How to ensure your content gets seen and does its job

Tena: So my name is Tana and for almost two decades I've been working in content. So that basically means that for most of my adult life, if not whole, my livelihood has depended on content actually performing. I think that just the amount of that stress makes me kind of qualified to give this talk, but if you're stressed about it as well, I hope this will help alleviate some of it and give you some ideas how to help your content do its job. So I work at Info bp. Show of hands, who knows what info BP is? Okay, just info people. Nice. Okay. BP is basically a global communications platform. So what it means is that when there is a brand trying to communicate with a consumer or a customer, basically there is probably some info BP going on. If you get a message from your Uber that your driver is here, probably info bp, if you get your TF two FA via call or SMS could be info bip.

If you get some email notification about your card info B, you get the drift what it's all about. There are also a lot of ways to interact with our products. We have some no-code products, low-code products, APIs, some telecoms partnerships. Basically a really huge array of things to do with info B. Why I'm telling you this is because that's great if you're a customer, but if you're working in info B and you're trying to explain this really wide and different array of products to really different audiences, that gets kind of difficult. Luckily, not all of that is my job, but I do work in developer content. So basically we produce a lot of content that helps developers interact with our content and know what info BP is. Maybe we're not doing such a good job judging by the raise of hands here, but we'll try harder.

So basically this is what we call our info B developer Content universe. We have different venues that we tested out. We have our docs and tutorials, of course everybody has that. There is the engineering hub blog, which is basically kind of more employer branding, but also about technology and engineering culture. In info B, we have Developer hub, which is additional resources for developers Startup Tribe, which is not something my team does, but it's super important and a podcast because everyone has a podcast scale up and up and then we have something a bit different but not unheard of. That's the Shift Mag. It's actually editorially independent magazine for developers, but owned and powered by Info vb. So what I'm telling you this is because I'm trying to kind of sum up our learnings from all these different venues and platforms and show you what worked for us, what didn't in a really practical terms.

So what usually happens with content, and a lot of people have mentioned this before in their talks, especially when talking about strategy, people get so wound up in how to content, how to choose a good topic, how to get it out there that when it's published it's just like I'm done, but you're not. You're basically just halfway there. Sometimes just publishing is fine. Has anyone seen Field of Dreams hands up. Okay, I see a bit of a general relational divide here. I'm on the older side expected, but still hurts. Okay, so basically those of you who haven't, Kevin Costner builds basically a baseball field because the voice tells him to and the voice keeps telling it. If you build it, they will come. It's kind of like that often with content, if you publish it, they will come and that's kind of a more realistic scenario than a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield because you publish something like we have this nice little tutorial here, very basic piece of content. We do some basic SEO and if someone googles how to build a Preport chatbot with info B, they're going to find this and this little guy is going to do his job. Such a good piece of content. But here's the thing, even this very, very basic piece of content can do so much more. It can basically tell you, okay, how to do this. It can tell you that we have a product called Answers. It can tell you what the hell answers is because it's not.

It can tell you, you can see at a glance how easy or difficult it is to use our product. You can see what our platform looks like because you have to register to see it. So even the basic piece of content can do so much more than just be a editorial and show how to do something. There are basically two main paths to do that. One is to syndicate and one is to distribute. I know probably all of your distributor content in one way or another, but how many of you syndicate? Hence, okay, how many of you know what syndication is? Okay, cool. So basically syndication is publishing your own content, but on someone else's platform, on a venue that you do not own.

Click, yeah. So this can be either some publishing platform like Medium or a Substack or Dev two or basically anything where you have to publish your content there and it's hosted there. It can be like a media, so maybe someone writes a blog post or an article from your company, but it's not published in your company blog. You submit it to some kind of developer media like Shift Mag, our own self-promotion here or a new stack or basically, I dunno, container journal or anything here, and then you have something that you're probably already doing but just don't know it's indication. It's when you host your content on a specific platform like YouTube or Transistor for podcasts or something like that. So probably a lot of you are doing syndication, just don't know the definition. So why to do it. The first reason is of course to get a wider audience and not only a wider audience, but a different audience.

