Why you SHOULDN'T do content marketing | Sidebean

0:00College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Good things come in force. Like ukulele strings, boy band members. Oh, yeah. And PayPal payin' for. No fees, no interest, no impact on your credit score. Just the flexibility to pay the way that works for you. Strum it, hum it, pay it in for. Download the PayPal app to get started. Subject to approval. Learn more at paypal.com slash payin' for. Paypalling, NMLS 910457. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work,

1:00use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at ND.com slash podcast. That's ND.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. The problem, the biggest problem with content marketing is that people underestimate how long it takes to kick in. It can be months or years to yield results and most startups don't have months or years to wait and find out if these growth tactics are working. So we've built essentially a multi million dollars SaaS business on content marketing. But when founders and marketers ask me if they should do it, I always start with this word of caution. It may not be what your startup needs right now because a startup usually doesn't have the runway to wait. They need to get customer feedback and usage metrics as fast as possible. And content marketing is slow.

2:01Honestly, as slow as marketing can get. So in this video, I'm going to share when it's safe or when I think it's safe to begin doing content marketing stuff, how much we've spent, how we've structured our team and how long it took us to finally see results. By the way, I'll share also how we transitioned from written content into this video. Remember the first five comments on any of our videos gets free access to our office hours so make sure you're subscribed with that bell button on. So a startup is a race against running out of money. More specifically, it's a race to find product market fit before you run out of money. Product market fit is honestly this kind of mythical concept that started people like to throw around. But it is, in essence, what makes or breaks a company. So market reason defines product market fit as being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market, which honestly, that's, I think it's too abstract. A better way to measure it is when 40% of your customers say that they would be very disappointed if they no longer had access to your product. So companies have been built, raised capital, and failed without ever finding product market fit.

3:03And all these blurb is to say that content marketing is a shitty way to go after your product market fit. What you really want to be doing is coming up with a thesis about who your customer could be, putting that product in front of them and then measuring if your theory about this product is correct. So this cycle doesn't look too different from the lean starter approach. Faster you can go through a cycle, the more chances you will succeed. Now, Google ads are, for example, a fantastic way of doing this because you can target particular searches, searches that only people of a specific profile would be making. It's not the only way. It's certainly not the cheapest, but it is fast. We started as a presentation platform and we targeted searches anything around our promo alternatives, to presentation builder, to presentation software. But customers from those keywords didn't really engage with the product well. And very few of them were converting for us. And the problem was that we were casting too wide of a net. Anyone could be running a search on presentation software and it wasn't specific enough to build an audience. The good thing was that people use presentations for many things. So we started looking for more specific use cases.

4:05After a couple of weeks of testing, we found the keyword, really, the keyword which was pitch deck for us. To have that searches related to pitch deck did great for us, customers converted, giving us profitable numbers. So we just started doubling down on this again and again. We doubled down on budget, we doubled down on landing pages, on branding, even on the product itself and it worked. Honestly, all from a good Google keyword. But the cycle that made us find that keyword took a month. As a new website with no domain authority, for followers, there's no way we could have found an answer like this with any shape or form of content marketing. But once we've found it, then it was time to go on. Okay, so picking your, we found ourselves with this website with no domain authority. So we understood that we had to create this authority from scratch and it was, it was time. And back then we were a small marketing team. Honestly, it was just one other person and me. So we made sure that the search campaigns, the paid search campaigns that were driving growth continued to operate fine. And that would continue to drive us customers so that we could start moving resources

5:06to this new project. So you solve a marketing channel, you put an autopilot and move on. The first absolutely crucial thing you have to decide is where you will host this content. Because you're gonna need a CMS. You're unfamiliar as CMS is a content management system. It's like an infrastructure that allows your writers and your marketing team to publish content without needing to code a new page every single time. So very important, once you choose a CMS, going back or changing where your hosting is risky, it's delicate and it's incredibly time demanding because you risk losing all the domain authority that you've built. And there are generally two schools of thought on how to do this. First, you can host your blog on the same domain as your main page or you can host your blog as a subdomain. So blog.slideme.com. We can probably make a whole video about it. So I'm not gonna get into the details. The point is that a CMS will make it a lot simpler for content creators to publish without needing time from your developers. Now, the most popular CMS, globally, it's WordPress. It's free, it's open source, and it has hundreds of plugins and optimizations for SEO that's search engine optimization.

6:07So you essentially have to install WordPress in a hosted server. It's like an operating system that runs on that server. So my recommendation for this is to use Hostinger. It's fairly easy to use and it's pretty fast. And in the last few years, they've released this WordPress Hosting Plan, which already gives you a server with WordPress or is a little less $2 a month. So if you don't know, WordPress is like this open source operating system for your server, for your website. But people have leveraged WordPress to create some of the most famous content sites out there. The TED blog, Microsoft News, the Sun, BBC America, TechCrunch, all of these sites are hosted on WordPress. So after you sign up for Hostinger, they'll run you through this really quick wizard. And WordPress will be installed on your server automatically. And then you can pick a template and essentially start writing. So I had this long overdue revamp of my personal website. So I used this opportunity to move it into Hostinger and to show you how quick it is to get set up. Now from the Hostinger dashboard, you can connect other domains, you can enable SSL,

7:07you can add email hosting, if you wanna have custom email addresses, and then from the WordPress dashboard, you can just edit and publish your content in a second. Setting up a Hostinger account takes a minute, I reached out to the guys from Hostinger and they offered a coupon code for you. So you can go to hostinger.com slash slide bean to access. They have a four year plan, which is over. College football is back. So Hilton called me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky Jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Good things come in force, like ukulele strings, boy band members, and PayPal payin' for. No fees, no interest, no impact on your credit score,

