Content Marketing

"I know a lot of people have talked about doing a LinkedIn 30. So 30 days of posting something on LinkedIn in terms of content every day for 30 days straight, and just getting past that barrier of sharing."

"What I find is like, yeah, there's this a while where you're writing and it feels like you're talking to nobody and then gradually it grows and you'll have these peaks, but then over time is where the magic is."

"And then tactically, it's a lot of content marketing and a lot of thought leadership. When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that... And then of course, getting a lot of content around because when you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that."

"We have a side car product called Snyk Advisor. Snyk Advisor, it's basically a service that developers use to search and find open source packages when they're considering integrating some within their software applications... anyone searching on Google for a package that does X, Y, Z or a specific package by name, Snyk Advisor will be right up there in terms of the search results."

"One of the things that I've seen that I don't know if people realize is consistency and predictability of content creation... there is something to churning out consistent quality work and putting it out there for your audience to consume and respond and react to that goes a long way. It's almost like the 10,000 hours."

"He set up a whole team of people who looked at people's motivations and the top jobs to be done that Canva could service. He then mapped that through the entire experience of going into Google, typing a search query, getting that search query, seeing that it was a great result, firstly getting to the top result, but then also the experience after they landed on Canva."

"The way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit. So even though content feels like it's running adjacent to the actual product that you're putting out there, you still have to think about who is my audience? ... What is it that they need to get promoted? What is it that they need to avoid failure? What is it that causes them a great deal of anxiety in the day-to-day of their lives or their work? And can you create some type of content product that is going to address this for them?"

"painkillers always win. So can your content be a painkiller? Can it help people out of situations that are causing them a lot of pain? Can it help people stop being so confused or can it make them even feel less alone in their experience?"

"It would take eight hours to just write the thing. And that's after you had done all of the prep work of making sure that your interviewee was feeling really anchored and understanding a topic that you were both really excited about and making sure you were mining all of the tactical gems from that conversation."

"make clips of your podcast and you could put those clips on these channels that do have that built in distribution... TikTok, YouTube, Instagram Reels... brand awareness for me."

"One of the channels that we're spending some time experimenting with is this concept of microapps... Website Grader... you put in your domain, and it crawled your site, and then gave you a set of recommendations... It was definitely a one trick pony. But what it did was it created an interesting conversation"

"I got him to make technical content and that, I think, went to number one on Hacker News... I remember one of my bars were deciding if something would hit this or not... "Did I understand it?" And if I understood it, it was probably too basic, or if I could have written it myself, it was probably too basic."

"The standard press release format, it's so formulaic, and I think it actually encourages that more marketing speak. The benefit is that you're getting all the news details in one place... However, you can do the exact same thing in a blog post."

"If you're going to do that [social strategy], have an exec that you're also trying a social strategy with. Don't just do the plain corporate channels. Corporate channels, it's very hard to build a following... When you have an executive, you're following a personality."

"The future of content is clearly AI-assisted. Clearly, you and I will be using AI to help us write, so it's not no AI at all, but it's not 100% generated with AI."

"One concept would be information gain. So did you say something that somebody else didn't say? Two is how typical are you? Are you so typical that I think that you're a rewritten version of somebody else's content?"

"I started a blog six years before... I said, 'I'm going to start a blog, it'll be about software engineering and I'll call it The Pragmatic Engineer.'... I said, 'I'm going to do what Jeff Atwood said. I'm going to publish... every two weeks I'm going to publish an article, and I'll do it for a year.'"

"I announced my newsletter, I told people, 'I'm going to go full time on this.' I had maybe 10,000 Twitter followers and, I don't know, maybe 1,000 on LinkedIn... What I didn't tell is that there was at least six years of accidental work behind this."

"My rule of thumb is when they do a search for you on Google, if your LinkedIn profile is the first thing that comes up, you've probably done something wrong. What should come up is an article you wrote. Is a tweet you published."

"Generally speaking, threads, despite everything I've said, are the primary way to get followers. There's a reason why people do threads as opposed to single tweets is because when people get exposure to a thread, they're basically getting exposure to the length of thoughts equivalent to you having sent a newsletter edition or a blog post in many cases."

"I'm spending as many hours going back and rewriting old blog posts and handbooks as I am writing ones. If you come back to anything I've written over the course of a year or year and a half, it'll be updated, because I consider everything I write to be evergreen."

"We wanted to become the content leaders in that, with the hypothesis... that if we win on content and as a thought leader, that will drive back to Bobbie. And today... if you do a cursory Google search for something like 'How long does formula last?' Milk Drunk is showing up between the CDC and the bum on the first page of Google."

"Going direct... means that the founder or executive for some very senior person has to be speaking from themselves. First person, may be first person plural, and speaking in a human voice authentically. You see them make mistakes, you see them be vulnerable, and they have to become an ambassador to the community."

"LinkedIn is super underutilized because it gets a ton of eyeballs in time, but most of the content sucks... the ratio of your competitive set of interesting content versus how much time and attention people spend on there is excellent."

"Step one would be assessing what are you good at and what do you enjoy... Step two is setting up your account on those channels... And then you start building your audience. And when you start if you're actually starting from zero, get some pipeline of content ready... get a week or two of posts ready to go."

"I'm a huge fan of SEO, happy to discuss that later, but if people aren't asking this question to Google, you can write all the content you want, it doesn't matter, nobody's going to find it."

"The biggest mistake people make is they will just shove keywords. They're like, 'Okay, these are the keywords people are searching for, I need to make sure I mention it five times.' Obviously do that, make sure that the content that you wrote answers the question. But the main thing to think about it is, is the Google search over? If someone reads your content, if they typed in something to Google, and then they read the article that you've published, are they going back to Google to continue reading more or is the Google search over?"

"We have this framework that we call the traffic light system. Essentially we go, whenever the team is going to do a content series, they will go and find up to 700 keywords... And then those set of keywords get ranked by highest volume to the lowest volume... And then you go one by one... and say, what is the intent of someone searching this keyword?"

"We use Clearscope, we love it... those tools will give you a score to say you're an A plus or you're a C minus, you need to make your language less sophisticated, currently it's at university level and we need it to be at fourth grade reading level."

"Podcast is the ultimate long game, so you need to find some intrinsic connection to what you're actually doing. If you don't love the conversations or the format you're doing, don't do it."

"Number one thing is that you have to really be unfiltered. I mean, you don't really need to be perfect on this platform. I mean that's the beauty of it. You can be yourself, you can really share the things that you like."

"The most important thing... is just get started and do something every single day... it builds muscle, it gets you familiar with the medium and you start understanding what works in that medium and what doesn't and you start building reps."

"I think with SEO, it's like the first pillar I would say is, do you have a unique angle... Do you have a unique programmatic angle, right? For instance, Canva did dealt with templates... do you have a unique data angle?"

"SEO is now becoming more attractive because once you got your burn under control and you're thinking, "Okay, we saved all this money by reducing our paid budget. We're cutting it entirely. How do we put some of those resources back to work?" And all of a sudden SEO starts looking a lot more lucrative because it's almost like you took the urgency of grow at any cost in the next six months, you took that out of the equation."

"Make sure that you have also set up a process to take the insights that your customer success people are coming up with and turn them into as much content as you can... we would talk to a bunch of customers and then customer success would have helped them build bases, and then we would create templates."