内容推广的秘诀 | 第18话

您可以在此处收听，也可以在 iTunes、Overcast 或 Spotify 上收听。

吉米：酷。 欢迎回到 Animalz 播客，在短暂的中断之后，我们回来聊天更多内容。 所以吉米在这里。 我们也有 Jan。Say hello Jan。
简：怎么了？
吉米：然后我们有瑞恩。 瑞安欢迎。
瑞恩：你好！ 再次。
吉米：我认为这可能对那些过去没有经常听播客的人有用，或者如果你是第一次只是说，“你好。我们是谁？我们为什么在这里？” 我可以开始了。 所以，Animalz，内容营销机构，我们是一个由分布式作家、内容策略师和编辑组成的团队。
Jimmy：我们主要为 B2B SaaS 公司提供内容，但越来越多地在该人群之外工作。 我是吉米。 我是我们的营销总监之一，我们有两个营销总监，这是另一个播客的故事。 是的。 所以无论如何，这是一个很好的快速介绍。 然后 Jan 和 Ryan，你们也可以自我介绍一下吗？
Jan：是的 Jan。几年前我创办了 Animalz。 今天，我的重点更多地放在企业的思想领导方面，试图帮助作家承担你最喜欢的创始人、风险投资、首席执行官、首席营销官和其他高管的声音，为这类客户制定战略。 还有……招聘。 都是那种东西。 所以这就是我。
瑞恩：很好。 我是瑞安。 我已经在 Animalz 工作了一年半。 我是一名内容策略师。 因此，我专注于为新客户制定新策略、关键字研究、构思，以及所有真正有趣的、极客内容营销方面的东西。
吉米：太棒了。 我喜欢它。 好吧，我很高兴我们今天能和你聊天，瑞恩。 因此，Ryan 最近为 Animalz 博客写了一篇博文，题为“内容推广的秘密隐藏在显而易见的地方”。 我们将深入研究。 但我认为我们应该开始的地方是防潮地板胶。
吉米：那么瑞恩你能……吗？ 好的，您已经在内容领域工作了很长时间。 你本周早些时候在推特上发布了关于你过去在内容营销方面的一些演出，这对我来说绝对是突出的，我之前听你提到过，你能给我们一点启发吗？
瑞恩：我绝对可以。 是的，我几年前工作时最大的客户之一是一家企业地板公司。 我之前曾与许多利基 B2B 公司合作过，但这就像所有这些公司中最利基、最多的 B2B 一样，试图为其制定内容营销策略有点令人生畏。
瑞恩：是的……从字面上看，它是一种粘合剂，您可以将其粘贴到不同类型的地板上。 如果您在地板下的水分管理方面遇到问题，如果您……上升的地下水位开始从混凝土中渗出，噩梦。 十亿美元的问题。 我正在帮助公司教育人们了解这个问题并为他们的业务创造潜在客户。
吉米：那么您是否以许多 B2B 内容营销人员处理内容的方式来处理这个问题？ 就像你的关键词研究一样，弄清楚你的短尾机会是什么，你的长尾机会是什么……然后为搜索而写作？ 就像有一个不同的构思过程？
Ryan：我想假装几年前我就是这样组织的，但 SEO 是我们追求的主要机制。 这真的很难。 我为 Conversion XL 写的关于利基 B2B 营销策略的帖子专注于我们提出的解决方案，因为这是一个非常奇怪的利基行业。 很多真正的短尾关键词，而不是很多数量。 不得不变得很有创意。
Ryan：我们最终选择了很多与客户也会遇到问题的软件管理相关的主题。 关键词数量更多，然后几乎可以通过真正具体的行动号召、电子书和其他东西自行选择。
吉米：我喜欢它。 进展如何？ 它奏效了吗？
瑞恩：效果很好。 我想我们......我希望它会比它做得更好。 但我认为对于大量 B2B 内容来说，它的燃烧速度很慢。 我们有点没有意识到它会有多慢。 我想我上次签到时，该网站每月进行的搜索量大约为 20,000 次。 所以是的，我们最终对它感到满意。
吉米：那太好了。 我想那些客户也会为这些服务付出高昂的代价。
瑞恩：是的。 绝对地。 它是......我认为普通客户是这样的，它是六位数的交易规模或其他东西，所以你不需要很多客户来实现它以获得相当可观的回报。
吉米：是的。 是的。 我想在某个时候写一篇关于这个确切主题的博客文章，即内容的数量要求以及它根据您的业务模型而发生的巨大变化。 就像 Animalz 是另一个我们不喜欢的例子一样，我们实际上并不需要大量的流量来建立网络以产生潜在客户。 还有很多其他类似的业务，只是 SaaS 不是其中之一。
瑞恩：是的，当然。
Jan：那些像昂贵的关键字 Ryan 吗？
瑞恩：我们真的非常非常小众。 所以很多，不是很贵，因为它的体积很小。 我们只是在某种程度上，我们对其中的很多进行了总体排名。 这就是我们的计划。
简：对。
吉米：嗯，你把这个设置得很完美，瑞恩继续写你写的关于推广和分发的文章……我的意思是人们问我们的所有事情，这可能是……它在肯定是前三名。 我喜欢你想出这个非常简单、有用、有用的模型来思考内容推广的方式。 我想这也是你在以前的工作中学到和应用的东西。 你能不能带我们走……带我们走过它。
瑞恩：是的，绝对的。 我认为……关于内容营销过程的文章很多。 关于写作，关于构想……其中一直让我感到仍然非常神秘，仍然非常不可预测的部分是晋升。 我认为我们很多人都是作家，我们花了很多时间专注于伟大的想法，伟大的执行。 然后，当他们在互联网安静的死水中憔悴时，我们会感到非常沮丧。
Ryan：所以我只是想对我们已经看到、合作过的一些真正成功的产品进行逆向工程，并尝试找出是什么让它们与众不同？ 他们为什么成功？ 我认为他们拥有的唯一定义特征是他们从第一天开始就进行分销。 他们认为这是一个需要解决的挑战，他们创建了专门为给定分销渠道设计的内容。 我认为这与当今许多内容营销人员的分发方式完全不同。
Ryan：我认为人们非常热衷于将促销视为与社交媒体网站分享。 我们可以分享给增长黑客吗？ 还是Reddit？ 没有真正考虑内容本身是否适合这些渠道。
吉米：好的。 因此，让我们专门研究有机搜索，因为这是您强调的第一个示例，根据我们的经验，这对于基本上任何 B2B 公司来说都是最大的机会。 如果你想要......不是便宜的流量，但如果你不想为流量付出很多钱并在很长一段时间内花费大量资金，那么你基本上被迫专注于有机。 你怎么看？ 有一种方法可以解决这个问题，可以写一篇完美优化但也不是很有趣的文章，对吧？ 也有可能编写非常感兴趣且未优化的内容，并且发现平衡已被证明是一个挑战，不仅对我们，而且对所有内容营销人员都是如此。
Ryan：是的，我认为最好的方法可能是优化文章的搜索结构。 我认为你可以做很多事情，比如标题标签、H2 标题、这些针对搜索量身定制的结构元素，仍然让你有很大的呼吸空间来发挥创造力，成为有趣的是，将自己与现有的所有内容区分开来。 我认为搜索不需要限制这种能力。
