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In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about quantity versus quality when it comes to content marketing and marketing in general.

In the startup world, it’s common saying that content is king. However, deciding whether if your content marketing strategy should be to push out tons of average content or just a handful of quality content can be tricky. And making this choice comes down to your content marketing goals.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why your goals matter more than anything else in content marketing, the various types of content marketing goals you could focus on and why you should focus on distribution first much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About today’s topic.

00:32 Why this topic was chosen.

01:50 Why your goals matter more than anything else.

01:55 The various types of content marketing goals you could focus on.

02:14 The importance of figuring out the worth of content to you.

02:21 How brand awareness could be a short term goal

03:05 How random content doesn’t help you.

03:13 Why you should focus on distribution first.

03:20 The importance of keyword research.

03:28 Various sites you can use to do your research.

3 Key Points:

  • Goals matter more than anything else.
  • Do your research on the right keywords to create content for.
  • Start with the distribution and then worry about the content.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:02]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:06]

Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat we want to talk about quantity versus quality when it comes to content marketing, or maybe marketing in general. What is better? I had somebody recently ask me this question, and I didn’t quite know. I wanted to say it depends, but I was like, “Does it still … Maybe I should talk to Hiten about this.” That was a question … It was phrased very kind of current, where the person asked me, “In today’s reality of content marketing, does it make more sense for us to focus on sheer quantity – just try to create as much content as possible, promote ourselves as much as possible, be on all podcasts, do blog posts and guest posts on all the blogs, just fill up the market with our presence, or, should we just focus on doing less stuff, but really, really high quality? Maybe for work for six months on a super in-depth long-form article with insights and data that you can’t find anywhere else, and really just … Or do a video that’s highly produced? Should we just aim more on quantity or more on quality when it comes to our content marketing efforts?” What is better in today’s content marketing reality as a software company as a startup?

[0:01:25]

Hiten Shah: Yeah. Goals matter more than anything else. What’s your goal? Forget everything else, what’s your goal? So let’s talk about some goals, right? If you’re doing content marketing today with all the content that’s out there already, and with, I think, more than ever people understanding that content is really about getting search traffic, you need to figure out if content is worth it to you in the short run, or if it’s a longer term thing. If it’s a longer term thing, you’re focused on SEO, and it’s going to take a while. There’s no quick win there. If it’s a shorter term thing, then you’re just focusing on brand awareness, and you’re probably much more focused on making sure the things you write get a lot of social media traffic, or things like Hacker News, or Growth Hackers, or Reddit traffic. And the honest, real truth is, when you do content marketing, you should be aiming for a long terms SEO benefit researching all those things, as well as finding things that will hit on social in the beginning, so you can just start building up the traffic in the back links and things like that as well. That’s a very elementary way to put it, honestly. But let’s just talk about content marketing for a second, because you talked about podcasts and stuff, right? And a lot of us have been either deliberate about this, or learned the hard way that random content doesn’t help you, unless you know how it’s going to get traffic for you. So working on your distribution and your promotion of content, is what I might even start before you write content. That way you can do research. So do keyword research to figure out what search terms make sense for you. Do research on those communities, Hacker News, Reddit, Designer News, whatever one’s that you can target. Even Get Hub is a content machine if you really start digging into, and can get you traffic, but that’s if you’re a developer focused product. And go do your research and figure out what’s popping on those things. What’s popping off, what’s working right now, last month, last two months, last 90 days. You don’t have to go too much further back in most categories to learn a lot, and then use that to inform whatever content strategy you go after. So start with the distribution, and then worry about the content. And that’s what I mean by goal. What’s my goal? I want to get traffic. Well, where am I going to get the traffic from? Cool, I’m going to get the traffic from those places. How do I get traffic from those places? Study those places, engage with those communities if you have to, and figure out how you’re going to get the traffic before you worry about the content. That’s the upside down way to do content marketing, which is now the right side up way. So that’s content.

[0:04:05]

Steli Efti: I love it. I just want to rip this up right here. There’s nothing more to add.

[0:04:09]

Hiten Shah: Okay.

[0:04:09]

Steli Efti: This is a beautiful way to respond. This is it from us for this episode of The Startup Chat. We’ll be with you very soon.

[0:04:15]

Hiten Shah: See you.

[0:04:16]