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Language: en
Some people say that content is king.
But at Ahrefs, product is king and
the&nbsp;content's job is to serve the king.
This is actually our content marketing strategy
in a nutshell and it's what people call "product-
led content marketing."
Now, if you're new to product-led content,
it's simply content that helps people solve
a problem with the help of your product.
Again, product is king.
It doesn't include hard sells or aggressive&nbsp;pitches
and that's because product-led content&nbsp;shouldn't
feel like a timeshare presentation.
It's about strategically weaving your product
and its use cases into content that'll actually
help people solve a problem.
For example, at Ahrefs,&nbsp;&nbsp;we have a tool
called Keywords Explorer,&nbsp;which is our
keyword research tool.
Now, it would make total sense for us
to create a post on how to do keyword
research because you need a keyword
research tool to actually do it well.
A perfect opportunity for us to
naturally plug our awesome tool.
Now, product-led content serves three
main purposes: it helps you bring&nbsp;awareness
to your products at scale, acquire new
customers, and retain your existing customers.
Let's talk about how product-led content
can do this starting with the first purpose.
It's obvious why product-led content helps
bring awareness to your product because your
product should be the hero in solving a problem.
For example, let's say you sell air compressors.
Someone might go to Google and search for
"how&nbsp;to winterize sprinkler system" because
they don't want their pipes to burst in the winter.
They see a page from some unknown company –
that's&nbsp;you – click it, then read through the post.
They'll see that winterizing sprinkler
systems requires an air compressor
to blow out excess water.
Not just that, but the article actually&nbsp;recommends
using a compressor called "ForeverAir",&nbsp;which is
a 12-gallon air compressor with&nbsp;an automatic
charging feature that's going&nbsp;to make the job
10X faster and easier.
There's now awareness that the compressor
ForeverAir exists and readers are&nbsp;now aware
of the USPs of the product.
Now, the reason why I said&nbsp;that product-led
content&nbsp;can bring awareness to your products
at scale is because you're integrating your product
into&nbsp;topics that people are actually interested in.
I mean, no one is searching for "ForeverAir"&nbsp;
because it might be a&nbsp;relatively unpopular product.
But the query "how to winterize sprinkler
system" gets an average of 2,700 monthly
searches in the US alone.
Now come up with 100 more&nbsp;topics where
a ForeverAir would be&nbsp;the perfect solution
to a problem, and you're now on your way
to&nbsp;bringing product awareness at scale.
The second purpose product-led content
serves is to help acquire new customers.
So going back to the air compressor company,
someone might click a link in that article&nbsp;to their
recommendation, see it's exactly what
they're looking for and within budget.
They add to cart and checkout.
Customer acquired.
Basically, people will come for the
information and some will buy it.
In general, the more indispensable your product is
in solving a problem, the more people will buy it.
And the third purpose product-led content
serves is it helps retain customers.
And this works particularly well for companies
that thrive and survive off of a recurring&nbsp;revenue
model like a software company.
Alright, so let's walk through a real&nbsp;example
of how a single piece of product-led&nbsp;content
can help serve all three purposes.
Take this blog post on how to do keyword research.
Because you need a keyword research tool
to do&nbsp;keyword research, it's easy for us to add
some natural plugs of our tool,
Keywords Explorer.
So anyone who reads this article will know
that Ahrefs has a keyword research tool.
Now, according to Site Explorer, this page ranks
for nearly a thousand keywords and as a result,
gets tons and tons of search
traffic every single month.
So the blog post helps to bring
product awareness at scale.
Check.
Now, someone reading&nbsp;this article will see
use cases of our tool&nbsp;and think&nbsp;that it's
perfect for their needs.
So they sign up for an account.
Check – customer acquired.
Now, at the same time, an existing
customer might read this post because
of a recommendation from a colleague.
She realizes that Ahrefs has a cool
new metric called "traffic potential."
She gets some ideas, logs into her Ahrefs account
and spends some time doing keyword research.
