內容推廣的秘訣 | 第18話

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吉米：酷。 歡迎回到 Animalz 播客，在短暫的中斷之後，我們回來聊天更多內容。 所以吉米在這裡。 我們也有 Jan。Say hello Jan。
簡：怎麼了？
吉米：然後我們有瑞恩。 瑞安歡迎。
瑞恩：你好！ 再次。
吉米：我認為這可能對那些過去沒有經常聽播客的人有用，或者如果你是第一次只是說，“你好。我們是誰？我們為什麼在這裡？” 我可以開始了。 所以，Animalz，內容營銷機構，我們是一個由分佈式作家、內容策略師和編輯組成的團隊。
Jimmy：我們主要為 B2B SaaS 公司提供內容，但越來越多地在該人群之外工作。 我是吉米。 我是我們的營銷總監之一，我們有兩個營銷總監，這是另一個播客的故事。 是的。 所以無論如何，這是一個很好的快速介紹。 然後 Jan 和 Ryan，你們也可以自我介紹一下嗎？
Jan：是的 Jan。幾年前我創辦了 Animalz。 今天，我的重點更多地放在企業的思想領導方面，試圖幫助作家承擔​​你最喜歡的創始人、風險投資、首席執行官、首席營銷官和其他高管的聲音，為這類客戶制定戰略。 還有……招聘。 都是那種東西。 所以這就是我。
瑞恩：很好。 我是瑞安。 我已經在 Animalz 工作了一年半。 我是一名內容策略師。 因此，我專注於為新客戶制定新策略、關鍵字研究、構思，以及所有真正有趣的、極客內容營銷方面的東西。
吉米：太棒了。 我喜歡它。 好吧，我很高興我們今天能和你聊天，瑞恩。 因此，Ryan 最近為 Animalz 博客寫了一篇博文，題為“內容推廣的秘密隱藏在顯而易見的地方”。 我們將深入研究。 但我認為我們應該開始的地方是防潮地板膠。
吉米：那麼瑞恩你能……嗎？ 好的，您已經在內容領域工作了很長時間。 你本週早些時候在推特上發布了關於你過去在內容營銷方面的一些演出，這對我來說絕對是突出的，我之前聽你提到過，你能給我們一點啟發嗎？
瑞恩：我絕對可以。 是的，我幾年前工作時最大的客戶之一是一家企業地板公司。 我之前曾與許多利基 B2B 公司合作過，但這就像所有這些公司中最利基、最多的 B2B 一樣，試圖為其製定內容營銷策略有點令人生畏。
瑞恩：是的……從字面上看，它是一種粘合劑，您可以將其粘貼到不同類型的地板上。 如果您在地板下的水分管理方面遇到問題，如果您……上升的地下水位開始從混凝土中滲出，噩夢。 十億美元的問題。 我正在幫助公司教育人們了解這個問題並為他們的業務創造潛在客戶。
吉米：那麼您是否以許多 B2B 內容營銷人員處理內容的方式來處理這個問題？ 就像你的關鍵詞研究一樣，弄清楚你的短尾機會是什麼，你的長尾機會是什麼……然後為搜索而寫作？ 就像有一個不同的構思過程？
Ryan：我想假裝幾年前我就是這樣組織的，但 SEO 是我們追求的主要機制。 這真的很難。 我為 Conversion XL 寫的關於利基 B2B 營銷策略的帖子專注於我們提出的解決方案，因為這是一個非常奇怪的利基行業。 很多真正的短尾關鍵詞，而不是很多數量。 不得不變得很有創意。
Ryan：我們最終選擇了很多與客戶也會遇到問題的軟件管理相關的主題。 關鍵詞數量更多，然後幾乎可以通過真正具體的行動號召、電子書和其他東西自行選擇。
吉米：我喜歡它。 進展如何？ 它奏效了嗎？
瑞恩：效果很好。 我想我們......我希望它會比它做得更好。 但我認為對於大量 B2B 內容來說，它的燃燒速度很慢。 我們有點沒有意識到它會有多慢。 我想我上次簽到時，該網站每月進行的搜索量大約為 20,000 次。 所以是的，我們最終對它感到滿意。
吉米：那太好了。 我想那些客戶也會為這些服務付出高昂的代價。
瑞恩：是的。 絕對地。 它是......我認為普通客戶是這樣的，它是六位數的交易規模或其他東西，所以你不需要很多客戶來實現它以獲得相當可觀的回報。