吉米：是的，当你在研究领导力思想内容时，你是怎么想的？ 您是否在提出角度并实际撰写文章之前考虑分发？ 搜索会起作用吗？ 是啊，你怎么看？
Jan：搜索很棘手。 实际上，我认为 Ryan 可能对最近的偏见有更好的看法，因为他与一个相关的客户合作。 但我会说，考虑社会分配通常是关键。 Twitter、Hacker News、Reddit 是主要的地方，LinkedIn 在较小程度上。 但我认为，如果您没有特别考虑要发送内容的频道，那么您可能会失败，除非您正在与大牌合作，或者您有一些非常疯狂的想法。
简：这不仅仅是看……因为我认为人们已经谈论了一段时间的剧本是，“好吧，弄清楚……如果你要去社交，你必须提前知道这一点。” 但是今天的社交是一个由不同类型工具组成的巨大景观，在 Hacker News 上成功的同一篇文章不一定会在你希望它成功的特定核心用户群中在 Twitter 上成功。 所以你真的要看具体的渠道。 抱歉，不仅是频道，还有您希望帖子成功的平台。
简：所以是的，我肯定会先看那些……甚至大部分时间都会想出一个帖子的想法。
瑞恩：是的，我认为这就像争论的中心论点。 就像曾经有过五到十年的时间，您可以将内容发布到世界上，而不必过多地关注特定的分发渠道，您仍然很有可能获得良好的表现。
Ryan：一般来说，可以与之竞争的内容较少，我认为人们的眼光略差一些，因为他们没有接触到那么多，你可以采用这种包罗万象的方法。 我认为今天太忙了，太拥挤了，每个网络都在叫嚣，到处都是想要把他们的作品推向世界的营销人员。 您可以在其中脱颖而出的唯一方法是拥有绝对适合您共享的那个频道的东西。
吉米：是的。 您刚刚取笑了一件重要的事情，我认为我们应该稍微拉一下该线程，这是在您考虑内容分发时设定期望值。 因此，特别是有机，存在这样一个问题，即数量最多的关键字最具竞争力，因为人们追逐那个数量。 它们往往是短尾，只是一种相当广泛的搜索，这使得它们难以追求，即使你能够达到这些排名，在合格流量方面也不是特别有价值。
吉米：所以当我们与客户交谈时，[听不清 00:11:20] 你得到了长尾，处于漏斗式机会的中间，因为他们更容易获得这些排名，他们是更合格的流量，等等。 但是有这个期望设定的问题，对吧？ 当人们看到大流量并想到那些大流量数字时，他们的眼睛会变大。 这是一种非常不完美的内容策略方式，对吧？ 当您只是追逐大关键字时。 所以我想瑞安问你一个问题是你怎么看？ 您一直在与客户交谈。 当您与他们谈论促销和分销以及策略将是什么样子时。 你从人们那里听到什么关于交通的信息？ 他们的期望？ 他们对一般的低流量、长尾机会感到满意吗？
Ryan：是的，让我印象深刻的一件事是，我认为很多客户实际上并不将 SEO 视为一种分发机制，这实际上是一个非常有趣的挑战。
吉米：这是一个很好的观点。 真的很重要。
Ryan：是的，我们创建了许多不同的内容桶。 搜索引擎优化内容始终是被捆绑的内容，它是人们一直想要创建的内容。 我认为他们没有意识到，就像您创建思想领导力以在 Slack 上分享或在 Twitter 上引起共鸣一样，SEO 内容是为特定渠道、特定机制设计的。 就喜欢......搜索关键字而言，我可能整个职业生涯都在追求每月搜索数百个关键字。
瑞恩：很少有人这样做。 正如你所说，人们在寻找这些巨大的数字时会睁大眼睛。 但总的来说，我会经常回到这个短语，我认为总体而言，关注这些的文章可能会有很大的数量。 没有文章会为一个关键字排名。 我们如何看待针对 SEO 内容的方式与它在现实中的实际运作方式之间存在一种脱节。 我们提出了一个核心关键字，我们创建了一篇专为此而设计的文章，但该文章随后可以为数千个相关的关键字变体排名。
瑞恩：即使其中一些人每月有十次搜索，总的来说，这也是相当大的流量。 我认为很多客户在选择大的、真正有竞争力的、看起来很有吸引力的关键词时，都会把它放在桌面上。
吉米：是的，当然。 好吧，所以我在销售电话中一直收到的一个问题是，“好吧，你们写文章，它们很棒，你优化它们。然后呢？” 您实际上如何确保......他们能够在与其他许多非常好的并且经过良好优化的文章竞争时获得流量？
Ryan：是的，我……他们中的很多人，甚至是我与之交谈的 Animalz 的客户、内容经理，他们总是将 SEO 视为一件非常复杂的事情。 他们不知道如何将他们正在写的文章与这个算法黑匣子相匹配。 但我认为很多时候它归结为非常简单的启发式方法。 提出一个对您的域强度可行的主要关键字，它与您之前创建的其他内容具有主题相关性。 这显然是一个很好的起点。
Ryan：我认为建立次要的，比如相关的关键词也非常非常重要。 所以这是我们在帖子中实际包含的示例。 Ad Espresso 在他们的内容上做得很好，他们写了关于你应该在一周中的每一天使用的 Instagram 主题标签。 现在很明显，那里的核心关键字就像 Instagram 的主题标签。 但其中有一个信息子集，他对文章的叙述很重要，那就是……星期一的主题标签，星期二的主题标签等等。
Ryan：每个相关的关键词都有自己的数量。 将其包含在本文的范围内是有意义的，这样您就可以为这个庞大的相关关键字库进行排名。 这也是我认为很多人开始使用 Clearscope 的原因，也很有趣。 基本上是抓取现有文章以查看哪些关键字和哪些主题最常出现，并将其用作他们自己的启发式方法，以了解他们应该在文章中包含的信息。
Jan：关于那篇文章的另一个很酷的地方是，回到你之前吉米所说的关于创建排名和好的内容之间的紧张关系。 那是你能在 Instagram 标签上找到的最长、最密集的数据、最有价值的内容吗？
Jan：如果你用谷歌搜索“Instagram 主题标签”，首页上的所有其他帖子都是……我会说细节和分辨率水平的三分之一或四分之一。 对我来说，我认为从 Ad Espresso 的角度来看，这几乎有点像他们自己的思想领导力。 就好像他们只是通过创建文章所需的那种蛮力来展示它们是最有用的，最有思想的 Facebook 广告资源。 它创造了一个品牌，对吧？ 阅读有关它们的文章后，它会在您的脑海中留下不可磨灭的印象。 所以是的，我认为肯定有一种方法，这有点像识别那些机会，在这些机会中，你可以创造出真正伟大的东西，这些东西也可能排名非常高，并给你带来流量或给你想要的目标流量。
Jan：这可能有点像本节中的一个隐含想法，就像，这些是你想要通过这种分发策略追求的东西。 你想找到那些东西。 我不知道这有意义吗瑞恩？
