Newsletter #1: Official Launch
Feel a little different? We've shifted over to Substack. Here's the most valuable resources from the past two weeks.
Hey guys, excited to be launching the How the Fxck newsletter on Substack.
You may be thinking, huh? I’ve been getting emails from you for ages. You’d be right, but those were more ‘podcast announcements’.
Now that we’ve shifted to a bi-weekly podcasting schedule, you’ll receive a newsletter like this one on the non-podcast release weeks.
The plan is to have them JAM packed with two week’s worth of content that I’ve been reading or listening to. I’m gonna be picky with what’s included so they’re of MAX value to you.
Here’s newsletter #1. If you like it click like and post a comment!
I'm in marketing strategy mode at the moment.
So I wanted to share some of the pieces of content I found particularly useful.
Animalz have a killer blog on content marketing. This article titled "How to Fast-Track ROI From Your First Blog Post" was so actionable and useful. If you're thinking about what core content you need on your company blog, this article is the place to start.
I first came to realise the skill of the Animalz team through their blog post "Your blog is not a publication". In this post, they set a clear approach to structuring your blog when you don't have Intercom levels of money to invest in it. Building a library (not a publication) means you focus on quality and depth rather than breadth and volume. It really changed my way of thinking and is certainly a content marketing must-read.
From an SEO strategy perspective, I’ve learned a lot this week. I have an ebook-come-strategy playbook in progress for newsletter #2, but until that’s complete, I’ve reviewed a powerful SEO strategy: publishing velocity.
In this article, I look at whether it’s really the “number one” SEO strategy. Some of the case studies included a company who wrote 400 articles within six months, propelling their way from zero to hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors.
Towards the end of the analysis, I address whether or not this traffic is effective or not. In one of the cases, it is, but in the other, it seems like it fulfils a business goal that matters little to most of us in the SaaS space: driving traffic to pages purely to generate Google Ad revenue.
A final one from an SEO perspective is this excellent blog post by Steve Fitz. It’s always fun to read demystifying articles, and these three points on whether SEO is dead or not really do that.
If you want to make sure your SEO efforts are well-aligned, it’s a must-read. A piece of insight I hadn’t heard before was Steve’s suggestion to run PPC ads on the keywords you’re planning to take on through SEO, that way you can pre-check if those keywords drive traffic that converts highly.
On a final note, I’ve been working closely recently with a senior sales leader. She sent me a podcast on content marketing that hit on so many relevant and insightful points.
In the podcast’s first episode, like me, they interviewed Chris Walker on the topic of ‘is the ebook dead?’. Those of you who listened to the How the Fxck podcast with Chris will know where he stands on that…yes, yes it is.
But this episode of Content Marketing with Alice de Courcy, CMO at Cognism, and Tom Bangay, Director of Content at Juro, takes an opposing stance. Ebooks & SEO, when genuinely done well are a solid method of generating revenue. They talk through what makes a great ebook and how to start writing one—I found it invaluable.
This was published on Substack so you can comment, ask questions and generally engage with me and others. Please do feel free :)
Got some tips for excellent content to include in the next newsletter? Send it over here: ben@thefxck.com.