吉米：是的。 是的。 我想在某個時候寫一篇關於這個確切主題的博客文章，即內容的數量要求以及它根據您的業務模型而發生的巨大變化。 就像 Animalz 是另一個我們不喜歡的例子一樣，我們實際上並不需要大量的流量來建立網絡以產生潛在客戶。 還有很多其他類似的業務，只是 SaaS 不是其中之一。
瑞恩：是的，當然。
Jan：那些像昂貴的關鍵字 Ryan 嗎？
瑞恩：我們真的非常非常小眾。 所以很多，不是很貴，因為它的體積很小。 我們只是在某種程度上，我們對其中的很多進行了總體排名。 這就是我們的計劃。
簡：對。
吉米：嗯，你把這個設置得很好，瑞恩繼續寫你寫的關於推廣和分發的文章……我的意思是人們問我們的所有事情，這可能是……它在肯定是前三名。 我喜歡你想出這個非常簡單、有用、有用的模型來思考內容推廣的方式。 我想這也是你在以前的工作中學到和應用的東西。 你能不能帶我們走……帶我們走過它。
瑞恩：是的，絕對的。 我認為……關於內容營銷過程的文章很多。 關於寫作，關於構想……其中一直讓我感到仍然非常神秘，仍然非常不可預測的部分是晉升。 我認為我們很多人都是作家，我們花了很多時間專注於偉大的想法，偉大的執行。 然後，當他們在互聯網安靜的死水中憔悴時，我們會感到非常沮喪。
Ryan：所以我只是想對我們已經看到、合作過的一些真正成功的產品進行逆向工程，並嘗試找出是什麼讓它們與眾不同？ 他們為什麼成功？ 我認為他們擁有的唯一定義特徵是他們從第一天開始就進行分發。 他們認為這是一個需要解決的挑戰，他們創建了專門為給定分銷渠道設計的內容。 我認為這與當今許多內容營銷人員的分發方式完全不同。
Ryan：我認為人們非常熱衷於將促銷視為與社交媒體網站分享。 我們可以分享給增長黑客嗎？ 還是Reddit？ 沒有真正考慮內容本身是否適合這些渠道。
吉米：好的。 因此，讓我們專門研究有機搜索，因為這是您強調的第一個示例，根據我們的經驗，這對於基本上任何 B2B 公司來說都是最大的機會。 如果你想要......不是便宜的流量，但如果你不想為流量付出很多錢並在很長一段時間內花費大量資金，那麼你基本上被迫專注於有機。 你怎麼看？ 有一種方法可以解決這個問題，可以寫一篇完美優化但也不是很有趣的文章，對吧？ 也有可能編寫非常感興趣且未優化的內容，並且發現平衡已被證明是一個挑戰，不僅對我們，而且對所有內容營銷人員都是如此。
Ryan：是的，我認為最好的方法可能是優化文章的搜索結構。 我認為你可以做很多事情，比如標題標籤、H2 標題、這些適合搜索的結構元素，仍然讓你有很大的呼吸空間來發揮創造力，成為有趣的是，將自己與現有的所有內容區分開來。 我認為搜索不需要限制這種能力。
吉米：是的，當你在研究領導力思想內容時，你是怎麼想的？ 您是否在提出角度並實際撰寫文章之前考慮分發？ 搜索會起作用嗎？ 是啊，你怎麼看？
Jan：搜索很棘手。 實際上，我認為 Ryan 可能對最近的偏見有更好的看法，因為他與一個相關的客戶合作。 但我會說，考慮社會分配通常是關鍵。 Twitter、Hacker News、Reddit 是主要的地方，LinkedIn 在較小程度上。 但我認為，如果您沒有特別考慮要發送內容的頻道，那麼您可能會失敗，除非您正在與大牌合作，或者您有一些非常瘋狂的想法。
簡：這不僅僅是看……因為我認為人們已經談論了一段時間的劇本是，“好吧，弄清楚……如果你要去社交，你必須提前知道這一點。” 但是今天的社交是一個由不同類型工具組成的巨大景觀，在黑客新聞上成功的同一篇文章不一定會在你希望它成功的特定核心用戶群中在 Twitter 上成功。 所以你真的要看具體的渠道。 抱歉，不僅是頻道，還有您希望帖子成功的平台。
簡：所以是的，我肯定會先看那些……甚至大部分時間都會想出一個帖子的想法。
瑞恩：是的，我認為這就像爭論的中心論點。 就像曾經有過五到十年的時間一樣，您可以將內容髮佈到世界上，而不必過多地關注特定的分發渠道，您仍然很有可能獲得良好的表現。