The sad truth is when something is published on your corporate website or startup website, no matter how fun your startup is, it's always going to get a lower reach and lower engagement than something that's published on an inin media. That's just a sad truth. So here we have two pieces of content published on the new stack and Shift Mac. They both had 20,000 reads plus still generating with no advertising. If they were published on one of our blogs, that number would have been a lot lower. That's a sad truth. So if you want to get a wide reach, maybe some brand recognition, maybe get a point across, then you go through some kind of third party platform or a media. The really fun thing is that a lot of people don't know if you publish it on some kind of a developer media, lots of them have a policy where you can republish it on your blog.

It usually just takes like 10 days or you have to wait two or three weeks and you have to leave a canonical link, which means that this is a repost for SEO purposes, but it's kind of a way to both heavier your cake and eat too. And also there's super, they like to get developer content because their workers are journalists and they're very good at what they do, but they do appreciate a first person perspective. Click okay. One of the reasons we also syndicate our content is because our engineers do a lot of writing and they really like to see that something they've written has been read by tens of thousands of people or that their name is in a magazine that they read or another media venue. So it's not really an OK R or KPI, but it makes people you work with happy, so good reason to do it. Also, sometimes you have the platform benefits, like the algorithms, the fact these platforms already have their own audiences, the fact that they're optimised better than maybe you would know. I think Kevin had a talk about video strategy yesterday and they decided to host on their own platform. So maybe you can catch 'em later for that perspective.

Sometimes a really stupid reason, but a good one is that you have literally nowhere else to put it. So in the company I worked for before, we wanted to start the developer blog, we didn't want to use resources, developer resources to build it even though it was a developer agency. So we just stuck some medium into there and it worked. We also did this three years ago engineering handbook for info B. Our website was being redesigned and they were like, just wait for us to publish it until we were done with the redesign and basically we just went to get book and published it there and it has been gathering a Metricon basically of traffic and people just getting information about BP and what it would have been sitting there waiting.

Sometimes also, you want to get some idea across your point across, you want to reach a wider audience, you want to get some brand recognition, and this might sound dangerous to like pr. That's because it is, the point I'm always trying to get across is that other departments are your friends. PR and technical companies has a job that's kind of difficult. They're not technical experts, but they still have to write about technical topics that they're not that good at maybe or they don't have the insight that you have, but they do have the budgets and they do have to spend them and they do have to publish. And marketing, pr, employer branding, those can all be our best friends. They just maybe don't know it yet. Okay, so if it has all these benefits, why not use syndication? Why does anyone distribute? Well, the first thing is not all content is meant to be syndicated.

If it's super brand specific, heavily branded syndication is not a good way to go. Or if it's really product related, like a tutorial that's probably best hosted on your site, then there's less traffic going to your websites. That depends on your goals. Like last year we did a lot of syndication, but this year we have a deal with our web team that we are trying to bring more traffic to our sites. Then you can, the important thing is that you also have no control over these platforms. They can change their algorithms, they can change the way they interact with you, they can change the reach. This is something that happened if anyone ever worked in the media, especially in the last 10 years. At some point all the media were using Facebook and social media sources of traffic and they basically forgone all other sources like newsletters and stuff like that, and then Facebook cut its reach and everyone was in deep trouble.

So the other path is distribution. You all kind of know that. Basically when you distribute content, that means it's published somewhere and you're using external channels to send it in different directions. You can also first syndicate and then distribute it from there. So distribution is not just tied to your own publishing venue. Oops. Okay, so when everyone starts a company or a media, it's usually this is a distribution starter pack. It's in social media and their own newsletter, which they may or may not abandon at some point. I would always suggest that whenever you start something, do please have your own newsletter base, however small it is. However slowly you're building it, it's literally the only channel of distribution that you will ever truly own. The others are great, use them, but have this and it's always easier to build it from something than from the ground up.