8:08just the flexibility to pay the way that works for you. Strument, hum it, pay it in for. Download the PayPal app to get started. Subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash payin' for. Paypaling, NMLS 910457. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at nnd.com slash podcast. That's nnd.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. Pretty insanely cheap, just $96 for four years of hosting. And you can drop an extra 10% discount if you use the coupon, it's like you. Another very important factor here is that in June, 2021 will release an update to their algorithm. It essentially puts an incredible value

9:09in the site loading speed. In other words, if your site is slow, Google will penalize you and show your lower than your competitors faster. So to help with this, the guys from hosting will also have this tool called LightSpeed, which essentially caches your website so that it is served faster. Now, LightSpeed is also compatible with the most common WordPress plugins, such as Yoast, SEO, and BB Press and WooCommerce. So it should work well with that. So in our case, we decided to keep everything inside the same domain. That's what you're doing. You're gonna need to bring your landing pages into WordPress, you need to care, and then create kind of like a separate blog section. So you can start writing. So Sharper in your prints, this is what we did for a whole year. We wrote article after article about pitch decks, tearing down famous pitch decks, designing others, creating templates of our own. It was this massive task that saw our team grow from two people to five people, and spend directly around $70,000 promoting this content. Now, our focus during this whole time was SEO. In a nutshell, how well a page ranks, depend on how good the content is, which Google measures based on the time on site and the bounce rate.

10:09And whether it matches the keywords on the searches that people are making. More recently, again, Google really cares about loading speed and more of the format. That is also combined with what they call domain authority, which is defined by the domain authority of other pages linking to your domain. So while the algorithm is pre-menstrually complex, and it's one of Google's best kept secrets, the gist of the matter is that Google ranks good content. That's it. Now, if the content gets published and nobody reads it, Google can't really measure the bounce rate or time on site or their shareability. So it can't figure out if that content is actually good. So the most critical part of this whole exercise was preparing my team, our investors, for a project that was going to take months to maybe show results. It was the first effort that we made that it was so long-term. But again, we did it at a time when we had found another channel that knew was going to drive the growth and that our stats would still look promising for future investors. Delicate when you pick to do it. We started this project in January 2016 and effectively tripled our traffic by the end of that year,

11:12which also tripled our leads and our revenue. And we did it by publishing about two pretty good articles every single week. These weren't articles meant to be viral sensations. They were insightful articles with unique perspectives. They were just, they were not just research, re-edits of content that we found elsewhere. We were actually producing new things. And that is not easy. You do need subject matter experts, either writing the articles or guiding other ghost writers. Our articles weren't white papers, but provided something that you could really find elsewhere. Slowly but surely, the landing pages, we were promoting rose to the first lots on Google Search. So again, a summary, you have to find a perfect keyword so that your content marking efforts are more narrowed. Once you find it, set aside a good budget and prepare for a long-term effort. I get a common follow-up question to this. Did we do anything before this? Did we warm up the site? We kind of did. We had a blog and I would write articles every other week or so. They weren't a key marketing strategy. And since these factors are going to take a lot of time to kick in, it's easy to be tempted

12:12to begin writing today. And that's not necessarily bad, as long as it's not a distraction from your other actually relevant customer-driving channels. Now let's get into video content. When we depleted Google Search for the keywords that we needed, we started looking for our next long-term marketing bet, which was when we started playing around with video. So YouTube, you didn't know, is the second largest search engine in the world. So before doing content about what we wanted to talk about, we did content focusing on what people we were looking for. So we wrote in a wave of YouTube search before anything. We wrote videos that were targeting searches, that other videos weren't answering well, where we could potentially create a better piece of content that would out-rank. Only after we built a follower base, we actually started creating content about topics that we found interesting. This took us years to figure out. For the first 18 months, we created a few content series that never really picked out, never really worked. And then we did around 12 months of search-focused content. And for the last 24 months or so, we've been focusing on more general startup type content,

13:14regardless of the search traffic. The problem with video as a content strategy versus written form is that producing each video is super expensive. To us, which we do all of this in-house, each of these videos costs between $2,000 and $3,000 these days. And we're doing an in-house with our Costa Rica team, which is of course cheaper than a team in the US. I would see that number go to five, maybe 7,000 easily, if we did it to a third party agency. So it would have been an impossible bet for us to produce 18 months worth of content paying $5,000 per video. We would have scratched that campaign super quickly. And even if we knew what we were doing with YouTube and with search, it took us a long time to get it working. Moreover, the content that we create is very clearly speaking to our audience. We don't have to get distracted, testing different audiences to see which one converts best. We know that we're talking to you, start our founders or potentially future entrepreneurs. So I hope this overview gives you a good point of reference to get started if you wanna get started or if you have started, hopefully on how we, our company, our size, kind of scale this team.

14:14Today we have six people on our media team, which are producing videos, because videos is our next bet content in terms of written content and SEO is now on autopilot because we sort of solved that already. We still produce new content, but that is already one of our biggest main channels. All we're focused right now is on solving this new YouTube channel so that we can potentially put that on some sort of autopilot and then move on with a new campaign. Autopilot, by all means, is not just kind of leaving it aside. It's just defining a team, making sure that the management no longer needs to worry and be concerned about this new channel and coming up with new ideas. And then just, it has a team that runs it ongoing. But again, I hope we find this useful. Thanks to the guys from Postingger for sponsoring today's video, and I'll see you next week. It's football season, and you can now get almost anything you need for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get Babyback Ribs delivered, a strong defense, no, a strong deodorant.

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