Ryan：一般來說，可以與之競爭的內容較少，我認為人們的眼光略差一些，因為他們沒有接觸到那麼多，你可以採用這種包羅萬象的方法。 我認為今天太忙了，太擁擠了，每個網絡都在叫囂，到處都是想要把他們的作品推向世界的營銷人員。 您可以在其中脫穎而出的唯一方法是擁有絕對適合您共享的那個頻道的東西。
吉米：是的。 您剛剛取笑了一件重要的事情，我認為我們應該稍微拉一下該線程，這是在您考慮內容分發時設定期望值。 因此，特別是有機，存在這樣一個問題，即數量最多的關鍵字最具競爭力，因為人們追逐那個數量。 它們往往是短尾，只是一種相當廣泛的搜索，這使得它們難以追求，即使你能夠達到這些排名，在合格流量方面也不是特別有價值。
吉米：所以當我們與客戶交談時，[聽不清 00:11:20] 你得到了長尾，處於漏斗式機會的中間，因為他們更容易獲得這些排名，他們是更合格的流量，等等。 但是有這個期望設定的問題，對吧？ 當人們看到大流量並想到那些大流量數字時，他們的眼睛會變大。 這是一種非常不完美的內容策略方式，對吧？ 當您只是追逐大關鍵字時。 所以我想瑞安問你一個問題是你怎麼看？ 您一直在與客戶交談。 當您與他們談論促銷和分銷以及策略將是什麼樣子時。 你從人們那裡聽到什麼關於交通的信息？ 他們的期望？ 他們對一般的低流量、長尾機會感到滿意嗎？
Ryan：是的，讓我印象深刻的一件事是，我認為很多客戶實際上並不將 SEO 視為一種分發機制，這實際上是一個非常有趣的挑戰。
吉米：這是一個很好的觀點。 真的很重要。
Ryan：是的，我們創建了許多不同的內容桶。 搜索引擎優化內容始終是被捆綁的內容，它是人們一直想要創建的內容。 我認為他們沒有意識到，就像您創建思想領導力以在 Slack 上分享或在 Twitter 上引起共鳴一樣，SEO 內容是為特定渠道、特定機制設計的。 就喜歡......搜索關鍵字而言，我可能整個職業生涯都在追求每月搜索數百個關鍵字。
瑞恩：很少有人這樣做。 正如你所說，人們在尋找這些巨大的數字時會睜大眼睛。 但總的來說，我會經常回到這個短語，我認為總體而言，關注這些的文章可能會有很大的數量。 沒有文章會為一個關鍵字排名。 我們如何看待針對 SEO 內容的方式與它在現實中的實際運作方式之間存在一種脫節。 我們提出了一個核心關鍵字，我們創建了一篇專為此而設計的文章，但該文章隨後可以為數千個相關的關鍵字變體排名。
瑞恩：即使其中一些人每月有十次搜索，總的來說，這也是相當大的流量。 我認為很多客戶在選擇大的、真正有競爭力的、看起來很有吸引力的關鍵詞時，都會把它放在桌面上。
吉米：是的，當然。 好吧，所以我在銷售電話中一直收到的一個問題是，“好吧，你們寫文章，它們很棒，你優化它們。然後呢？” 您實際上如何確保......他們能夠在與其他許多非常好的並且經過良好優化的文章競爭時獲得流量？
Ryan：是的，我……他們中的很多人，甚至是我與之交談的 Animalz 的客戶、內容經理，他們總是將 SEO 視為一件非常複雜的事情。 他們不知道如何將他們正在寫的文章與這個算法黑匣子相匹配。 但我認為很多時候它歸結為非常簡單的啟發式方法。 提出一個對您的域強度可行的主要關鍵字，它與您之前創建的其他內容具有主題相關性。 這顯然是一個很好的起點。
Ryan：我認為建立次要的，比如相關的關鍵詞也非常非常重要。 所以這是我們在帖子中實際包含的示例。 Ad Espresso 在他們的內容上做得很好，他們寫了關於你應該在一周中的每一天使用的 Instagram 主題標籤。 現在很明顯，那裡的核心關鍵字就像 Instagram 的主題標籤。 但其中有一個信息子集，他對文章的敘述很重要，那就是……星期一的主題標籤，星期二的主題標籤等等。
