Getting customers is hard.
Because of the situation with the web today, it’s never been easier to start a business. That’s awesome for entrepreneurs, except it also means there’s more competition for attention.
For instance, there will be more apps submitted to the App Store this week (over 26,000 apps) than there were in the entire App Store for all of 2008.
When there’s so much noise, how do you stick out? One of the most common answers to this question is typically advertising.
But for most companies just starting out, the budget required to make a dent in getting customers through advertising is out of reach because there’s too much competition.
37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson voiced a similar philosophy on promotion that has guided 37signals, one of the most successful software companies today:
We will never have the resources to outspend a Google or a Microsoft in promoting itself. Instead, 37signals tries to out-teach.
At ooomf, we’ve tried many different things to grow our customer base – from search advertising to ad networks and partnerships. But nothing has proven to be a larger source of quality traffic than creating useful content.
We’ve figured out ways to make content that our audience enjoys, how to use guest blogging to increase the spread of our content, and even incorporate “mini-products” to grow our customer base.
I’m going to share with you what we’ve learned and how to use content to out-teach your competition and grow your business.
The psychology behind content and why it works
Many marketers know the importance of creating quality content.
For companies like Buffer, content marketing is their main source of traffic, accounting for over 70 percent of their user growth in their first 6 months.
But how can something as simple as blog posts drive so much growth? Part of the story lies in what happens in our brains when we learn something new.
Traditionally, the thinking has been that tangible rewards – like eating and sleeping – were the types of rewards that caused the release of the neurotransmitter, Dopamine, the brain’s universal signal for pleasure.
In 2011 however, a landmark study was conducted that found that abstract rewards – like listening to music – could also cause the release of Dopamine.
Another type of abstract reward is learning something new.
What this means is by offering content that helps you learn something new, your brain recognizes this content as rewarding and dopamine levels increase to recall the information.
This release of dopamine also makes you want to seek out more content in the future to repeat these feelings of pleasure.
People want to share practical advice
When you create content that is practically useful, it helps build an audience better than any other type of content.
That’s exactly what a study done by two University of Pennsylvania professors found when they looked at the New York Times most emailed articles.
The results of the study found that people like sharing content that teaches them something new the most – even more than content that might be surprising or interesting:
Helping someone learn something new increases your chances for your content to spread because practical advice is what people love to share the most.
Give to get: Reciprocity principle at work
When you receive something useful from someone, you feel an obligation to return the favor.
This is the principle of reciprocity and creating useful content (for free) without an expectation of anything in return falls into this psychological model.
When you write a blog post for instance, your aim is to help hundreds or thousands of people to do something better.
If you succeed, there’s an opportunity that some of those people may sign up for your service or email list because they want to repay you for the content you created that helped them.
Consistency is king: Why trying to go “viral” with 1 post is not enough
A big part of building an audience over time is consistency.
To build an audience, one hit piece of content isn’t enough. You need to repeat that quality content on a regular basis.
In fact, results from this survey found that once a blog reaches over 23 posts, there’s a 30 percent increase in lead generation that occurs:
This isn’t to say that if you post more blog posts you will get more traffic.
What this means is, if you consistently create high quality posts, once you hit around 20 posts, you should see a significant increase in traffic coming from your blog as more of your blog posts get indexed by Google, attracting traffic from search as well as links from other sites.
What’s even better, if you keep delivering quality content, consistency breeds authority and trust, says science:
Someone with [consistency] is viewed as rational, assured, trustworthy, and sound. – Author Robert B. Cialdini, PH.D.
The science of consistency: how to develop the habit of writing
I started off a bit too ambitious when I began writing for our blog. My aim was to write 2-3 articles per week but after the first week, I noticed the quality of the articles weren’t where I wanted them to be.
I realized that my sweet spot for what I could sustain starting out was writing one article per week.
When I made this change, my focus shifted from worrying about reaching a certain number of articles to focusing on the quality of the content.
Here’s what I did to help develop the habit of writing regularly:
1. Start by writing one article per week.
If you think that’s too difficult to sustain, commit to writing an article once every two weeks and once you start feeling more comfortable, then work up to one article per week then two articles per week, etc.
Slowly expand until you’re writing at the target number of articles per week that you want to sustain.
This strategy happens to plays right into the science behind how willpower works. It’s well-supported that willpower is like a muscle, and the growth of it takes time.
This explains why a diet where you cut out your favorite junk food usually fails in the long-term.
Starting small makes it much easier to develop a habit.
2. Make it the first thing you do.
I found that my best and most efficient work would come early in the morning (before 9am) when there are almost no potential distractions.
To help make sure I’m efficient when I’m working on new content, the night before, I leave my laptop on sleep with only the blank text file open with the current draft open. Here’s a shot of my laptop when I open it in the morning:
This minimizes distractions and reminds me that working on this post is what I should be doing first thing in the morning.
It also helps because you’ll start reading your draft and instantly feel the urge to make edits and begin writing.
3. When you write, just write.
It’s hard staring at a blank page and curser, knowing that you’re expected to turn it into a work of art that drives customers to your business.
That’s scary.