瑞恩：完全是的。 这也让我想到了另一点……我认为，每当您为搜索创建内容时，显然目的是要超越现有内容。 我认为很多人都熟悉这种摩天大楼的方法论，你实际上是在……你试图在信息的长度或综合性质的维度上击败它。 那就是……在很多情况下效果很好。 我认为 Ad Espresso 完美地执行了这一点。 我确实有这种假设变得越来越无效。 我们在世界上看到的内容越多，我们看到的摩天大楼的实施就越多。 我认为这是一场逐底竞赛。
Ryan：我们最终会得到包含 10 到 30,000 字文章的搜索结果，这对用户体验很不利。 没有人愿意坐下来阅读所有这些。 所以我认为我看到的一些最有趣的搜索游戏是人们正在寻找新的和不同的维度来超越内容。 这就是为什么 Jan 实际上做了很多事情，比如事物的思想领导力，找到这些叙事角度，这些叙事钩子，这些东西……它符合意图，但它也是逆向的，或者它提供了一个观点不同。 这是在这场军备竞赛中超越内容而不升级的另一种非常好的方法。
吉米：是的，当然。 实际上，我想问你 Jan 的问题是......需要从关键字中获得飞跃，对吗？ 所以你从一个关键字开始。 你必须做出这个飞跃才能找​​到你的主题？ 然后再飞跃你的角度是什么？ 你将如何处理这个问题？ 而且我觉得我们经常看到内容营销人员可以实现从关键字到主题的飞跃，但这通常就像“X 的最佳实践”或“X 的终极指南”并进入下一个层次，我认为这才是真正的好东西是。 但这也是真正具有挑战性的部分。
吉米：这可以追溯到你为 Animalz 博客写的一篇文章，关于如何为你所写的主题找到正确的角度。 您如何看待……当您被迫使用某个关键字时，您是如何实现这两个飞跃的？
简：完全是的。 是的，我认为瑞恩对他刚才所说的一切都是完全正确的。 而且我认为一种方式......例如使用 Ad Espresso，一种他们规避的方式就是使用他们从用户和......他们自己以及他们注意到的东西中收集的大量数据他们的产品。 这就是他们在 Facebook 广告成本中排名如此之高的原因，这显然是一个搜索量很大的词。 这是因为他们实际上拥有大量数据，说明人们在一天中的不同时间、不同国家/地区最终为 Facebook 广告支付了多少费用、针对不同的人口统计数据进行营销等等。
Jan：所以我认为以 Ad Espresso 为例，Facebook 广告成本这个话题的角度是，“我们有专有信息，对，我们要分享。这就是让我们的内容更有价值的原因，这就是人们点击的原因经常在它上面，它的排名比其他所有东西都高。” 所以这是有道理的。 假设人们没有可以共享的专有数据，或者他们没有那种数据，对他们来说，通常你会......一家公司建立一个......这只是为了建立一个声音和一个话题的角度。
Jan：我认为这方面的一些很好的例子，Wistia 和 Drift，它们都是不同但真正由语音驱动的公司，即使它不在 Wistia 博客上，你也可以立即判断你是否正在阅读来自 Wistia 博客的帖子。 所以你可以通过这种方式建立一种声音。 那种叙述方式。 是的。 有很多方法可以做到这一点。 我认为您也可以使用您拥有的特殊专业知识。 我们将在本文后面讨论 Slab，但以 Slab 为例，它经营一家从事知识管理的公司。 就像他们帮助你一样...... Slab 是一种用于构建内部知识库的工具，对吧？ 因此，他们基本上是知识库领域的世界上最重要的专家，因为他们每天、每周花费多少小时、专门研究该主题。
Jan：所以他们可以从成为知识管理专家的角度来解决所有问题。 关键是诚实并确定您的实际角度是什么。 如果您不是专家，请不要假装自己是专家。 正如您所指出的，仅与一个无差别的终极指南竞争真的很难。 所以你必须找到......你的角度，我会先说，然后是主题。 随着时间的推移，它会变得更容易，因为一旦你确定了一个可行的角度，你就不必为每篇文章重新发明轮子。 一旦你确定了这一点，这实际上会帮助你更快、更好地制作文章。 但你必须先弄清楚。 这有帮助吗？
吉米：是的。 是的，不，那太好了。
简：是的。
吉米：这让我想到了我这周看到的一些东西，我认为这很有趣，但也让我感到压力很大，那就是一些公司，所以你在你所做的事情上拥有专业知识，这可能就像一个内部知识库，但作为你发展业务，您也可以发展其他方面的专业知识。 所以一些公司写了这些东西，所以 Buffer 就是一个很好的例子。 所以最近我看到他们发的一篇文章，是关于他们如何解决性别薪酬差距的。
吉米：所以他们在研究这个问题并试图在他们的招聘和工资等方面解决这个问题时，已经发展了这种专业知识。 我内心的人认为这是，我很高兴他们正在写这个，这真的很有趣。 我的内容营销人员有点压力，因为我在想如果这篇文章在搜索“性别薪酬差距”之类的词时获得牵引力，它会扭曲转化率，因为流量不符合条件人们注册了社交媒体调度工具。 这真的让我很紧张。
吉米：我提出这个只是因为它是一个例子......有点，这种情况经常发生，对吧？ 人们有很好的想法并且他们针对搜索进行了优化，它仍然可能带来不合格的流量，但它仍然值得做。 我想。 如果没有别的，只是为了世界的更大利益。
Jan:是的，而且对于你发送给谷歌的积极信号，你获得了很多流量，对吧？
吉米：这也是真的。 这也是真的。
Jan：他们会同意的。
吉米：瑞恩，你可以吗？ 因此，Jan，您还强调了另外两个示例，以使用其中一个示例，您能否快速介绍一下您在本文中包含的另外两个示例，作为一篇文章，一个渠道理念的成功案例研究？
瑞恩：完全是的。 所以我也有 SFOX，这是一个加密货币交易平台。 再次，像超级利基公司之一。 他们实际上专注于 Twitter 分发。 就像如果你花任何时间在 Twitter 上模糊地参与正在进行的加密货币谈话，你就会意识到加密 Twitter 是一个巨大的、蓬勃发展的社区。 总是看到所有这些关于与我从未听说过的加密货币挤在一起的模因。
Ryan：所以他们做了什么，他们创建了这个社区整理的指南，汇集了不同比特币专家的专业知识，所有这些专家都在 Twitter 上拥有非常活跃、非常参与的社交媒体追随者。 因此，这不仅是一种由社区驱动的伟大努力。 这不仅仅是一个厌倦的营销作品。 它还在文章的绝对结构中内置了分布。
Ryan：基本上，如果你让人们在一篇文章中看起来不错，它会负责分发。 你已经激励他们为你分享它。 所以我认为这是一个非常非常聪明的例子。