Ryan：每個相關的關鍵詞都有自己的數量。 將其包含在本文的範圍內是有意義的，這樣您就可以為這個龐大的相關關鍵字庫進行排名。 這也是我認為很多人開始使用 Clearscope 的原因，也很有趣。 基本上是抓取現有文章以查看哪些關鍵字和哪些主題最常出現，並將其用作他們自己的啟發式方法，以了解他們應該在文章中包含的信息。
Jan：關於那篇文章的另一個很酷的地方是，回到你之前吉米所說的關於創建排名和好的內容之間的緊張關係。 那是你能在 Instagram 標籤上找到的最長、最密集的數據、最有價值的內容嗎？
Jan：如果你用谷歌搜索“Instagram 主題標籤”，首頁上的所有其他帖子都是……我會說細節和分辨率水平的三分之一或四分之一。 對我來說，我認為從 Ad Espresso 的角度來看，這幾乎有點像他們自己的思想領導力。 就好像他們只是通過創建文章所需的那種蠻力來展示它們是最有用的，最有思想的 Facebook 廣告資源。 它創造了一個品牌，對吧？ 閱讀有關它們的文章後，它會在您的腦海中留下不可磨滅的印象。 所以是的，我認為肯定有一種方法，這有點像識別那些機會，在這些機會中你可以創造出非常棒的東西，這些東西也可能排名非常高，並為你提供流量或為你提供你想要的目標流量。
Jan：這可能有點像本節中的一個隱含想法，就像，這些是你想要通過這種分發策略追求的東西。 你想找到那些東西。 我不知道這有意義嗎瑞恩？
瑞恩：完全是的。 這也讓我想到了另一點……我認為，每當您為搜索創建內容時，顯然目的是要超越現有內容。 我認為很多人都熟悉這種摩天大樓的方法論，你實際上是在……你試圖在信息的長度或綜合性質的維度上擊敗它。 那就是……在很多情況下效果很好。 我認為 Ad Espresso 完美地執行了這一點。 我確實有這種假設變得越來越無效。 我們在世界上看到的內容越多，我們看到的摩天大樓的實施就越多。 我認為這是一場逐底競賽。
Ryan：我們最終會得到包含 10 到 30,000 字文章的搜索結果，這對用戶體驗很不利。 沒有人願意坐下來閱讀所有這些。 所以我認為我看到的一些最有趣的搜索遊戲是人們正在尋找新的和不同的維度來超越內容。 這就是為什麼 Jan 實際上做了很多事情，比如事物的思想領導力，找到這些敘事角度，這些敘事鉤子，這些東西……它符合意圖，但它也是逆向的，或者它提供了一個觀點不同。 這是在這場軍備競賽中超越內容而不升級的另一種非常好的方法。
吉米：是的，當然。 實際上，我想問你 Jan 的問題是......需要從關鍵字中獲得飛躍，對嗎？ 所以你從一個關鍵字開始。 你必須做出這個飛躍才能找到你的主題？ 然後再飛躍你的角度是什麼？ 你將如何處理這個問題？ 而且我覺得我們經常看到內容營銷人員可以實現從關鍵字到主題的飛躍，但這通常就像“X 的最佳實踐”或“X 的終極指南”並進入下一個層次，我認為這才是真正的好東西是。 但這也是真正具有挑戰性的部分。
吉米：這可以追溯到你為 Animalz 博客寫的一篇文章，關於如何為你所寫的主題找到正確的角度。 您如何看待……當您被迫使用某個關鍵字時，您是如何實現這兩個飛躍的？
簡：完全是的。 是的，我認為瑞恩對他剛才所說的一切都是完全正確的。 而且我認為一種方式......例如使用 Ad Espresso，一種他們規避的方式就是使用他們從用戶和......他們自己以及他們注意到的東西中收集的大量數據他們的產品。 這就是他們在 Facebook 廣告成本中排名如此之高的原因，這顯然是一個搜索量很大的詞。 這是因為他們實際上擁有大量數據，說明人們在一天中的不同時間、不同國家/地區最終為 Facebook 廣告支付了多少費用、針對不同的人口統計數據進行營銷等等。
Jan：所以我認為以 Ad Espresso 為例，Facebook 廣告成本這個話題的角度是，“我們有專有信息，對，我們要分享。這就是讓我們的內容更有價值的原因，這就是人們點擊的原因經常在它上面，它的排名比其他所有東西都高。” 所以這是有道理的。 假設人們沒有可以共享的專有數據，或者他們沒有那種數據，對他們來說，通常你會......一家公司建立一個......這只是為了建立一個聲音和一個話題的角度。