A way to change this thought process is to focus on just writing for your first draft and not doing research at the same time.
What helps me get started, is I layout a text document like this:
title
introduction
main topic 1
point
example (something unique from my experience)
point (with key actionable take away)
main topic 2
point
example (something unique from my experience)
point (with key actionable take away)
main topic 3
point
example (something unique from my experience)
point (with key actionable take away)
conclusion
I then write my first draft of a title and fill in the “Main 1″, “Main 2″, “Main 3″ points that are the most important to cover.
Once you’ve done that, break each main point down into “point, example, point” format.
This format makes it easier to organize your thoughts and just be able to write freely.
I make notes as I go along where I’d like to adding a supporting source or example that I don’t recall the details of and will look up later.
This way, rather than having to flip back and forth between doing research and writing, you’ll be able to focus simply on capturing your thoughts on the subject matter.
You can go through and add supporting sources later when you start editing.
But I hate writing!
If you really don’t like writing, it isn’t the only form of content that works.
You may have seen the “People Are Awesome 2013″ YouTube clip:
It was created by a band from the UK named Hadouken. Hadouken cleverly posted their new single as the background music to the YouTube video, which is a compilation of short YouTube clips of people doing awesome things.
The video now has over 70 million views (number 33 on the YouTube 100) and Hadouken’s single “Levitate,” which was playing in the background, made it into the BillBoard Hot 100 this year.
Experiment with what form of content you think you can stick with over time and start with what type of content you think makes the most sense for you.
If you hate writing blog posts, try creating short YouTube videos or a Slideshare Presentation instead. Just make sure to focus on sharing useful information for your audience.
When having no audience is an advantage
If you haven’t consistently created useful content before, it may seem like it’s not worth it to start when you have no audience.
For example, it took us 2 months before we got more than 10 retweets on a single article from our blog but those first two months were helpful in establishing our content schedule and learning what type of content resonated the most with our audience.
Something that might help to shift your mindset when you have no audience is to think that you get to create content with no expectations so it’s an opportunity to experiment with the topics you want to cover and you don’t worry so much about the number of views, tweets, or likes.
Those will come with time and actually might come sooner than you expect.
When Hubspot reviewed the data from over 5,000 online businesses, they found that 85 percent had increased traffic from content creation within 7 months.
This is further proof of the importance of creating content early because it can start to pay off in just a few months.
What topics should you make content about: 4 easy places to find ideas
When I was just starting out, one of the hardest parts for me was figuring out what to write about. I remember after writing our 10th blog post, I felt there was nothing left to write about.
But, after seeing the type of the content put out on successful blogs run by Buffer and 37 Signals, I realized there were so many other opportunities to write about that would interest our target audience.
Here’s places where I began to look for inspiration on content topics:
1. Experiences at our company or conversations with team members
For example, I wrote about our experiences of launching and getting press coverage and how I learned to overcome my issues with stage fright while founding a company.
In each of these instances, there was something unique that we experienced that I thought would be practical advice for our audience.
2. Experiences in your life outside of your company
Sometimes there’s things you notice while you’re waiting in line or traveling that relates to a topic you cover on your blog.
For instance, David Heinermeier Hansson at 37signals wrote about his recent experience flying with American Airlines and dealing with their customer service department. He brilliantly related it to how caring organizations should work with customers:
A natural, caring organization designed to create passionate customers stretches and bends. A rigid business bureaucracy looks to nail every T on policies, procedures, and practices—customers be damned.
3. Articles you retweet or bookmark
If you retweeted or saved an article to read it later, the content of that piece had to have been interesting to you.
This is a great opportunity to think about how you could add to the conversation around that topic that interests you and perhaps go deeper, share an experience you had, or give your perspective.
4. Emails you send to customers
One of our most popular articles on how to get press, actually started as an email to a customer.
We turned that email into a blog post and within a few hours it shot to the top of the Startups subreddit, lead to opportunities for guest posting, and it became an article that we often referred to when other customers asked about how to get press.
If there are multiple customers asking you the same question, it could be validation that turning that common question into a blog post topic will perform well.
Bonus: Standing out from the crowd: The “mini-product”
When you make content, the goal is to create value for your audience.
At ooomf, our most favorite thing to do is create useful products. Sometimes, we create “mini-products” which are small websites (usually 1-2 pages) that we think would be useful for our customers.
For instance, this New Year’s Day, we released a campaign called Launch This Year:
We collected all the most useful information about how to go from idea to launching an app in the App Store and put it in one place.
This campaign ended up being covered by VentureBeat, Digital Trends, Lifehacker, and Tech Vibes, and resulted in over 17,000 signups within a week.
**Psst. We’ve got another “mini-product” in the works. Sign up here for an early peak.**
Content doesn’t just have to be a blog post. Creating something useful for your customers is the most important thing to remember, how you do that is up to you.
We want to write about you on ooomf!
Getting customers is tough so we want to help share your story.
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We’ll also feature you on ooomf.com, and cover your project on our blog.
Email hi@ooomf.com when you’ve complete a project with a link or image of the work and we’ll take it from there!
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