However, when it comes to developer content, these may be not the best way to go. So here's the thing, I'm not talking about these social media as a way to interact with public as a way for a brand to get their message across. I'm talking about them as a sources of traffic. Facebook for us has been a very low source of traffic and I mean that both in info B for developer content, both in info B and I was on the editorial team of a te hand developer media before Info BP and Facebook did get some results, but it was never the main source. Instagram is good for some clips. If you have a podcast, if you have some kind of video tutorials, it's fine for that. Obviously for anything textual not that great. X is actually the only one that I think that really works well in mainstream media and developer content as well.

And I think LinkedIn mostly depends on your company. For us, it works great for small and medium businesses and stuff like that, but not really for developer content. So what I would suggest for dev content distribution starter pack, if you're just starting out of course X because it allows you some really communication in the moment you publish something, you share it right away, it allows interaction. From my experience, developers as a public don't just want to read something. They really want to interact with it from fact. There was a research, what kind of content performs best for developers and the answer was that the best content is where people think that the person writing it is like 90% right, but 10% wrong and they get to correct them. So you need those interaction channels. My personal favourite and what worked best for our team in developer content was Reddit, both in advertising, we'll get to that later and just distributing and Discord is also a good way to go if you already have a community in there and it's like a dual benefit because if you have a community and you have some developer content, you always have a conversation starter to jump in there and you also have an audience that's kind of already built if you have to choose just one.

Okay, I would always suggest Reddit because it has a really very, very, very active developer community and I cannot overstate this, although it's very active, it's not always very nice or positive. You're going to get some bad comments, but also you'd get some bad comments if you wrote, the sky is blue so it's fine, don't worry about it. It has lots of specialised subreddits where you can participate. It's really easy to distribute. There is no process. You don't have to specifically edit your texts to make them perform better. It does yield great results for us. And the really fun thing is that there are many developers newsletters that are basically browsing Reddit for content and then they just pick it up and distribute it even further. So you get that nice second boost. So spining of which click, I realise I could this, oh, okay.

This was a slide where there were images of two newsletters, one was TLDR and the other was Change Log. We both used them and sources of Traffic a lot. When I say use them, well basically they pick up our articles or UBM submit them and we get a lot of traffic from 'em. Newsletters are great because developers love independent newsletters. They trust them, they love to see themselves on there and they also really read them. TLDR has some 3 million subs I think correct me there people if I'm wrong. Chain Log has somewhat less, I think a lot less, but it's also super engaging. A lot of developers read it and love it, both great sources and of course there was a little icon of your newsletter which may not have 3 million source, but again, I repeat that is literally the only means of the distribution.

You own that list of people who agreed that they want to receive your content, so keep it going. Some things that didn't work for us, I'm not saying they will not work for you, I'm just saying that didn't work for us, so maybe you can try something else with 'em, try them differently. One was the Hacker News, so basically Hacker News. There are a lot of articles out there, how to post in Hacker News to get the conversation started and going. We tried to follow them, we didn't get the results we wanted. We did get some traffic out of it, but just, it's not that it didn't work good, it's just that the amount of effort we needed to put in and the amount of traffic we got was just not worth it. Kind of the same as with Daily Dev. I still think it's a really good site, but I, it's really easy process to get your content out there, but a lot of content is like listicles the ultimate way to do this, how to do this with that. It's not really a content we make or the format we like, so it'll take a lot for us to transfer our content into that and the results just didn't back up the effort. That's fine. Maybe it works for you. Hopefully it does. What I did notice is they're kind of pivoting towards community building and they have some really fun formats like challenges. I think our friends from Twilio are doing some of the challenges there, so maybe they want to share how that's working out.

