The Rogue Cartel

Yesterday and part of today I listened to the interview with HelpScout, which is an email-based help-desk.

One of the things they focused on to grow their business was “content marketing.” I wanted to jot down some notes and ideas so that I could reference them later and incorporate them into my own business.

Content marketing was their alternative to “writing a check” to acquire customers. It ultimately became so effective that they hired someone to do it full time. I don’t remember the name of the guy’s blog whom they hired…something like StrappingMind or something like that.

The way they built their content was to come up with a theme, which in this case was something like “data-driven customer support.” The core of the content came from a book, which was about 5,000 words.

It sounded like the way they based their posts was to find other companies that they could include in the article, perhaps as a case-study. That sounds like a good way to get good content.

But how did they get their content out there? They used guest posts. I think I read a guest post from him about guest posts on Think Traffic.

They used guest posts to get in front of potential customers. This seems to be a fairly common idea. At a high level, Noah Kagan in his interview (write down notes), did the same thing by saying that marketers should find ways to be where their potential customers are.

They also used SlideShare as a way to get their content out there. It sounded from the interview that he still used guest posts as the way to get traffic and then drive them to SlideShare.

For my project, what I will need to do is:

• Come up with a list of existing blogs where I can put content
• Come up with a landing page that I can link to
• Write content

It’s interesting that it was a software company that used this approach. I am still working through how it would work with my business models.