She also reports back to her team
on Slack and&nbsp;tells them to try it out.
Everyone loves it!
Check.
Customers retained.
Now, as much as I love&nbsp;product-led content
especially because&nbsp;I've experienced results
first-hand, it may not be the best content
marketing strategy for every business.
As a general rule of thumb, product-led content
works well when your product helps to solve
common problems and you're able
to serve and sell to these people.
So that means that a local pub or a chiropractor
might be better off looking at other&nbsp;marketing
techniques like local SEO.
Now, if you have a services based company,
product-led content can still work for you.
For example, let's say your business provides
virtual fitness and nutrition coaching sessions.
So basically any topic where you can talk about
these things can be potential opportunities for
you to create product-led content.
Alright, so if you want to start&nbsp;creating
product-led content,&nbsp;there are three things
you need to do.
#1. Make sure you know your product really well.
And I don't want you to just brush this off.
Having a deep understanding of your
product and knowing how it helps
solve different problems is the hardest
part about creating product-led content.
The better you know your product and the more
you believe in its effectiveness and use cases,
the better your content will be.
For example, prior to joining Ahrefs,
I was a paying customer for a few years.
And anytime I talked with clients or if I
ever blogged about anything SEO-related,
I felt like I had to recommend Ahrefs,
otherwise, I felt like I'd be&nbsp;doing
a disservice to my readers.
That's because I knew how to use the product
pretty well and I truly believed that in many&nbsp;cases,
Ahrefs was the best solution to a problem.
So when I actually joined the company,
it was a super-natural transition because
I already knew the product pretty well.
And today, I know the product better than ever.
Possibly better than anyone in the entire world.
Alright, the second thing you need to do is
to find topics you'll create content around.
And the way we choose topics is mostly
based on search traffic potential because
SEO is the primary distribution strategy
we&nbsp;use to gain visibility to our content.
To do that, you can use a keyword
research tool like Keywords Explorer.
Just search for topics in your niche and then
head on over to the Matching terms&nbsp;report
to get some keyword ideas.
Now, because we're looking mostly for
problems and things people want to learn,
I'll head on over to the Questions report.
And to narrow in on easy-to-rank-for keywords,
you can set a keyword difficulty filter&nbsp;with&nbsp;a low
maximum value like 10.
From here, you can look at the traffic potential
column to get an idea of how much search traffic
you could get if you were
to rank #1 for that keyword.
Now, with this list, you can move on to&nbsp;
the third step which is to prioritize&nbsp;your
keywords using business potential.
Business potential is simply a way we
score topics based on how helpful we
think&nbsp;our product is in solving
a specific problem.
And these scores range from 0 - 3.
A score of 3 means that your product is
an irreplaceable solution to a problem.
For example, Ahrefs is indispensable for
a&nbsp;topic like "how to rank higher in Google"
because&nbsp;it's hard to do
that without tools like ours.
A score of 2 means that our product helps quite
a&nbsp;bit, but it's not essential to solve the problem.
For example, if the air compressor company had
a post on "how to inflate your vehicle's tires,"
their product wouldn't exactly be
indispensable because there are
tons of other ways you can do it.
Now, a score of 1 means that our&nbsp;product
can only be mentioned fleetingly.&nbsp;
For example, if the fitness and nutrition
coaching company created content&nbsp;on
the best fitness trackers,&nbsp;it'd be tough
to organically mention&nbsp;their service in
a meaningful way.
And a score of 0 means there's absolutely
no way to mention your product.
And these are topics that should&nbsp;be
removed from your topic list&nbsp;or deprioritized
to the bottom of the list.
Because there's so many topics you can write
about in just about any niche, I highly recommend
trying this out for your company because&nbsp;
we've found it to work extremely well.
And if you want these pages to&nbsp;actually
rank high in Google,&nbsp;then go and watch
our step-by-step tutorial that'll show
you exactly how to write content
that's optimized to rank in search engines.
I'll see you in the next tutorial.