Jan：我認為這方面的一些很好的例子，Wistia 和 Drift，它們都是不同但真正由語音驅動的公司，即使它不在 Wistia 博客上，你也可以立即判斷你是否正在閱讀來自 Wistia 博客的帖子。 所以你可以通過這種方式建立一種聲音。 那種敘述方式。 是的。 有很多方法可以做到這一點。 我認為您也可以使用您擁有的特殊專業知識。 我們將在本文後面討論 Slab，但以 Slab 為例，它經營一家從事知識管理的公司。 就像他們幫助你一樣...... Slab 是一種用於構建內部知識庫的工具，對吧？ 因此，他們基本上是知識庫領域的世界上最重要的專家，因為他們每天、每週花費多少小時、專門研究該主題。
Jan：所以他們可以從成為知識管理專家的角度來解決所有問題。 關鍵是誠實並確定您的實際角度是什麼。 如果您不是專家，請不要假裝自己是專家。 正如您所指出的，僅與一個無差別的終極指南競爭真的很難。 所以你必須找到......你的角度，我會先說，然後是主題。 隨著時間的推移，它會變得更容易，因為一旦你確定了一個可行的角度，你就不必為每篇文章重新發明輪子。 一旦你確定了這一點，這實際上會幫助你更快、更好地製作文章。 但你必須先弄清楚。 這有幫助嗎？
吉米：是的。 是的，不，那太好了。
簡：是的。
吉米：這讓我想起了我這週看到的一些東西，我認為這很有趣，但也讓我感到壓力很大，那就是一些公司，所以你在你所做的事情上擁有專業知識，這可能就像一個內部知識庫，但作為你發展業務，您也可以發展其他方面的專業知識。 所以一些公司寫了這些東西，所以 Buffer 就是一個很好的例子。 所以最近我看到他們發的一篇文章，是關於他們如何解決性別薪酬差距的。
吉米：所以他們在研究這個問題並試圖在他們的招聘和工資等方面解決這個問題時，已經發展了這種專業知識。 我內心的人認為這是，我很高興他們正在寫這個，這真的很有趣。 我的內容營銷人員有點壓力，因為我在想如果這篇文章在搜索“性別薪酬差距”之類的詞時獲得牽引力，它會扭曲轉化率，因為流量不符合條件人們註冊了社交媒體調度工具。 這真的讓我很緊張。
吉米：我提出這個只是因為它是一個例子......有點，這種情況經常發生，對吧？ 人們有很好的想法並且他們針對搜索進行了優化，它仍然可能帶來不合格的流量，但它仍然值得做。 我想。 如果沒有別的，只是為了世界的更大利益。
Jan:是的，而且對於你發送給谷歌的積極信號，你獲得了很多流量，對吧？
吉米：這也是真的。 這也是真的。
Jan：他們會同意的。
吉米：瑞恩，你可以嗎？ 因此，Jan，您還強調了另外兩個示例，以使用其中一個示例，您能否快速介紹一下您在本文中包含的另外兩個示例，作為一篇文章，一個渠道理念的成功案例研究？
瑞恩：完全是的。 所以我也有 SFOX，這是一個加密貨幣交易平台。 再次，像超級利基公司之一。 他們實際上專注於 Twitter 分發。 就像如果你花任何時間在 Twitter 上模糊地參與正在進行的加密貨幣談話，你就會意識到加密 Twitter 是一個巨大的、蓬勃發展的社區。 總是看到所有這些關於與我從未聽說過的加密貨幣擠在一起的模因。
Ryan：所以他們做了什麼，他們創建了這個社區整理的指南，匯集了不同比特幣專家的專業知識，所有這些專家都在 Twitter 上擁有非常活躍、非常參與的社交媒體追隨者。 因此，這不僅是一種由社區驅動的偉大努力。 這不僅僅是一個厭倦的營銷作品。 它還在文章的絕對結構中內置了分佈。
Ryan：基本上，如果你讓人們在一篇文章中看起來不錯，它會負責分發。 你已經激勵他們為你分享它。 所以我認為這是一個非常非常聰明的例子。
