Swipe Files - 📂 Treat content like its your product

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For two years in a row, SaaS founders and marketers reported content as the #1 driver of growth according to the State of SaaS Marketing Report. That's why I'm excited to partner with Embarque to help more startups level up their content and SEO with affordable done-for-you content production. With clients like Riverside, MentorCruise, EmailOctopus, and VEED... these folks know what they're doing. They'll handle the whole process from keyword research to backlink building. Make sure to mention "Corey" or "Swipe Files."

Check out Embarque →

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

Firstly, content marketing does not just mean blogging. There are many more facets to content marketing than just blogging: ebooks, guides, courses, videos, podcasts, webinars.

Secondly, each of those can be on a variety of different topics and angles: how-to’s, teardowns, templates, data analysis, meta content, use-case content, thought leadership, and hub and spoke.

Thirdly, content marketing isn’t just SEO. SEO helps, but it’s not the singular distribution channel.

The goal of any piece of content is to be (1) searchable or (2) shareable or (3) both searchable and shareable, and in that order.

The reason why SEO is so important for content marketing is because it’s the biggest traffic potential for your product. Search traffic is advantageous over other sources because it’s predictable.

Without search traffic, you have to have a large email list, advertise with it on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn for example, or hope that it gets shared organically on social media.

But with search traffic, you can count on there being people searching for content like yours every month. And you can track how many people will find it and move up the ranks to get more people.

Research

The first step to content marketing that converts is research.

Customer research

And the first thing we’ll do is go back to our customer insights bank and see what we can pull out of there to use for content marketing.

This is why we ask questions like, “What do you wish more people would talk about or write about?” and “What was going on in your world when you started looking for something like our product?”

Look for little nuggets in online communities and forums that give you insight into what people need help with and want to learn about.

Content research

The second thing we can do is use tools to help us ideate and come up with a list of topics to explore further.

Source ideas yourself

Use Ahrefs to see which keywords you’re already ranking for and then put them in a list.

​KeywordTool.io - Get tons of keyword ideas.

​AnswerthePublic.com - Get keyword ideas in the form of questions.

Buzzsumo - Research successful posts with search and social metrics.

​A 10-Minute Guide to Finding Low Competition, High Traffic Keywords​

Source ideas from competitors

Use Ahrefs to do a site explorer of all the keywords your competitors rank for. You can even see which keywords they rank for that you don’t, or which ones one ranks for that the other doesn’t.

Source ideas from blogs, publications, and other companies who serve customers like yours.

Use the site explorer to find keywords they rank for or, inversely, see which sites are ranking for keywords you want to rank for and then do a site explorer on those sites.

My favorite is looking at competitors and similar sites’ top pages

Refine and rank

Not all content is created equal. Next, since we’re optimizing for searchability and shareability, we need to refine and rank the ideas.

Not all keywords are created equal. You want to find the keywords with high search traffic (and clicks) as well as having relatively low keyword difficulty. Ideally, you should prioritize the keywords with the highest search traffic compared to keyword difficulty.

Dump all ideas into Ahrefs’ keyword explorer to see the estimated search traffic for each one.

But not everything needs to be, or should be, searchable. It can also be shareable. This, however, can only be found out through trial and error. So you’ll want to assign some sort of value to each idea to give a shareability score. It could be as simple as high, medium, or low.

But not everything needs to be, or should be, searchable. It can also be shareable. This, however, can only be found out through trial and error. So you’ll want to assign some sort of value to each idea to give a shareability score. It could be as simple as high, medium, or low.

What makes something shareable?

• New data or insights
• Controversial opinions or insights
• Personal experience
• Something 10x bigger or better than anything else out there
• A “definitive guide” or something that’s very thorough
• A step-by-step tutorial or walkthrough

First, let’s cover the different types of content.

Then, let’s cover the different formats you can use that content.

Content formats usually come in the form of:

• Teardowns
• Template Library
• Meta Content
• Use-Case Content
• Thought Leadership
• Hub and Spoke
• Data
• Expert roundups
• Case studies
• Programmatic

Teardowns

A teardown is an analysis of someone else’s company, fundraising, onboarding, email strategy, etc. Content marketers gravitate towards teardowns because they are easy to write. Some are interesting and useful to readers, but many are writer-centric—i.e., the writer can come up with a template that they can use over and over again.

