the Phoenix Startup Scene. There isn’t a better place in the world to start a startup but not feel the pressure to work 27 hours in a day. It can be done.

I also run PubLoft. We help startups with their content marketing efforts. I love talking startups, marketing, and all thing Phoenix tech.

What To Expect From Us

You can expect to come to this blog every few days with a new post about how you can improve your marketing efforts as a startup founder. There will be bitesized pieces of content that you can digest in a few minutes and there will be long-form guides how to do best for X.

Because I spend all day running PubLoft, I struggle to do marketing for us, even though I do it for our customers. This is kinda hypocritical if you ask me, so I’ll be documenting the process as we ramp up our marketing efforts as well. I’ll be telling you what works and what doesn’t along the way.

Oh also, expect gifs. Lots and lots of gifs. (pronounced gif, not jif). If you don’t want to miss a blog post, make sure to provide your email below and I’ll send you a post outlining everything we sent out in the past couple of weeks, with some other goodies in there.

So that’s it, folks. Expect more blog posts every week and if you’re a startup founder who has a sexy product but no one to admire it, you’re welcome in advance for the tips. I take donations via bitcoin. Until next time, keep hustlin’

The PubLoft Blog IS LAUNCHING! was originally published in The PubLoft Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.