So basically I showed you our little developer content universe at in info B, but in truth it looks more like this and these little icons on top change depending on what our goals and what we want to do. But they're all really important because this is all organic traffic. So we haven't spent $1 of advertising budget yet. Mostly because when we started out, we didn't have an advertising budget, but the fun thing is most of our team came from regional independent niche media. So that wasn't used to us. We were more like your people have budgets, so basically trying to build traffic organic was pretty natural, but it's really nice if you have advertising budgets, it's really nice to spend it. The first money we got, we tried to test out what worked best for us. Again, this really depends on the type of your campaign, on the type of content on who you're targeting, how well you do your message, but we try to do the same quality advertising on these four different channels.

For us, LinkedIn and Daily Dev were kind of expensive and we didn't get a lot of traffic out of them. We got more traffic out of daily dev than from LinkedIn and that's kind of weird because LinkedIn really works for me, info bipa in other sectors like corporate and small and medium businesses. But for developer content it just did not perform that well. Reddit was amazing, it was pretty inexpensive and we got a lot of traffic from it and a lot of engagement. Not a little of good, but still all of it appreciated. And Dev two was also pretty good for us. If you're interested in the stats, we can talk later on.

And there's also the fourth way, so that's amplifying. Does anyone know what amplifying is? Okay, so amplifying is basically, I think I mixed up on my slides, nevermind. So amplifying is basically using other people or other brands cloud to widen your own reach. So potential amplifiers, they can be journalists, they can be media, they can be your own champions or potential champions that you already know about, but basically using someone who has either a bigger cloud but also maybe just not bigger, just different to get your point across. It's really easy to do that. So if you have a podcast, you're probably already doing it. So you have guests who are probably more interesting than you, maybe they have a bigger following and basically they share whatever you post with them because people share stuff that they're in and you get reached through their followers.

It can also be if you have a company you work with, this is a tool that we use at our developers Love it. We're one of their biggest clients. They ask if they can do a case study with us. Basically the only thing we had to do was for our developers to say how much they love it and how they use it. And basically the developers that use this tool are kind of learning also about info. It's not the greatest amount of traffic, but it is a different kind of audience. So I keep talking about how to get your content to perform, but the title of my talk was not how to get a high performing content because it was just the content that does its job. If you have a tutorial that has a hundred views and that's a hundred people that know how to do something and it didn't give up halfway, that's good.

That little content did its job. When you get a hang of it, content can be quite quick and quite cheap. So say you have some kind of feature that kind of doesn't have a really good ui, people give up along the way, maybe they don't use a feature, even if it's good for them. Content or tutorial is a really cheap fix to that until you get to that on your roadmap and fix the fuzzy ui. So just because something doesn't have thousands of views doesn't mean that it's content that it's not doing your job. And also there are two types of contents, high performing content. So one is it goes like this because when you publish it, it gets all the views, it's maybe tied to something that's relevant. I dunno, apple is talking about introducing RCS. You publish something about RCS, it's going to go like this, but there's also a content that's kind of evergreen. It's a long tail that you publish and it has maybe a hundred views this month, hundred views next month and so on and so on and so on. And it'll often outperform the really popular one. So just because something is not working right away does not mean that it's not working and that it's not good content. And that's it.

Any questions? Okay,

MC: I got you. You got it.

Audience member 1:

So we at pieces have been trying to crack the Reddit code. How do you, and so we're not, what type of content do you feel works best on Reddit? Doing responses like, Hey, check this out, or we do some content that's kind of technical to see if that drives some interest, but it just doesn't seem to do very well.

Tena: Okay. So basically what we like to do just back from our journalist days that we translate to Infobit, we like to do kind of rounded campaigns. They don't have be campaigns, they don't have to be paid. So if you want to push your tutorial or something technical about how your product works, you just do a range of blogs or articles first, something about the industry that you're in. Why if you're doing something insecurity, then what's the state of security? Then how to stop something insecurity that your product does. Then something about your product specifically, and then you tie it in with the tutorials so it's never straight in the head. It is just trying to give more rounded picture. I think it was also Kevin, I keep quo Kevin, but he said that a person has to see something like seven times to get it in their head. And it's like that you're approaching them just basically from all sides and trying to think, okay, how can I present this topic in 10 different ways and how to tie them all to each other.

