What is the first thing you should do when considering an inbound marketing campaign?
I’m pretty much always going to suggest to write. To start creating assets you own and can leverage. Something you can put an opinion or in-depth knowledge behind. More than anything, create something of value to your audience. And put it to market.
Right now we don’t care about search volumes, or technical SEO or backlinks. Those things have their place, but the one thing that will remain consistent across all steps of the campaign, be it day 1 or day 1000 is content. It’s creating something of value.
So start there.
Let’s break it down a little further. Where to start writing.
The most obvious answer to this, and the one I will give every time is – Your own blog.
This being said, I’ve recently heard a great argument as to why Medium.com is a great place to start. I’m not gonna lie, as an SEO this pains me to give this argument time in the sun, but the reason is understandable and I can see a couple of situations where it makes total sense.
We’ll cover the blog side of things first because that’s what I’d suggest and this is my article so I’m the boss 😛
Writing on your own blog
Why is putting your own content on the company site important?
Well mostly it’s because you own it. It’s your site, it’s your trust, it’s your traffic. Anyone you drive to this content will benefit your assets.
You also have control of all the variables available to you in order to rank.
Variables?!
We can discuss variables and rankings factors later. I do not want them to get in the way of you producing content. Nor the blog design.
Just stick with what the default page design is and use that for now. Because you have control of everything, we can go back and change things. Headers, URLs, blog design. All these things.
For now, though, I just want you to focus on writing.
Writing on Medium
If you’re one of those people who you know you’ll get caught up on blog design, or the perfect page pixel width.
Or, your site just doesn’t have a blog section yet. I’ve worked with enough SaaS companies to know you guys love your custom CMS’s.
Then Medium might be just the thing you need.
I think the best way I’ve heard it put before is
“Medium is the MVP of your blog”
There’s no worrying about the design, there’s no worrying about getting the content in front of people. Medium has a built in audience to the platform, it’s how they work.
It really is one of the lowest barriers to entry in writing, getting it on a live site and driving traffic to it.
Why not Medium and what do farmers have to do with writing online?
There’s this thing called sharecropping where you rent land from a farmer. You put in all the hard work tilling the soil, planting the crops, feeding the land. So you can create produce.
But it’s not your land. So at any point the land owner could raise the prices, or decide they want it back. You have no say, you either agree or move somewhere else.
All the while the owner gets the end result of your hard work. Not the fruit, but the cared about land. You can’t take the crops with you either.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. I’ll break it down for our situation though.
Digital sharecropping. We’ve created this blog on Medium (or any other platform for that matter, Facebook, Linked In etc). We’ve build traffic to this page and have an audience on there. But it’s not “ours”. It’s Mediums. They’re the ones getting more trust on the site. More of a market share in the space you’re writing for.
An obvious point to this argument is at the bottom of every post on Medium is a grid of 8 more things you can read. They’re never more from the same site. It’s pushing your audience to someone else. You have no control over this.
This would never happen on your own site.
I’m not saying don’t write on Medium. I’m saying know its purpose in the long run of what you’re creating.
Now, to actually write that first post? I gotchu – head over here where I give you the framework responsible for over 200 first blog posts. Minimum 1200 words? Yes. Valuable to your audience? Would we have it any other way?
Featured Snippet? Now we’re talking.
Google Voice Search? Oooooh, maybe.
See you over there.