Jan：如果你是 SFOX 這樣的新人，要讓人們認出你需要很多時間。 而且他們當時沒有最好的名牌。 而且......我現在思考這個問題的方式，看著這條推文，就像，這就是你可以播種的方式，你播種你的存在......在這種情況下，重要的人，還有很多其他人。 它只是一種植物，它將你的品牌植入他們的腦海中，這樣當他們以後再次看到它時，他們可能會對它有不同的印象。 可能是一個積極的印象，因為它們在一篇文章中被提及。 但他們也像——
瑞恩：是的，由協會代言之類的事情。
簡：是的。 他們會說，“我以前聽說過。” 他們會願意更深入地研究它，並隨著時間的推移建立那種小的關聯。”我認為這很強大。
瑞恩：是的，所以我也喜歡那篇文章。 尤其是當牠喜歡的時候，它非常小眾。 儘管我們總是談論社交媒體、虛榮指標，而不是沉迷於這類事情。 我認為，正如 Jan 所說，當你在一個對 SFOX 這樣的平台非常有價值的空間內獲得認可的主要意圖時，轉推、喜歡、提及和其他東西，在他們的實例中實際上是一個非常有價值的指標。
Ryan：另一個選擇是......就像 Jan 提到的另一家公司，Slab，團隊知識庫工具。 我喜歡這篇文章。 我喜歡所有這些文章。 我認為它們讀起來真的很有趣。 作為一個厭倦的營銷人員，這就像……總是遇到一件很酷的事情。 這就是傑夫貝索斯如何將敘事轉化為亞馬遜的競爭優勢的一個例子。 我認為這讓 Hacker News 的流量激增，一天之內的頁面瀏覽量接近 15,000 次。 這真的很酷。 這是一個類似於亞馬遜、定位、商業戰略的概念。 不僅如此，它是與多年來接觸過各種內容營銷的真正精明的人一起完成的。
瑞恩：但我認為他們做得非常好的是以一種非常有趣的方式定位它。 對一個真正過頭的故事採取了新穎的方法。 他們也發表意見，這是一件兩極分化的事情。 但即使是不同意你的人也是提高對某事的認識的好方法。 促使討論。 我什至得到了一位真正的亞馬遜高管的回應，他必須像這種內容的黃金標準。
吉米：是的，這太棒了。 而且我知道有些人對 Hacker News 持懷疑態度，因為峰值是……有時，就像是內啡肽的衝擊，但實際上你並沒有從中獲得很多價值。 並非總是如此。 正確的？ 就像我剛剛將這篇文章插入 HREF 以查看它有多少鏈接一樣，HREF 報告了來自 177 個唯一引用域的 1500 個鏈接。 他絕對瘋了。
Jimmy：就像 Jan 之前所說的那樣，這些都是，無論這篇文章最終是否會轉化大量客戶。 積極的信號使您下次更容易對與業務超級接近的事物進行排名。
Jan：也有很大的不同，對吧？ 在由於......付費......推廣帖子或強迫推廣帖子而導致的飆升之間，這就像人們並不真正喜歡它但你有點在遊戲系統和帖子是的，也許你為一個系統定制它，一個像 Hacker News 這樣的分發渠道，但它最後的結果是很多有用的鏈接。
Jan：是的，這篇文章很有趣，因為我們實際上在內部爭論過……正如你提到的，亞馬遜太過分了，甚至在談論 Jeff Bezos，文章中提到的所有東西，比如六頁備忘錄寫作。 這甚至被做死了。 所以......我們有點想知道，人們真的仍然關心閱讀傑夫貝佐斯嗎？ 而且我認為這篇文章的成功提醒了我，我認為內容中很多最好的想法可能只是以前成功的想法，我們現在可以重新發明。
Jan：你不必害怕以前做得很好的事情。 但這可能只是存在……我們可以利用的內部痴迷。
瑞恩：我非常喜歡。
簡：是的。 而且，為了全面披露，我們應該承認，這篇文章在國家詢問者關於 Jeff Bezos 的報導前幾天也上線了。 所以我認為我們得到了一些幫助。
瑞恩：我們絕不參與勒索。 那純屬巧合。
簡：是的，沒有。 我們和那件事完全沒有關係。
瑞恩：是的，我喜歡這件事，人們花了很多時間嘗試逆向工程推廣以及使內容成功的方式。 在很多情況下，這個問題的答案是顯而易見的。 所需要的只是查看這些平台。 查看高性能內容，並挑選一些導致內容自然浮出水面的特徵。