That’s not to say teardowns aren’t a potentially useful strategy. They certainly are. For one, you can put the brand names of well-known companies and people in your blog post titles. This is really helpful for gaining distribution, particularly for newer sites. Also, if you can find an interesting angle, you can create an entire series of great content relatively quickly.

Teardowns work best when the product itself provides data that can be used in the analysis. This is true in several of the examples below. You’ll notice that these are examples are really, really in-depth. This is key to making teardowns work. Here are a few examples:

• Nacho Analytics: Airbnb vs. VRBO: Why A Massive Organic Search Advantage Doesn’t Always Pay Off (uses their own data)
• CB Insights: We Analyzed 12 Of The Biggest Direct-to-Consumer Success Stories To Figure Out The Secrets To Their Growth — Here’s What We Learned (uses their own data)
• Slab: How Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon’s Competitive Advantage​
• Hiten Shah: How Sketch Took on Adobe by Making a Faster, Leaner, Cheaper Image Editor​

There’s room in nearly every content strategy for teardowns — it’s also a great place to start — but your strategy should eventually evolve to include other lanes.

📝 Meta Content

Does reading about Buffer’s gender pay gap make you want to sign up for a social media scheduling tool?

No, probably not. But this is representative of an interesting trend in content marketing where people skip the keyword research and ultimate guides in favor of essays detailing the experience of doing their job.

This takes shape in different ways. It’s often a founder sharing how they got the company its first $5,000 MRR or why those chose an alternative to venture capital. We recently read a great piece from Copper’s CMO that describes how and why they rebranded the company and another about what Intercom learned scaling a sales team.

These posts are all different, but share a common thread. Each one records an experience using a personal, humble tone and offers more lessons learned than it does congratulations.

This is meta content marketing. It’s when people at your company write about their experiences doing their jobs, regardless of whether that experience is relevant to your target reader. These posts tend to be transparent, are often loved by readers, and can be extremely cathartic for the writers.

Let’s state upfront that this style of content marketing isn’t for everyone. If your company doesn’t have a strong content culture — meaning that content buy-in comes from the top-down — it’s going to be nearly impossible to get leadership to sign off on this strategy. Imagine a marketing manager at an enterprise company writing about how they build onboarding emails, but with the numbers redacted. Yea … it wouldn’t work.

In order for meta content marketing to resonate, you need to be transparent about something. You don’t have to share revenue or salaries, but you do need, at the very least, to share some personal insights from your experience. It has to be revealing.

Use-Case Content

For flexible products with many use-cases, you can generate tons of content quickly by pairing use-cases with the target personas. This works best for:

• products with many use-cases (think Trello, Airtable, Evernote, etc.)
• products that are freemium or inexpensive

The formula is simple: [persona] + [use-case]. Just plug in various personas and use-cases. Let’s look at an example of how Trello might use this. First, start with a persona:

• project management for designers
• documentation for designers
• time tracking for designers
• account management for designers

Next, pick a use-case and swap out personas:

• time tracking for marketers
• time tracking for devs
• time tracking for sales
• time tracking for customer support

Each use-case is an axis that you can pivot from. Even with a handful of use-cases and personas, you can create dozens of combinations. You’ll still need to turn each into a great idea, then into a great article, but you’ll have a template to work from.

This is an SEO play. The idea isn’t to generate the world’s most interesting content. Rather, the goal is to quickly generate lots of pages that can help you rank for long-tail search terms.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership means different things to different people. For some, it’s a CEO spouting off jargon on LinkedIn. To others, it’s the content marketing equivalent of an op-ed. Thought leadership can be a characteristic of your content, or it can be a tactic of its own. At its core, thought leadership content is an opportunity to share personal insights. It does not need to follow any particular formula, nor does it have to come from a higher-up.

The best thought leadership content draws a line around an abstract concept. It’s when a writer finally puts into words something they’ve known to be true, but never explicitly stated.