Jan：如果你是 SFOX 这样的新人，要让人们认出你需要很多时间。 而且他们当时没有最好的名牌。 而且......我现在思考这个问题的方式，看着这条推文，就像，这就是你可以播种的方式，你播种你的存在......在这种情况下，重要的人，还有很多其他人。 它只是一种植物，它将你的品牌植入他们的脑海中，这样当他们以后再次看到它时，他们可能会对它有不同的印象。 可能是一个积极的印象，因为它们在一篇文章中被提及。 但他们也像——
瑞恩：是的，由协会代言之类的事情。
简：是的。 他们会说，“我以前听说过。” 他们会愿意更深入地研究它，并随着时间的推移建立那种小的关联。”我认为这很强大。
瑞恩：是的，所以我也喜欢那篇文章。 尤其是当它喜欢的时候，它非常小众。 尽管我们总是谈论社交媒体、虚荣指标，而不是沉迷于这类事情。 我认为，正如 Jan 所说，当你在一个对 SFOX 这样的平台非常有价值的空间内获得认可的主要意图时，转推、喜欢、提及和其他东西，在他们的实例中实际上是一个非常有价值的指标。
Ryan：另一个选择是......就像 Jan 提到的另一家公司，Slab，团队知识库工具。 我喜欢这篇文章。 我喜欢所有这些文章。 我认为它们读起来真的很有趣。 作为一个厌倦的营销人员，这就像……总是遇到一件很酷的事情。 这就是杰夫贝索斯如何将叙事转化为亚马逊的竞争优势的一个例子。 我认为这让 Hacker News 的流量激增，一天之内的页面浏览量接近 15,000 次。 这真的很酷。 这是一个类似于亚马逊、定位、商业战略的概念。 不仅如此，它是与多年来接触过各种内容营销的真正精明的人一起完成的。
瑞恩：但我认为他们做得非常好的是以一种非常有趣的方式定位它。 对一个真正过头的故事采取了新颖的方法。 他们也发表意见，这是一件两极分化的事情。 但即使是不同意你的人也是提高对某事的认识的好方法。 促使讨论。 我什至得到了一位真正的亚马逊高管的回应，他必须像这种内容的黄金标准。
吉米：是的，这太棒了。 而且我知道有些人对 Hacker News 持怀疑态度，因为峰值是……有时，就像是内啡肽的冲击，但实际上你并没有从中获得很多价值。 并非总是如此。 正确的？ 就像我刚刚将这篇文章插入 HREF 以查看它有多少链接一样，HREF 报告了来自 177 个唯一引用域的 1500 个链接。 他绝对疯了。
Jimmy：就像 Jan 之前所说的那样，这些都是，无论这篇文章最终是否会转化大量客户。 积极的信号使您下次更容易对与业务超级接近的事物进行排名。
Jan：也有很大的不同，对吧？ 在由于......付费......推广帖子或强迫推广帖子而导致的飙升之间，这就像人们并不真正喜欢它但你有点在游戏系统和帖子是的，也许你为一个系统定制它，一个像 Hacker News 这样的分发渠道，但它最后的结果是很多有用的链接。
Jan：是的，这篇文章很有趣，因为我们实际上在内部争论过……正如你提到的，亚马逊太过分了，甚至在谈论 Jeff Bezos，文章中提到的所有东西，比如六页备忘录写作。 这甚至被做死了。 所以......我们有点想知道，人们真的仍然关心阅读杰夫贝佐斯吗？ 而且我认为这篇文章的成功提醒了我，我认为内容中很多最好的想法可能只是以前成功的想法，我们现在可以重新发明。
Jan：你不必害怕以前做得很好的事情。 但这可能只是存在……我们可以利用的内部痴迷。
瑞恩：我非常喜欢。
简：是的。 而且，为了全面披露，我们应该承认，这篇文章在国家询问者关于 Jeff Bezos 的报道前几天也上线了。 所以我认为我们得到了一些帮助。
瑞恩：我们绝不参与勒索。 那纯属巧合。
简：是的，没有。 我们和那件事完全没有关系。
瑞恩：是的，我喜欢这件事，人们花了很多时间尝试逆向工程推广以及使内容成功的方式。 在很多情况下，这个问题的答案是显而易见的。 所需要的只是查看这些平台。 查看高性能内容，并挑选一些导致内容自然浮出水面的特征。
Ryan：在搜索中，你可以对它的结构进行逆向工程。 您可以查看关键字、标题、他们使用的主题。 所以像 Hacker News 一样，有一些话题几乎可以保证会引起人们的共鸣。 我们总是谈论埃隆马斯克、沃伦巴菲特、杰夫贝索斯。 即使它被完成了死亡，它也是有原因的。 这些人有一种神秘的魅力。
Ryan：实际上，我认为查看任何目标分发平台并得出一些可以应用于未来内容的可操作要点实际上并不难。
吉米：我喜欢它。 好吧，伙计们，我觉得我们应该开始结束这件事，因为美国的平均通勤时间是 26 分钟，而我们刚刚结束。 是的，这就像我们的基准。 当你把车开进你的停车位时，我们想结束。
吉米：好的。 所以让我们为这一集尝试一些新的东西。 让我们围着桌子转一圈……每个人都有机会提出一个结束的想法，既然这是新的，我要向你们提出这个问题，我会先走，所以你们有时间考虑一下。
Jimmy： ……好吧，本文没有强调的一件事是电子邮件。 它没有被突出显示，因为没有很多公司在电子邮件方面做得很好的好例子。 所以我很想看到有人把电子邮件优先分发策略放在一起。 有点像 Mattermark 过去做的对吗？ 他们制作了自己的内容，他们拥有可以分发的庞大电子邮件平台，这是一项建立公平的努力，对吗？ 增加电子邮件列表。 因此，我希望看到更多 SaaS 公司利用电子邮件。 这是老式的，但它仍然工作得很好。
Jan: I think we should see the insights for that probably.
Jimmy: That's a good call. That is a good call yeah.
Jan: Yeah. I'll go next. As far as jumping into this, practical advice, I feel like I've worked with a bunch of customers now who sort of come in with zero channels firing and it's always how do we get the machine to start running? Because ideally you're sort of choosing between all of these. But some people aren't at the point yet where they're getting enough traffic to make those kinds of decisions.
