[endorphone]

Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, and others have adopted this strategy with great success

This is a confirmation bias, however. There are a lot of orgs trying the same strategy to absolutely no success, great content that doesn't have the social proof rotting away in obscurity.

Even among the ones who yield success, that tends to come and go. It's a very short path between "wow great content" and content that is cynically (and sometimes accurately) seen as a thin veneer over self-promotion.

There was a period when Netflix, for instance, had tech pieces on here constantly. The crowd lost interest. They're still pumping out the content, presumably at a significant manpower cost, to seemingly little readership.

[puranjay]

I run a content marketing agency. The problem you're talking about is, indeed, a massive one. But that usually happens when companies create content without thinking about its distribution.

While you certainly must create content that your audience wants to read, it is even more important that you have a clear plan for distributing it. If your content isn't supported by a strong SEO plan, and if you don't have a clear social media and PR strategy for it, you won't see results, no matter how good the content is.

[metafunctor]

Yep, don't forget to do the marketing for your marketing.

[gregorygoc]

Isn’t distribution of content is like just posting what you wrote on reddit or on HN nowadays?

[puranjay]

Way more than that. It's a combination of SEO + PR + social media. So you'd have some content that other sites might be willing to publish or link to (say, in a weekly "best of" roundup). Some other content that would focus purely on keywords supported by a backlinking campaign to rank well in search engines. And some other content that would focus on topics that would resonate with, say, the HN crowd.

[libertine]

Ah this takes me back to the ol'days: content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.

[nine_k]

Would you mind to link some of these quality articles of not so successful companies? Maybe HN crowd would bring them some of the deserved success.

[captainredbeard]

At Netflix's level, the tech blog content shifted from being content marketing to content recruiting.

[dshah]

At scale, recruiting is often about marketing. It's about conveying a compelling story that pulls people in.