This can take all kinds of forms, but here are a few examples that we find to be particularly intriguing:

• Sahil Lavingia, Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company​
• Paul Adams, The End of Apps as We Know Them​
• Chris Savage, When Your Competition Accelerates, Have the Courage to Go Slow​
• Eugene Wei, Compress to Impress​
• Claire Lew, The Power of Assuming Positive Intent​

Thought leadership content is a good example of what we call movement-first content. The primary goal of movement-first content is to inspire, not necessarily to inform. These posts should spread via social media rather than search. They are optimized for impact, not distribution.

Hub and Spoke

Let’s first explain how this works. A hub is a page designed to rank for a competitive keyword. Think of it as “landing content” — optimized to the “T” for search and built to drive readers deeper into your site. It’s similar to an index or table of contents. The spokes are posts created for long-tail variations of the hub target keyword. All spokes point readers back to the hub but have the ability to rank on their own as well. Together, the hub and its spokes create a hierarchy that is clear to both readers and search engines.

A hub and its spokes work best when they operate outside the constraints of a blog. Atlassian has several excellent examples of this. It has dedicated a section of the site to agile development. You can see how it’s structured by looking at some of the URLs:

• Hub: https://www.atlassian.com/agile
• Spoke: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum
• Spoke: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum/standups
• etc. (there are dozens)

You may choose to create a hub to compete for a competitive keyword. Hubs are great for earning search traffic, but don’t expect them to drive tons of subscribers or bring in social traffic. (Remember: one post, one channel.)

Data

Data analysis for content creation is way underutilized. Using data as source material for content is powerful because it makes your site an alpha source. There are a few ways to go about this:

Analyze user data

If you work for a SaaS company, you are sitting on a goldmine of data. Yes, it can be difficult to get access to the data. It’s also difficult to get a data analyst to sift through it. (Ideally, you can do at least some of this on your own. If not, time to level-up your spreadsheet skills.) Make the case by planning out a content series with very specific signup goals. This justifies the dev time needed to get and analyze the data.

Example: The Wistia Guide to Calls to Action in Video Marketing. This post was created with anonymized user data from the product. This was the primary output, but Wistia also created some spinoff posts.

Analyze public data

It’s not hard to collect, clean and analyze publicly available data, particularly if you’re looking for performance data. Social influence, downloads, pageviews, followers, etc. are all metrics that can easily be tracked, captured and analyzed.

Example: How to design a SlideShare that pulls over 1 million views. SketchDeck, an on-demand design service, put together this piece about popular SlideShares using some very accessible data (views, downloads, comments, number of slides, etc).

Run an experiment

This is the easiest way to create new source material since you can create your own hypothesis and choose what data to track. There are all kinds of ways to do this.

Example: We Stopped Publishing New Blog Posts for One Month. Here’s What Happened. Buffer simply stopped publishing new posts, spent time refreshing old content and tracked the traffic. It’s a straightforward, but very useful post.

The main reason why expert roundups are such a hot content creation method these days is that not only are you creating new content and value for your audience, your site is also getting a ton of social media shares, expert exposure, and authority in the process.

Here’s a typical 5-step formula for how to create and find success with an expert roundup.

• Choose a hot topic or question relevant to your niche
• Email/outreach experts the question within your space
• Once you get enough answers, publish them all to your site
• Send outreach again to your experts and ask them to share your post
• Repeat the process and continue to promote previous roundups on your site

The formula works extremely well and it one of the best ways to get expert names within your niche on your site. Since the experts who contribute content back to your site are getting free exposure and a link back to their site, it’s no problem for them to spend a few minutes answering your question and getting back to you.

I’ve used this strategy in reverse by contributing to expert roundups and building a ton of links to various sites that way.

Case studies are sorta persuasive narratives featuring specific, real-world uses for a product or service to help demonstrate their value. Case studies are more than a simple testimonial from a customer – they speak to specific needs and customer pain.

They sway purchase decisions and literally make a case for why a buyer should choose a certain solution, and they’re a critical part of your sales collateral library.

There are tons of examples out there. Case studies can be used as downloadable content that prospects can grab off of your website or even just for sales reps (including yourself) to send out to prospects who need some more swaying.

You can even just publish it on your website for everyone to read.

There’s even a service that focuses almost entirely on producing case studies called Case Study Buddy. Here are some of their samples.