Jan: And I think ... you really got to experiment and sort of take all these in and think, "We're going to run a test and see ... " Each channel, and maybe you have some preferences but try each channel, figure out if you can get the needle moving on any of them and then double down on that one for the foreseeable future. But ... don't waste time on a channel where you're not getting the results that you want to be getting. And ... if you are not getting the right results, make sure that you're approaching it correctly vis a vie this article. Closing thought.
Jimmy: Nice.
Ryan: Closing thought in one move I'm going to try and improve the state of content on the entire internet. I'm just going to say simply, "Stop sharing SEO content to social media." SEO like search is a distribution channel. If you're going to do that, customize the post to search. Don't worry about trying to share it on Twitter, Hacker News, or Reddit. There are much better formats for those channels.
Ryan: I think if we do that, all of our content will be better suited to the channels it appears on, we'll have to deal with less hideous spam in all of the nice social places on the internet as well.
Jimmy: That's beautiful. That's a beautiful way to close this out.
Jan: Nice. 好一个。
Jimmy: Cool. 惊人的。 Well as always we're hiring and you can hire us. So that goes both ways. We're always looking for new, awesome people to join our team, and we're taking on more customers. So you can learn all about that at Animalz.co.
Jan: And if you're listening to this on your way to work, have a good day in the office.
Jimmy: Actually if you come work for us you don't have to commute anymore because it's a remote company.
Jan: Nice. Nice, nice. 确切地。
Jimmy: Cool awesome thank you guys.
Jan: Thanks Jimmy. 谢谢瑞恩。 再见。
Ryan: Absolute pleasure.You can listen right here, or on iTunes, Overcast, or Spotify.

Jimmy: Cool. Well welcome back to the Animalz Podcast, after a brief hiatus we're back to chat more content stuff. So Jimmy here. We also have Jan. Say hello Jan.
Jan: What's up?
Jimmy: And then we have Ryan. Ryan welcome.
Ryan: Hello! 再次。
Jimmy: I think it may be useful for people who have not listened to the podcast much in the past or if it's your first time just to sort of say, "Hello. Who are we? Why are we here?" I can kick that off. So Animalz, content marketing agency, we're a team of distributed writers, content strategists, and editors.
Jimmy: We primarily do content for B2B SaaS companies but increasingly are working outside of that demographic. And I'm Jimmy. I'm one of our marketing directors, we have two marketing directors which is a story for another podcast. 是的。 So anyway that's a good little quick intro. And then Jan and Ryan would you guys just introduce yourselves too?
Jan: Yeah Jan. I started Animalz a couple years ago. And today my focus is a little more on the thought leadership side of the business trying to help writers assume the voices of your favorite founders, VCs, CEOs, CMOs, other executives, working on strategy for those kinds of customers. And ... hiring. All that kind of stuff. So that's me.
Ryan: Nice. 我是瑞安。 I've been at Animalz for, coming up to a year and a half now. I'm a content strategist. So I focus on coming up with new strategies for new customers, keyword research, ideation, all the kind of really fun, geek out stuff side of content marketing.
Jimmy: Awesome. 我喜欢它。 Well I'm glad we get to chat with you today Ryan. So Ryan recently wrote a blog post for the Animalz blog titled, "The Secret to Content Promotion is Hidden in Plain Sight". And we're going to dive into that. But I think the place that we should start is moisture-resistant flooring adhesive.
Jimmy: So Ryan could you ... ? Okay so you've worked in content for a long time. You tweeted earlier this week about some of your kind of past gigs in content marketing, this was one that definitely stood out to me and I've heard you mention it before, could you enlighten us a little bit?
Ryan: I absolutely could. Yeah one of my biggest customers when I was working a few years ago was an enterprise flooring company. I've worked with lots of niche B2B companies before, but this was like the most niche, the most B2B of all of those companies and it was kind of intimidating trying to come up with content marketing strategies for it.
Ryan: As yeah ... literally it is adhesive that you affix to different types of flooring. If you have issues with sub-floor moisture management, if you ... the rising water tables start to leech out through the concrete, nightmare. Billion dollar problem. And I was helping the company educate people about this problem and generate leads for their business.
Jimmy: So did you approach this in the way that a lot of B2B content marketers approach content? Like do your keyword research, figure out, what are your short tail opportunities, what are your long-tail opportunities and ... and write for search? Like was there a different ideation process?
Ryan: I'd like to pretend I was that organized a few years ago but SEO was the primary mechanism we went for. 这真的很难。 The post I wrote for Conversion XL about like niche B2B marketing strategies was focused on the solutions we came up to this because it was such a weird niche industry. Lots of really short tail keywords, not a lot of volume. Had to get quite creative.
Ryan: We ended up going for a lot of topics that were tangentially related to software management stuff that the customers would also have problems with. Keywords that had more volume and then almost self-selecting through really specific call to actions, eBooks and stuff.
Jimmy: I love it. 进展如何？ 它奏效了吗？
Ryan: It worked pretty well. I think we ... I hoped it would work better than it did. But I think with lots of B2B content it's a slow burn. We kind of didn't realize how slow it would be. I think the last time I checked in, the site was doing something like 20,000 searches a month from like nothing. So yeah we were happy with it in the end.
Jimmy: That's great. I would imagine those customers are paying a high dollar for those services too.
Ryan: Yeah. 绝对地。 It was ... I think the average customer was something like, it was a six figure deal size or something so you didn't need many customers to come to fruition for it to have like a pretty substantial payoff.
Jimmy: Yeah. 是的。 I would like to do a blog post about that exact topic at some point which is the volume requirements of content and how dramatically it changes depending on your business model. Like Animalz is another example of like we just don't, we don't really require a ton of volume in terms of traffic in order to network for lead generation. And there's lots of other businesses out there like that, it's just SaaS is not one of them.
Ryan: Yeah definitely.
Jan: Are those like expensive keywords Ryan?
Ryan: We went like really, really niche. So a lot of them, not very expensive because there was very little volume for it. We just kind of, we ranked for a lot of them in aggregate. That was kind of the plan we went for.
Jan: Right.
Jimmy: Well you kind of set this up perfectly Ryan to segue into the article you wrote which is about promotion and distribution which is something ... I mean of all the things that people ask us about, that's probably ... it's in the top three for sure. And I love the way you came up with this very simple, helpful, useful model for thinking about content promotion. I assume it's something that you learned and applied in previous jobs too. Could you just kind of walk us ... walk us through it.
Ryan: Yeah absolutely. I think ... there is a lot written about the process of content marketing. About writing, about ideation ... and the one part of it that always struck me as still really mysterious, still really unpredictable, is promotion. I think a lot of us are writers, we spend a lot of time fixating on great ideas, great execution of that. And then we get really frustrated when they just languish in the quiet backwaters of the internet.
