Help users build content marketing strategies. Use when someone is starting a blog, building SEO, creating thought leadership content, or deciding on content formats and distribution channels.
Help the user build effective content marketing using frameworks from 23 product leaders who have built content engines at companies like Notion, First Round, and The Pragmatic Engineer.
When the user asks for help with content marketing:
Meltem Kuran: "If people aren't asking this question to Google, you can write all the content you want, it doesn't matter, nobody's going to find it." Verify that people are actually searching for the topic before investing in creation.
Camille Ricketts: "The way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit... What is it that they need to get promoted? What is it that they need to avoid failure?" Treat content as a product that solves specific professional anxieties.
Camille Ricketts: "Painkillers always win. Can your content be a painkiller? Can it help people out of situations that are causing them a lot of pain?" Focus on solving specific pain points rather than providing general 'vitamins.'
Lulu Cheng Meservey: "Going direct means that the founder or executive has to be speaking from themselves. First person, speaking in a human voice authentically. You see them make mistakes, you see them be vulnerable." Corporate accounts fail; personality wins.
Meltem Kuran: "The main thing to think about is, is the Google search over? If someone reads your content, are they going back to Google to continue reading more or is the Google search over?" Write content that fully satisfies user intent.
Julian Shapiro: "I'm spending as many hours going back and rewriting old blog posts as I am writing new ones. I consider everything I write to be evergreen." Regularly update old content rather than chasing news cycles.
Sriram and Aarthi: "The most important thing is just get started and do something every single day... it builds muscle, it gets you familiar with the medium." Daily reps matter more than polish when starting out.
Ethan Smith: "The future of content is clearly AI-assisted. Clearly, you and I will be using AI to help us write, so it's not no AI at all, but it's not 100% generated with AI." Human expertise provides the 'information gain' that search engines reward.
For all 35 insights from 23 guests, see references/guest-insights.md