Programmatic Content

Imagine being able to spin up hundreds or even thousands of unique pieces of content using a data set, a little code, and a bit of curation. Instead of manually producing each individual piece of content, you can produce multiple at once. Instead of cranking out one or two blog posts a week, you can publish a hundred all at once.

This is the power of programmatic content. Its content creation at scale. Using templated page structure and a predictable set of data sources, content creation becomes a process of assembly.

Examples

• Reform Templates
• SwipeWell Examples
• NomadList cities
• DelightChat best Shopify apps
• LazySurfer beaches
• Podia competitor comparison pages
• Retext snippets
• Canva
• Zapier integrations
• Baseline
• The Hive Index
• SavvyCal time zone converter
• VEED
• IsDown
• Wise
• Airtable
• Trello

Four main types:

• Templates
• Conversions
• Comparisons
• Curation

​Programmatic SEO: Building 23 000 pages of BOFU Content​

This is basically a way to curate resources for your readers. It can also be a great way to capitalize on search demand. It’s easiest to explain this via examples, so let’s look at a few.

• Tettra, Culture Codes: Tettra is a tool for internal documentation. Teams can use it for things like keeping track of processes and sharing company values. They created a library of culture decks and employee handbooks that other companies can draw inspiration from. They’ve also interviewed people from some of these companies so readers can learn more about how and why these resources were created.
• PandaDoc, Business document templates: PandaDoc is a SaaS tool that makes it easy to send and receive contracts, proposals and quotes. In case you need a template for one of these documents, they have a massive library of them. This is less of a content play and more of an SEO play, but it’s a great way to capture search traffic and product adoption without spending months or years building momentum through a blog.
• Piktochart, Pitch Decks: This is a slightly different approach. Instead of building out a full library, Piktochart curates inspiration on its blog. If you’re resource-constrained, start here. You can always build out your library later.

Template libraries work best when they inspire readers to create something of their own — using your product, of course.

• Review site and server performance, evaluate if they’ll be able to handle this many pages
• A/B test the page content, layouts, etc. to find out what works the best
• After the launch, keep monitoring the analytics to see if everything is working properly
• Keep an eye on the crawl budget
• Fix all the site errors like 404 pages, duplicate content, redirect issues, etc.
• If possible, add schema markup
• Add Open Graph images
• Optimize images on the page to load fast
• Create an XML sitemap including all the newly generated landing pages
• Add the keywords in the meta title and description (programmatically generate the meta description using a templated 1-2 sentences)
• Use keywords in the page URL too
• Add at least 1 image with the main keyword as the alt text
• Add keywords to the page content a few times
• Add links to other collections at bottom?
• Add breadcrumbs for internal links

And can be created or repurposed in all sorts of shapes and sizes:

• Blog posts
• Guides
• Ebooks
• Email courses
• Landing pages
• Videos
• Video courses
• Podcasts
• Webinars

Blog posts

Writing a blog post doesn’t have to be rocket science. My advice is to keep it as specific as possible, written to speak directly with your target customer, and exhaustive of the topic.

• Spend a lot of time on the title. The title is the main determining factor if someone will read it or not.
• Outline before you start writing to make sure you’re covering everything and optimizing for multiple keywords. Make sure to include any relevant keywords that are subtopics as H2s. Use Google’s “Suggested” box to find more things to cover in the post.
• Write for 5th grade level. Be as specific as possible. Include examples, quotes, illustrations, images, and sources as often as possible.
• Make sure you do a few passes for edits. Everything should be written to be understood clearly as well as being void of any grammar or spelling errors.

Here are some examples of what I personally think are good blog posts.

They all have solid design, are thorough and optimized for search engines, and (while it doesn’t have to) they all also include references to their products.

Guides

Guides can come in the form of:

• Checklists
• Templates
• Collections of blog posts
• More extensive blog posts

And can either be gated or not gated, or in other words, behind a form or public for everyone.

Moz’s Beginner’s guide to SEO has been their single most successful piece of marketing for their entire existence. Founder Rand Fishkin has attributed a lot of their success to this one guide.

Hotjar gained a lot of traction with startups in the early days from their guide to your early-stage startup where they chronicled their own journey and gave tips along the way.

Ebooks

Ebooks should be reserved for more extensive collections of blog posts and guides all together.