Ryan: So I just wanted to reverse engineer some of the really successful we've seen, we've worked with, and try and identify what was it that made them different? Why were they successes? I think the one, the single defining characteristic they had, was they approached distribution right from day one. They viewed it as a challenge to solve, they created content designed explicitly for a given distribution channel. Which I think is quite different to how a lot of content marketers today approach distribution.
Ryan: I think people are quite keen to view promotion as sharing it to social media sites. Can we share it to Growth Hackers? Or Reddit? Without really thinking whether the content itself is appropriate for those channels.
Jimmy: Okay. So let's dig specifically into organic search because that's the first example you highlight that is in our experience the biggest opportunity for essentially any B2B company. If you want ... not cheap traffic, but if you don't want to pay a lot of money for traffic and spend a ton of money over a long period of time, you're basically forced to focus on organic. How do you think about that? There's sort of a way to go about it where it's possible to write an article that's perfectly optimized but is also not very interesting, right? And it's also possible to write stuff that's very interested and not optimized and finding that balance has proven to be a challenge, not just for us but for all content marketers.
Ryan: Yeah I think probably the best way to approach it is to optimize the structure of an article for search. I think there's a lot you can do in terms of like the title tag you go for, the H2 headers, these kind of structural elements that tailor it off towards search, that still allow you a lot of breathing room to be creative, to be interesting, to differentiate yourself from all the existing content that's out there. I don't think search needs to be limiting in that capacity.
Jimmy: Yeah how do you think about this when you're working on leadership thought content? Are you thinking about distribution ahead of coming up with angles and actually writing the articles? Does search play into that? Yeah how do you think about that?
Jan: Search is tricky. Actually I think Ryan may have better perspective on that just recency bias-wise because of his work with a customer where this is relevant. But I will say for my part that thinking about social distribution is usually the key. Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit being the major places and LinkedIn to a lesser degree. But I think if you're not thinking about the channel specifically where you want to send something to then you're probably going to fail unless you are working with a big name or you have some really crazy ideas.
Jan: And it's more than just looking at ... because I think that the playbook people have talked about for a while is, "Okay figure out ... if you're going for social, you have to know that ahead of time." But social today is such a huge landscape of different types of tools and the same post that succeeds on Hacker News is not going to succeed necessarily on Twitter within the certain core group of users you want it to succeed with. So you really have to look at the specific channel. Sorry not just channel but platform where you want posts to succeed.
Jan: So yeah I would definitely be looking at those ahead of ... even coming up with an idea for a post most of the time.
Ryan: Yeah I think this is like the central thesis of the argument. Like there was a time, jump back like five, ten years, where you could put content out into the world, not have to necessarily concern yourself too much with a particular distribution channel and you would still stand a good chance of it performing well.
Ryan: There was less content out there to compete with generally, I think people were slightly less discerning because they hadn't been exposed to as much, and you could do this kind of catch-all approach. I think today it's just too busy, too crowded, every network is clamoring, full of marketers wanting to get their pieces out into the world. The only way you can stand out in that is to have something that is absolutely tailored to that one channel that you're sharing it on.
Jimmy: Yeah. You just teased an important thing which I think we should pull that thread a little bit which is expectation-setting as you're thinking through content distribution. And so with organic specifically, there is this problem where the keywords that have the highest volume are the most competitive because people chase that volume. They tend to be short tail and just kind of pretty broad searches which makes them challenging to go after and even if you are able to achieve those rankings, not particularly valuable in terms of qualified traffic.
Jimmy: And so as we talk to clients, [inaudible 00:11:20] and you got the long tail, middle of the funnel-ish opportunities because they're easier to get those rankings, they're better-qualified traffic, et cetera. But there is this problem of expectation-setting, right? Where people's eyes get big when they see big volume and they think about those big traffic numbers. And it's a really imperfect kind of way to go about your content strategy, right? When you're just chasing big keywords. So I guess Ryan a question for you is how do you think about that? You talk to clients all the time. And as you're talking to them about promotion and distribution and what the strategy's going to look like. What are you hearing from people about traffic? Their expectations? Are they comfortable with sort of the low traffic, longer tail opportunities in general?
Ryan: Yeah one of the things that strikes me, I think a lot of customers don't actually view SEO as a distribution mechanism, which is actually a really interesting challenge.
Jimmy: That's a great point. Really a great point.
Ryan: Yeah we create lots of different buckets of content. SEO content is always the one that gets banded about, it's the one that people always want to create. I think they don't realize that in the same way that you would create thought leadership to maybe be shared on Slack or resonate on Twitter, SEO content is designed for that particular channel, that particular mechanism. In terms of like ... going after keywords as well, I've probably spent my entire career going after hundred search a month keywords.
Ryan: Few people do it. As you say people's eyes go big when they look for these huge numbers. But quite often in aggregate, which is, I'm going to come back to this phrase a lot I think in aggregate, articles that go after these can have substantial volume. No article will ever rank for one keyword. There's a kind of disconnect between how we think about targeting SEO content and how it actually functions in reality. We come up with one core keyword, we create an article designed to work for that, but that article can then rank for thousands, literally thousands, of related keyword variants.
Ryan: Even if some of those have like ten searches a month, in aggregate, that is a substantial amount of traffic. I think a lot of customers leave that on the table when they go for the big, really competitive, really seemingly attractive keywords.
Jimmy: Yeah definitely. All right so one question I get on sales calls all the time is, "Okay so you guys write articles, they're great, you optimize them. Then what?" How do you actually ensure that ... they are able to get traffic as they compete with a bunch of other articles that are really good and also well-optimized?
Ryan: Yeah I ... a lot of them, even customers, content managers at Animalz that I talk to, they always approach SEO like it's a really complicated thing. They don't know how to match up the article they're writing to this algorithmic black box. But I think a lot of the time it boils down to really simple heuristics. Coming up with a primary keyword that is feasible for your domain strength, it has topical relevance to other things you've created before. That's obviously a good starting point.
Ryan: I think building out secondary, like related keywords is also really, really important. So this is the example we actually included in the post. Something Ad Espresso did beautifully with their content, they wrote about Instagram hashtags you should use for every day of the week. Now obviously the core keyword there is like Instagram hashtags. But within that there's a subset of information which his kind of essential to the narrative of the article which is ... hashtags for Monday, hashtags for Tuesday and so on.
Ryan: Each of those related keywords has their own volume. It makes sense to include it within the scope of this one article and in doing so you can rank for this huge base of related keywords. This is what I think a lot of people started using Clearscope for as well quite interestingly. Basically scraping existing articles to see which keywords and which topics appear most commonly and using that as their own heuristic for the information they should include in their article as well.
Jan: The cool thing too about that piece is that going back to what you were saying earlier Jimmy about the tension between creating content that ranks and content that's good. Is that is the longest, most densely packed with data, most valuable piece of content on Instagram hashtags that you can find.
