Startups Pillar posts: the secret to superhuman blog growth |
- Pillar posts: the secret to superhuman blog growth
- My app is live and downloadable so that people can easily test it and give me feedback, but not ready for “launch”. Will this hurt me?
- I am the entire marketing department for a startup that is pivoting our core product direction - I was wondering if anyone has advice
- I am probably blind - where is the value of product hunt listing coming from?
- The classic: to fundraise or not to fundraise before building MVP?
- Need some advice/encouragement
- My App is live - I'm running ads - but no downloads any ideas?
| Pillar posts: the secret to superhuman blog growth Posted: 30 May 2018 01:27 PM PDT Hi guys, would you like to hear how our PR website doubled its monthly blog traffic off the back of one post? It's going to upset a lot of mediocre bloggers. It's also going to reconfirm what a lot of expert bloggers already know (although whether they actually have the patience to do it is another story!) The answer is: a pillar post What is a pillar post?A pillar post comes under many synonyms. It has been dubbed '10x content' by Rand Fishkin. It's called long-form content by a lot of people. Essentially, this is your BEST effort and producing the BEST content on a key topic in your niche. For example, if you're a real estate agent, you might write an extensive blog piece on all the steps to take before selling a home. A pillar page needs to be a blog piece that is authoritative and comprehensive on a subject, but on a topic that is neither too specific or too broad. A key benefit to establishing this pillar page are the pieces of cluster content that you'll link to in the subtopics. Continuing with the real estate example, if a step to selling a home is to do a home inspection, you might write a supporting blog piece that elaborates on this subtopic that you can link to in your pillar page. It's not just the size of your blog post, it's what you do with it. Some questions to ask for your pillar page:
It's not just the size of your blog post, it's what you do with it. In my opinion, pillar posts should have all of these things. Why are pillar posts so effective?Let's first answer this question from an SEO perspective. Google rants about the importance of great content more than long-distance runners do about their latest marathon time. It's about time people started listening... Pillar posts should rank well in search engines, not only because they're lengthy (although research has shown that this helps), but also because people are more inclined to link quality content. Perhaps more importantly though, pillar posts will demonstrate your brand's expertise far better than your 500-word news update. I'd argue that one properly-written pillar can be more effective than a fortnight's worth of unremarkable blog posts. How to write a pillar postStep 1: Brainstorm a topic in your niche that is neither too broad, nor to specific. Step 2: Check the efficacy of that topic through a keyword tool such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. Check for keyword volume. The great way to evaluate the potential of a topic is to take a look at your competitors where their traffic is coming from. Step 3: Research on subtopics that you can create supporting blog articles around. Ensure there is keyword traffic volume potential. Step 4: Make your content valuable by giving lots of highly actionable advice and give lots of examples. Now we'll move on to how we promoted the post (hopefully you can get some suggestions out of it for promoting your pillar page!) How we promoted our pillar postOf course, no matter how good your pillar is, you'll struggle to attract people if you don't tell people about it. We discovered an above-average amount of links and social shares pointing to our guest post article, just a day after sharing it with our email list and social media audience. As I said, people are more inclined to share high-quality content. Nevertheless, we were just getting started. The next step was to reach out to influencers who had shared similar content in the past. Buzzsumo is a great tool for this. Using an outreach email approach, we were able to get a lot of shares from highly-followed accounts. From there, the social reach really started to snowball. Another great thing about pillar posts is that it's a much easier sell when you're reaching out for backlinks. See this example email for inspiration: "Hey there, \*influencer\.* We really enjoyed your article about writing engaging guest posts. The part about \whatever\** really stuck with me. We just published an article about successfully pitching guest posts to the world's best bloggers. Maybe your audience would appreciate you linking to it in \this part of your blog\** Either way, thanks again for the awesome post! Eli This template worked well for us, especially when we remembered to amend the bold starred parts ;). We've seen reasonable success from sliding the post into our Quora answers and blog comments too, although this was more of a bonus than a core part of a strategy. ConclusionCompanies like Hubspot and many more swear by this strategy for their content marketing. We found the same merit in pillar pages. The question is: will you trust in this strategy and your writing/marketing ability to write a pillar post of your own? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 May 2018 06:06 AM PDT I am building a company around a new social app of mine. Everyone knows you have to test your app, and I decided to say screw invite only closed distribution beta testing and just releasing it. I have found out through my development years that it is already hard enough to get someone to download an app, and it's much harder if you make them sign up for a beta, download yet flight, etc. So it is soft launched with zero advertising or promotion, but I have still got about 300 accounts created and several have upgraded to premium. My question is: will this hurt my startup in the long run? The app is not quite ready for the spotlight and I would not consider it launched even though that is a buzzword. Once I incorporate notifications and a few other features it will be ready. Will I have shot my ASO by leaving it on the store for so long without referring traffic to it? Does anyone have insight on soft launches to test vs. coming out of the gate sprinting? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 May 2018 05:25 PM PDT I am the entire marketing department for a startup that is pivoting our core product direction - I was wondering if anyone has advice for 1. What kind of work can I front load while we are still in flux about the verbiage we are going to use to depict our new product direction 2. Market Research that is invaluable to this process (ex. Competitors User Acquisition strategies) 3. What kind of "best practices" type documents do you recommend I create with my team so that I am set up for success once we have settled on the verbiage and vertical for our pivot 4. Any additional advice and or books/courses are much appreciated [link] [comments]  |
| I am probably blind - where is the value of product hunt listing coming from? Posted: 30 May 2018 07:45 AM PDT Hey guys, Can you please explain to me where is the value of Produc Hunt coming from? Is that the community validation? Are your chances of being featured in a major news higher? I read couple of articles on this but I still do not see it clearly. It seems to me couple of tech savvies are hanging around - but not "normal consumers". It looks like that people push their products by asking their friends for upvotes. There might be enough audiance for tech products however for more niche products I do not think this helps customer acquisition too much. Does it? Where I am coming from is that I was building an moile app with my friend in spare time. Overall great experiance and learning - the go to market strategy is the next piece. I just wanted to hear your opinion on Product Hunt and its reach. Thanks a lot, Jan [link] [comments]  |
| The classic: to fundraise or not to fundraise before building MVP? Posted: 30 May 2018 03:40 PM PDT Original plan: European founding team of 4 covering product, engineering, design and finance/busdev, transaction commission based B2C marketplace concept for a mobile app that has been tested with both ends of market with strong interest, aimed to compensate cofounders with equity and use $50-60k of savings to fund admin, legal, etc and fuel traction (marketing, offline sales, grow network). Once traction proven, approach funders with proven MVP and validated concept Today: Founding team of 3 covering product, design and finance/busdev. With all architecture sorted, considering to develop of app by 3rd party at $40k = less resources for fuelling traction. No technical founder meaning even if MVP proven to work however, have network to attract a quality tech team if capital is raised. Decisions: 1. Worth attracting capital to part fund MVP build out? From angels? Strategic investors? 2. Ignore and focus on getting MVP to market? 3. With no Engineer/CTO, will most funders (angels, VCs) frown upon inability to find technical cofounder to fit role? 4. Fundraising after MVP only worthwhile with traction? Thoughts? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Need some advice/encouragement Posted: 30 May 2018 01:46 PM PDT Hi ! I don't want to go into too much details but I am however seeking maybe some advice from someone who went through a similar situation. I started a project last year, my very first start-up on my own, and it is a great idea (not going to go into details about what my start-up is), and so I shared with my peers before I kind of finished the project. Now i've finished the project and it turned out that start-ups are alot more difficult than I thought, and because of the pressure I took upon myself by giving people expectations of me succeeding in a business or giving them the idea I might, kind of has me at this point of anxiety per say or just stuck in a thought. Projects all done and all that is left is to meet with clients and explain to them how my product can help, and it can help, but i haven't even done this yet. I'm like stuck run out of motivation or am in fear, I don't know what's going on and I can't get myself out of it. This may help ( I HAVE ADHD) i wasn't able to find everything interesting in University but took enough from it to apply it to my very first start up. I'm incredibly amazing when motivated but hard to motivate I need some relatable advice to maybe help me through this. [link] [comments]  |
| My App is live - I'm running ads - but no downloads any ideas? Posted: 30 May 2018 07:50 AM PDT So, I had been thinking about a problem I was having for quite some time and couldn't find an app on the Google Marketplace that really suited my needs so said screw it and made an app myself. I've written it - did closed internal testing with about a dozen people and over the course of 10 days fixed all the bugs and took user feedback into consideration. I released the app on Monday and in parallel created a Facebook Page, a twitter account, created a website and purchased some ads on Facebook/Google as well. However, I'm getting zero bites. I'm not sure if it's because the app is priced too high ($1.99) or if the ads aren't targeting the right people OR if the purpose of the app isn't conveyed properly in the store. Whatever the case may be, I'm at a loss. I'm a back-end developer by trade, so the whole sales thing isn't my thing. This is a side project that I hope to grow, but given my current situation don't have the capital to go all-in on a HUGE advertising campaign. Thoughts? Edit: Thank you all. With this info I've re-evaluated things and have decided to make the app free with ads. And in a future point release will allow the user to purchase a no-ad version. [link] [comments]  |
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