Intercom and Drift have both pumped out great ebooks. All are available to read as a PDF or on your kindle.

Email courses

An email course sounds like a complex, content-rich system but in reality it’s just a simple autoresponder with text-heavy emails that are sent out over a period of time.

The easiest way to come up with a great email course idea is to reverse engineer the outcome you want. For example, if you want someone to come away at the end wanting to do webinars, focus your email course on why webinars will help them grow their business. For another example, if you want someone feeling better using content marketing for their business, focus your email course on how to create a content marketing plan.

I recommend structuring it as a 5-7 email course, one each day, and with 1-2 of those emails being a pitch for your product.

Close used this effectively to show their sales thought leadership.

Bluetick has done this to learn how to automate followups.

Landing pages

Creating specific pages for content can also be a great way to distribute content in a unique way. Usually to:

• Do a comparison
• Show different graphics or data points
• Put more resources into the design of the content
• Include more complex tools on the page

Podia does a great job of this with their competitor comparison page as well as a free tool to help you generate sales copy.

Videos

Video marketing, while not as popular in SaaS, is a very under-utilized channel.

Ahrefs repurposes blog posts into high quality videos on youtube.

Video courses are also under-utilized since they take so much time and work. But they can pay off in the long-run.

Market Hero uses their course as a part of their selling points to their software.

Vyper uses their courses both as a lead magnet as well as an extraneous source of income. Mostly as a marketing play to get people in the funnel and then upsell them on their software.

Webflow has some fantastic video courses.

Ahrefs also has an amazing course called Blogging For Business which was actually what got me to become a customer of theirs.

Podcasts

Audio content has absolutely exploded with the rise of podcasting technology.

I heard podcasting described as “the ad your customers actually want to listen to.”

What’s ironic about this statement is podcasts rarely ever advertise the companies or services that the podcasters represent.

Podcasting has become, and will continue to be, a huge part of companies’ content strategy. Podcasting right now is where blogging was 10-20 years ago.

One of the biggest advantages podcasting has over every other form of content is that it only requires one of your senses: hearing. Reading a blog often requires you to be still, in a relatively quiet environment, and constant attention from your eyes. Watching video is even more demanding, requiring your eyes and ears.

With podcasting, however, you could be driving, walking, gardening, or even working while listening to a podcast. It requires almost no attention from your eyes.

Another great advantage podcasting has over other forms is that it’s highly personal. Reading someone’s writing is not very engaging and only tells you so much about who they are and what their personality is like. Hearing someone’s voice takes everything to a whole new level. Getting to hear someone’s voice and listen to them give you advice, tactics, strategies, etc is an amazing thing.

Podcasts are also on-demand, which greatly caters to our fleeting attention spans. If I want to binge-listen to all the podcast episodes, I can. If I want to listen to a podcast episode from 5 years ago, just press play.

Examples:

• I Made It by Podia
• Everyone Hates Marketers
• Founder’s Journey
• Art of Product

How to start a podcast

​How to start a podcast in 2019: easy-to-follow instructions​

Webinars

Webinars are an amazing tool that every SaaS company should employ in their toolkit.

“Webinars? Really?” Yes, they’re not just a fad from the early 2000s. Webinars are a highly effective way to serve multiple purposes for marketing.

One of the great things about webinars is that they serve both low-touch and high-touch sales models. They’re sales model agnostic, because while you’re selling, you’re doing it at scale.

Webinars can be very effective for a few reasons:

While many marketers still don’t do it, turning on the web cam while presenting alongside your powerpoint-esque presentation is an easy way to make the webinar much more personal, engaging, and memorable for attendees. Webinars are an exclusive chance to get real face time with your leads, something that’s both rare and effective.

During the webinar

No one wants to listen to, let alone watch, someone who is not excited about what they’re talking about. Have enthusiasm for the webinar. Get lively. Use your hands. Make sure you’re looking into the camera and have a good angle on your face.

Post-webinar

Most webinar software like Demio, Livestorm, and Crowdcast do this automatically but you’ll definitely want to make sure you send a replay afterwards and send in every lead into your CRM.

You can use webinars for very product-focused content or very high-level content that may not even mention your products.

—Corey

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