Jan: If you google "Instagram hashtags" every other post on the front page is ... I would say a third or a fourth of the level of detail and resolution. And to me, I think from Ad Espresso's point of view, it's almost like kind of like their own thought leadership. It's like they are just showing via the sort of brute force needed to create the article that they are sort of the most useful, the highest minded Facebook ad resource that's out there. And it creates a brand, right? It leaves that indelible impression in your mind after you read the piece about them. So yeah I think there definitely is a way and that's kind of like identifying those opportunities where you can create something really great that will also potentially rank really highly and give you traffic or give you the targeted kind of traffic you want.
Jan: That is maybe kind of like an implicit idea in this section that's like, those are the things you want to pursue with this distribution strategy. You want to find those kinds of things. I don't know does that make sense Ryan?
Ryan: Yeah totally. That brings me to another point as well which is that ... I think whenever you're creating content for search, obviously the intention is to outperform the existing content. I think a lot of people are familiar with this skyscraper methodology where you are effectively ... you are trying to beat it on the dimension of length or comprehensive nature of the information. That is ... in a lot of cases that works beautifully. I think Ad Espresso executed that flawlessly. I do have this kind of hypothesis that is becoming less and less effective. The more content we see in the world, the more of this skyscraper stuff we see implemented. And it's a bit of a race to the bottom I think.
Ryan: We're going to end up with search results that have 10, 30,000 word articles in it and it's just, it's bad for the user experience. Nobody wants to sit and read through all of that. So I think some of the most interesting search plays I'm seeing of people that are finding new and different dimensions to outperform content. Which is why a lot of the stuff Jan actually does, with like the thought leadership side of things, finding these narrative angles, these narrative hooks, stuff that is ... it matches the intent but it's also contrarian as well or it offers a perspective that is different. That is another really great way to outperform content without escalating in this arms race of length.
Jimmy: Yeah definitely. Actually the question I wanted to ask you Jan is like ... there's leaps that need to be made to get from the keyword, right? So you start with a keyword. You have to make this leap to get to what's your topic? And then make another leap to what's your angle? 你将如何处理这个问题？ And I feel like we often see that content marketers can make that leap from keyword to topic but that usually is just like "Best Practices for X" or "Ultimate Guide to X" and getting to that next level, I think that's where the really good stuff is. But that's also the really challenging part.
Jimmy: And this goes way back to an article you wrote for the Animalz blog about how to find the right angles for the topics you write about. How do you think about that in terms of ... when you're sort of forced to go for a certain keyword, how you make those two leaps?
Jan: Yeah totally. Yeah I think Ryan's totally right with everything he just said. And I think one way that ... like for example with Ad Espresso, one way they sort of circumvent that is by just using a ton of the data that they collect from users and from ... themselves and from stuff that they notice in their product. That's how they rank so high for Facebook ads cost which is obviously a hugely searched term. It's because they actually have a ton of data on how much people end up paying for their Facebook ads at different times of day, across different countries, marketing to different demographics, that sort of thing.
Jan: So I think for Ad Espresso for example, the topic Facebook ads cost, the angle is, "We have proprietary information, right, that we're going to share. And that's what makes our content more valuable and that's why people click on it often and it ranks higher than everything else." So that makes sense. Say people don't have proprietary data that they can share or they don't have that kind of data, for them, often you'll have ... a company establish a ... that was just to establish a voice and an angle on topics.
Jan: I think some good examples of this, Wistia, Drift, both different but really voice-driven companies and you can instantly tell if you're reading a post from a Wistia blog even if it's not on the Wistia blog. So you can sort of build a voice in that way. Kind of that narrative way. 是的。 There are a bunch of ways to do that. I think you can also use special expertise that you have. We talk about Slab later in this article but Slab for example, running a company that does knowledge management. Like they help you ... Slab is a tool for building an internal knowledge base, right? So they are the world's foremost experts basically in knowledge bases because they spend however many hours a day, days a week, working on that topic specifically.
Jan: So they can come at everything from an angle of being the experts in knowledge management. The key is being honest and identifying what your actual angle is. If you're not an expert don't try to pretend to be an expert. It's going to be really hard to compete with just a undifferentiated ultimate guide as you point out. So you have to find ... your angle, I would say first, and then topics. Over time, it gets easier because once you identify an angle that works, it's not like you have to reinvent the wheel for each article. And that'll actually help you produce articles a lot faster, a lot better, once you have sort of hammered that out. But you have to figure it out first. 这有帮助吗？
Jimmy: Yeah. Yeah no that's great.
Jan: Yeah.
Jimmy: That makes me think of something that I saw this week which I thought was interesting but also stressed me out which was that some companies, so you have expertise in the thing that you do so maybe that's like an internal knowledge base but as you grow a business you develop expertise in other things too. And so some companies write about those things and so Buffer is a great example. And so recently I saw a post from them that was about how they were addressing their gender pay gap.
Jimmy: And so they've developed this expertise as they've studied this problem and tried to address it in their hiring and their salaries and whatever. And the human being in me thought that this was, I was thrilled that they were writing about this and it's really interesting. And the content marketer in me was sort of stressed out because I was thinking about how if this post gains traction in search for terms like, "gender pay gap" that it's going to skew the conversion rates because the traffic is not qualified in terms of people signing up for a social media scheduling tool. And that really stressed me out.
Jimmy: And I bring this up only because it is an example of ... sort of, this happens a lot, right? Where people have great ideas and they get optimized for search and it still may bring in unqualified traffic but it's still worth doing. 我想。 If nothing else than just for the greater good of the world.
Jan: Yeah and for the positive signals to Google that gets sent by you getting a lot of Traffic, right?
Jimmy: That's true too. That is true too.
Jan: And they would agree.
Jimmy: Ryan could you? So there was two other examples you highlighted, Jan, to use one of them, could you just quickly run us through the two other examples that you included in this article as successful case studies of the one article, one channel idea?
Ryan: Yeah totally. So I had SFOX as well, which is a cryptocurrency trading platform. Again, one of like super-niche companies. They actually focused on Twitter distribution. Like if you spend any time on Twitter kind of vaguely engaging with the cryptocurrency talk that goes on, you realize that crypto-Twitter is this huge, thriving community. Always see all these memes about huddling with cryptocurrencies I've never heard of.
Ryan: So what they did, they created this community-collated guide pulling together expertise of different Bitcoin experts, all of which happened to have very active, very engaged social media followings on Twitter. So not only was it this great kind of community-driven endeavor. It wasn't just a jaded marketing piece. It also has distribution built into the absolute structure of the article.
Ryan: Basically if you make people look good in an article, it takes care of distribution. You've incentivized them to share it for you. So I think that was a really, really smart example.
Jan: It takes a lot to get people to recognize you if you're new in a space like SFOX was. And they didn't have the best name brand at the time. And ... the way I think about this now, looking at this tweet, it's like, this is how you sort of can seed, you seed your existence with ... in this case important people but also a lot of other people. And it just sort of plants, it plants your brand in their head so that when they see it again later on, they might, they'll have a different impression of it. Probably a positive impression because they were mentioned in a piece. But they're also like -
Ryan: Yeah endorsement by association kind of thing.