Ryan：在搜索中，你可以對它的結構進行逆向工程。 您可以查看關鍵字、標題、他們使用的主題。 所以像 Hacker News 一樣，有一些話題幾乎可以保證會引起人們的共鳴。 我們總是談論埃隆馬斯克、沃倫巴菲特、傑夫貝索斯。 即使它被完成了死亡，它也是有原因的。 這些人有一種神秘的魅力。
Ryan：實際上，我認為查看任何目標分發平台並得出一些可以應用於未來內容的可操作要點實際上並不難。
吉米：我喜歡它。 好吧，伙計們，我覺得我們應該開始結束這件事，因為美國的平均通勤時間是 26 分鐘，而我們剛剛結束。 是的，這就像我們的基準。 當你把車開進你的停車位時，我們想結束。
吉米：好的。 所以讓我們為這一集嘗試一些新的東西。 讓我們圍著桌子轉一圈……每個人都有機會提出一個結束的想法，既然這是新的，我要向你們提出這個問題，我會先走，所以你們有時間考慮一下。
Jimmy： ……好吧，本文沒有強調的一件事是電子郵件。 它沒有被突出顯示，因為沒有很多公司在電子郵件方面做得很好的好例子。 所以我很想看到有人把電子郵件優先分發策略放在一起。 有點像 Mattermark 過去做的對嗎？ 他們製作了自己的內容，他們擁有可以分發的龐大電子郵件平台，這是一項建立公平的努力，對嗎？ 增加電子郵件列表。 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. 我接下來去。 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. 好一個。
Jimmy: Cool. 驚人的。 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. 好好。 確切地。
Jimmy: Cool awesome thank you guys.
Jan: Thanks Jimmy. Thanks Ryan. Bye.
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. 我喜歡它。 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. It was really difficult. 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. 進展如何？ 它奏效了嗎？
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. 絕對地。 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? How are you going to approach this? 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. 這有幫助嗎？
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. This was really cool. 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. Not always true. 正確的？ 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. 我接下來去。 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. 好一個。
Jimmy: Cool. 驚人的。 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. 好好。 確切地。
Jimmy: Cool awesome thank you guys.
Jan: Thanks Jimmy. Thanks Ryan. Bye.
Ryan: Absolute pleasure.