Nice article.
In today's world, content marketing is critical for your business or blog. Content marketing (CM) is the practice of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience.
There are many ways to use content marketing. For example, you can use content marketing to create brand awareness, drive website traffic, build your email list, generate leads, and more
I've been writing a lot about "eng as marketing" too! You nailed it: for us devs, building a free tool is often way more effective than writing a ton of blog posts!
For Vidds, we built a free video editor that solved 4 common searches (trim, add text/images, resize, convert), and slowly added pages for each term with the tool embedded.
We started April with 35 impressions per day, and we're ending at 677 - almost 20x improvement in one month! The tool took 2 weeks to build.
Super interesting post, thanks for sharing! One thing I didn't see that I was hoping to: Examples of the types of tools you're referring to. Are you thinking just about infographics, reports, whitepapers etc.? Or tool like Zillow's Zestimate, a calorie-burning calculator for exercisers etc.?
Would love to see a handful of examples of tools beyond the "report-behind-the-email wall" that you've seen be effect or worth the ROI.
Yep that's a fair point . I think bootstrappers have the greatest advantage when we build tools, so I lean more towards calculators etc rather than whitepapers. It's hard for competitors to effectively copy a genuinely useful tool.
Hey James, thanks for sharing this – super informative. And congrats on your success with Boords! I see you are ranked #1 for "storyboard templates" which I'm sure is no easy feat.
I have a couple of questions for you if you don't mind:
Did you do any outbound link-building at all? I know you said that it "wasn't a priority" but not sure if that means zero link-building effort or some effort.
One thing you said which I found very interesting was the idea of not putting downloads behind an email form which I think runs contrary to common advice and practice. Do you have any additional support for this idea? It seems like a trade-off between the value of additional engagement/sharing vs. the value of an email list, but that comparison seems difficult to quantify and make.
Not for the first ~2 years. We've done some since, but we originally got to the #1 spot on the strength of the content
I don't have any data to hand, however from what I understand engagement and time on page are significant ranking signals, both of which improve with fewer barriers between user and content.
Thanks for the reply James, much appreciated. Re: #2, I think you're right that on-page time/engagement is an important SEO factor. Now that I think about it, the right strategy probably depends on the user's intent and the page's content. If users search "storyboard templates" and they go to your page to download templates and see they need to enter an email address, they may bounce quickly. But if they search "how to storyboard" and they go to a long-form article, then it may be ok to put an email-gated download at the bottom after they've spent the time reading the article.
I really enjoyed your article. Many useful tips including not-so-common ones, such as the "alphabet soup" method. Your advice about focusing on tools, as a primary leverage for makers is totally on point.
Hey all! This post is a step-by-step guide showing how I used content marketing to grow our bootstrapped SaaS to 250,000+ users.
I'm not a marketer by trade, so I had to learn on the fly. This is the guide I wish I had.
I hope you find it useful. Very happy to answer any questions!
dang.
:-) hope there was some useful stuff in there.
Amazing! Great insights. Thanks, @jameschambers
Nice article.
In today's world, content marketing is critical for your business or blog. Content marketing (CM) is the practice of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience.
There are many ways to use content marketing. For example, you can use content marketing to create brand awareness, drive website traffic, build your email list, generate leads, and more
Thanks for posting this! What a great read!
I've been writing a lot about "eng as marketing" too! You nailed it: for us devs, building a free tool is often way more effective than writing a ton of blog posts!
For Vidds, we built a free video editor that solved 4 common searches (trim, add text/images, resize, convert), and slowly added pages for each term with the tool embedded.
We started April with 35 impressions per day, and we're ending at 677 - almost 20x improvement in one month! The tool took 2 weeks to build.
Thanks Andrew! Really happy to hear you enjoyed it.
Totally agree, being able to build stuff is such a huge advantage. Great to hear it's an effective strategy for you, too.
Thanks for sharing, James!
:-) My pleasure
Super interesting post, thanks for sharing! One thing I didn't see that I was hoping to: Examples of the types of tools you're referring to. Are you thinking just about infographics, reports, whitepapers etc.? Or tool like Zillow's Zestimate, a calorie-burning calculator for exercisers etc.?
Would love to see a handful of examples of tools beyond the "report-behind-the-email wall" that you've seen be effect or worth the ROI.
My pleasure, thanks for the reply!
Yep that's a fair point . I think bootstrappers have the greatest advantage when we build tools, so I lean more towards calculators etc rather than whitepapers. It's hard for competitors to effectively copy a genuinely useful tool.
Hey James, thanks for sharing this – super informative. And congrats on your success with Boords! I see you are ranked #1 for "storyboard templates" which I'm sure is no easy feat.
I have a couple of questions for you if you don't mind:
Did you do any outbound link-building at all? I know you said that it "wasn't a priority" but not sure if that means zero link-building effort or some effort.
One thing you said which I found very interesting was the idea of not putting downloads behind an email form which I think runs contrary to common advice and practice. Do you have any additional support for this idea? It seems like a trade-off between the value of additional engagement/sharing vs. the value of an email list, but that comparison seems difficult to quantify and make.
Thanks Steven, glad you found it informative.
Thanks for the reply James, much appreciated. Re: #2, I think you're right that on-page time/engagement is an important SEO factor. Now that I think about it, the right strategy probably depends on the user's intent and the page's content. If users search "storyboard templates" and they go to your page to download templates and see they need to enter an email address, they may bounce quickly. But if they search "how to storyboard" and they go to a long-form article, then it may be ok to put an email-gated download at the bottom after they've spent the time reading the article.
Yep I think that's spot on - keeping bounce rates down has definitely worked in our favour.
This is exactly what I need to learn. Thank you, James!
You're welcome! Great to hear it's useful.
Comprehensive! Bookmarking for later.
Thanks! Hope it's of use for you :-)
This is a very good article. Good job!
Thanks! Much appreciated.
I really enjoyed your article. Many useful tips including not-so-common ones, such as the "alphabet soup" method. Your advice about focusing on tools, as a primary leverage for makers is totally on point.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the feedback! Glad the post was useful for you.