Jan: Yeah. They'll be like, "I heard of that before." And they'll be willing to look deeper into it and create the sort of small associations over time." I think that's powerful.
Ryan: Yeah so I loved that article as well. Especially when it's like, it is very niche. And although we always talk about social media, vanity metrics, not obsessing over that kind of thing. I think when, as Jan said, your primary intention of recognition within a space that is hugely valuable for a platform like SFOX so retweets, likes, mentions, and stuff, actually quite a valuable metric in their instance.
Ryan: The other option was ... like another company that Jan mentioned as well, Slab, team knowledge base tool. I love this article. I love all of these articles. I think they're genuinely interesting to read. Which, as a jaded marketer, is like ... is always a very cool thing to come across. This one example was how Jeff Bezos turned narrative into Amazon's competitive advantage. Which I think saw a traffic spike of Hacker News of like just shy of 15,000 page views in a single day. 这真的很酷。 It's a concept that's kind of done to death like Amazon, positioning, business strategy. Not only that it was done with an audience of really savvy people that have been exposed to all manner of content marketing over the years.
Ryan: But I think what they did really well was position it in a really interesting way. Took a novel approach to a really overdone story. They voice an opinion as well, it's quite a polarizing thing to do. But even people disagreeing with you is a great way to raise awareness of something. Prompting discussion. I even got a response from an actual Amazon executive which has to be like the gold standard of this kind of content.
Jimmy: Yeah that's awesome. And I know that some people are skeptical of Hacker News because the spike is ... it sometimes, it's just like, it's like a hit of endorphins but you don't actually get a lot of value from it. 并非总是如此。 正确的？ Like I just plugged this article into HREFs to see how many links it has and HREFs is reporting 1500 links from 177 unique referring domains. Which his absolutely insane.
Jimmy: And like Jan was saying earlier, those are all, whether or not this is the article that ends up converting a ton of customers. The positive signals make it easier for you to rank the thing that is super-close to the business next time.
Jan: There's also a huge difference, right? Between a spike that comes as a result of ... either paid ... promotion of a post or coerced promotion of a post where it's like people don't really like it but you're sort of gaming the system and a post where yeah maybe you tailor it for a system, a distribution channel like Hacker News but the result at the end of it is a lot of links which are useful.
Jan: Yeah this post is interesting because we actually had some internal debate over whether ... as you'd mentioned, Amazon is just so overdone and even talking about Jeff Bezos, all the sort of things mentioned in the piece like the six page memo writing. That's even been done to death. And so ... we were kind of wondering, do people actually still care about reading about Jeff Bezos? And I think that the success of this post reminded me that I think a lot of the best ideas in content are probably just ones that have succeeded before and that we can reinvent right for now.
Jan: And you shouldn't be afraid necessarily of things that have done really well before. But it might just be that there is ... an internal obsession that we can tap into.
Ryan: I love that totally.
Jan: Yeah. And also just for full disclosure we should admit that this post also went live like a few days before the National Enquirer story about Jeff Bezos. So I think we were helped a little.
Ryan: We were in no way involved with the blackmail. That was pure coincidence.
Jan: Yeah no. We had nothing to do with that at all.
Ryan: Yeah so the thing I love about this, people spend a lot of time trying to reverse engineer promotion and what ways that that makes content successful. In a lot of cases the answer to that is literally in plain sight. All it takes is looking at these platforms. Looking at the high-performing content, and picking at a handful of characteristics that cause content to kind of naturally rise to the surface.
Ryan: In search you can reverse engineer the structure of it. You can look at the keywords, the headers, the topics they use. So in like Hacker News, there are some topics which are just almost guaranteed to resonate with people. We always talk about Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos. Even though it is done to death, it's kind of done to death for a reason. There is this kind of mystical fascination with these people.
Ryan: It's actually not that difficult I think to look at any target distribution platform and come away with a handful of actionable takeaways that you can apply to your content going forward.
Jimmy: I love it. All right guys I feel like we should start wrapping this up because the average commute time in the United States is 26 minutes and we're just over that. Yeah that's like our benchmark. We want to be wrapping up as you pull into your parking spot.
Jimmy: Okay. So let's try something new for this episode. Let's just go around the table and ... everyone has an opportunity to offer a closing thought and since this is new and I'm springing this on you guys, I'll go first so you have a minute to think about it.
Jimmy: The ... okay one thing that was not highlighted in this article is email. And it was not highlighted because there's not a lot of good examples of companies that do a great job with email. And so I would love to see someone put together an email first distribution strategy. Sort of like what Mattermark used to do right? They did their own content, they had this massive email platform on which they could distribute and that's an equity-building endeavor, right? To grow an email list. And so I would love to see more SaaS companies leverage email. It's old-fashioned but it still works really well.
Jan: I think we should see the insights for that probably.
Jimmy: That's a good call. That is a good call yeah.
Jan: Yeah. I'll go next. As far as jumping into this, practical advice, I feel like I've worked with a bunch of customers now who sort of come in with zero channels firing and it's always how do we get the machine to start running? Because ideally you're sort of choosing between all of these. But some people aren't at the point yet where they're getting enough traffic to make those kinds of decisions.
Jan: And I think ... you really got to experiment and sort of take all these in and think, "We're going to run a test and see ... " Each channel, and maybe you have some preferences but try each channel, figure out if you can get the needle moving on any of them and then double down on that one for the foreseeable future. But ... don't waste time on a channel where you're not getting the results that you want to be getting. And ... if you are not getting the right results, make sure that you're approaching it correctly vis a vie this article. Closing thought.
Jimmy: Nice.
Ryan: Closing thought in one move I'm going to try and improve the state of content on the entire internet. I'm just going to say simply, "Stop sharing SEO content to social media." SEO like search is a distribution channel. If you're going to do that, customize the post to search. Don't worry about trying to share it on Twitter, Hacker News, or Reddit. There are much better formats for those channels.
Ryan: I think if we do that, all of our content will be better suited to the channels it appears on, we'll have to deal with less hideous spam in all of the nice social places on the internet as well.
Jimmy: That's beautiful. That's a beautiful way to close this out.
Jan: Nice. 好一个。
Jimmy: Cool. 惊人的。 Well as always we're hiring and you can hire us. So that goes both ways. We're always looking for new, awesome people to join our team, and we're taking on more customers. So you can learn all about that at Animalz.co.
Jan: And if you're listening to this on your way to work, have a good day in the office.
Jimmy: Actually if you come work for us you don't have to commute anymore because it's a remote company.
Jan: Nice. Nice, nice. 确切地。
Jimmy: Cool awesome thank you guys.
Jan: Thanks Jimmy. 谢谢瑞恩。 再见。
Ryan: Absolute pleasure.