Audience member 1:

And is this on your own subreddit or on just relevant subreddits type of thing? No, mostly relevant subreddits. Okay, cool. Thanks.

Audience member 2:

That last part is your own subreddit or yeah, your own sub Reddit or different ones is you answered that part, but it's like are you posting bits of the content or you're posting it somewhere hosting it and then you're going to that subreddit and saying, Hey, we're talking about your example security on this article, or are you taking bits and pieces of it and trying to post that so it gets somebody interested and you say, Hey, if you want to learn more, we wrote about it here. What does that look like?

Tena: Oh my god, it's so much more simple on red for now. So basically you just slap it on, you post it and people just stick onto it. For us, Reddit has been really low effort, so we don't even try to start a conversation. The conversation starts itself, we just share it and also something that's stupid but works on Reddit and should not. So if you post the content and then it performs kind of well and it's kind of a long tail or evergreen, you can repost it in two months and it'll be fine as long long as you don't overdo it. Sometimes it doesn't stick the first time and the second time it does. But yeah, so we love it so much because it has been so low effort and

Audience member 2:

It's just a new post, not like you're not jumping into a thread and posting, you're doing brand new post is

Tena: Just a brand new post. Yeah,

Audience member 2:

Okay. And then for you had the starter pack of the three Twitter, Reddit, discord, those are platforms just to say, hey, it's out there. It's just like a speakerphone for you to say that it's available.

Tena: Exactly. That's basically what distribution is, just throwing it out there.

Audience member 2:

Okay, cool.

Audience member 3:

Thank you. Is there a research phase you do before posting these, whether it's Reddit or Twitter, before you post it in these spaces? Or are you just posting it, see how it does, and then make a decision from there?

Tena: The second one, personally from my experience and I worked for media, for corporate, for startups, for basically I've approached content from all sides, and the only research that gives you actual results is just doing it. Sometimes it's going to go badly. Sometimes you're going to get some backlash and everyone's going to forget it in a week. It's fine if you try it, it doesn't perform. Oh well, you have some new information.

Audience member 3:

You've shared some great tips on distribution and syndication. Can you share some best practises on how to publish the content? What gets the most attention? What increases readability, how does it help the developers most?

Tena: Oh yeah, sure. I mean it's always choosing the right topic, right? So it depends on what kind of content is. If it's the type of content that's a tutorial or something super related to your product, then what we usually do is ask the developers. We have awesome engineers in info B, and they really care about the product, they're billing. So we're like, what's really fuzzy about our products? Where do you need most help? What's not working? What features are not being used? Also, you have probably all the user data, you see where they're falling off when they're just not using it the way you want them to. So that's always a good starting point because it's something people need. And if you're looking for a content that has a wider reach, you want tens of thousands of reads. It's kind of more general ish.

Well, we also ask our developers, so here's what we do. We have developer workshops where our developers come and they have a free topic, they can write about whatever they want and they kind of discuss, everyone makes three topics and they discuss their own topics and why they want to write about them. And they're usually, it's feeling the pulse of our audience, which are also developers sometimes. I have been working with developer content and developers for a long time and sometimes I'm like, oh, that's a weird topic that's not going to work. And then it just skyrockets. And I'm like, how did this happen? So if you have a pool of developers, do use them. Ask them about their opinions, get 'em to write it, help them to write it, enable them. I think that's the biggest thing, and I think that's how you get most topics that resonate. The most popular topics on Shift Mag, which is basically like an independent magazine. We have journalists and everything. We do research about what topics are going on right now, what everyone is talking about, and things that usually blow up are things are engineers, right? The topics they pick.

MC: Anyone else? Alright, Tennn, thank you so much.