作者：Ciara Byrne

如今内容营销非常流行，但是对于开发者，或者那些职称中不包含“市场营销”字眼的人来说，执行它是非常困难的。所以当我们最近在巴黎的GEN News Summit上遇到一位内容营销专家时，我便把握住机会向他青椒了使用内容的一些诀窍。

Shafqat Islam曾经是一名软件工程师，而现在是NewsCred（一家初创企业，主要获得来自《福布斯》和《科技新时代》的授权内容而提供给那些所需要的人）的首席执行官。

content-marketing(from thesearchagents)

Islam说道：“我们是一家使用内容营销去销售产品的技术公司。”以下是Islam关于如何有效执行内容营销的一些诀窍。

1）提供有用的内容：避免内容全部都是关于产品。提供一些普遍有用的内容。举个例子来说，如果你的产品是瞄准开发者，Islam主张“一个良好的测试方法就是看看它在Hacker News（游戏邦注：一家关于计算机黑客和创业公司的社会化新闻网站）能否获得积极投票。如果你担心人们会认为这是市场营销，那么它可能就是市场营销。”

2）检查你的速度：基于一定速度去提供内容，不管是授权内容还是原创内容。在社交媒体渠道中，这意味着一天提供5至10条有趣的内容。“我们使用的是三分法：三分之一应该是你的原创内容，这是处于更深的购买漏斗中，即关于你的产品，还有三分之一是一些普遍有用的内容，并不是关于你的产品，而最后的三分之一则是观点，即一些可能会让人皱眉的富有争议的内容。”

3）分享到Slideshare上：“我们的最佳分销渠道便是Slideshare，你可能猜不到这点。”NewsCred最近公开了一系列有关50条内容营销统计的幻灯片，并在不到1周时间里吸引了5万多人的浏览。“我们会利用LinkedIn去推广这些内容。然后产业中的一些人便会在他们的网站上分享我们的内容。”

4）依靠LinkedIn：Islam承认自己是LinkedIn的忠实粉丝，特别是对于该网站的B2B业务。“不要再把时间浪费于Facebook上，除非这是一款面向消费者的应用。LinkedIn已经成为了一个内容性网站。你可以将一整排文章推向关注你们公司的人，也可以通过LinkedIn进行内容付费推广。不久后他们将向那些瞄准未关注你们公司的用户的文章收取费用。公司的页面是核心，我们也会分组推出内容，现在我们主要是专注于内容和单位，很快我们也将推出收费文章。”

5）利用Email：Email仍然是现今世界上最大的社交网站。“很多人都忽视了电子邮件。这是世界上最有效的分销渠道，因为你这么做可能会干扰别人的生活，所以你必须提供一些真正有趣或有用的内容。你需要问问自己‘如果我收到这些内容会愿意转发给好友吗？’你必须准确地发送电子邮件！”

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Top 5 content marketing tips for techies

By Ciara Byrne

Content marketing is all the rage, but implementing it can be intimidating for developers, or indeed anyone whose job title does not include the word “marketing.” So when we ran into a content marketing expert at the recent GEN News Summit in Paris, I took the opportunity to ask for his top tips on using content.

Shafqat Islam, himself a former software engineer, is the CEO of NewsCred, a startup that licences content from publications like Forbes and Popular Science to brands who need it. (Disclosure: VentureBeat is a NewsCred partner: The company redistributes some of our content to its customers, and in return pays us a licensing fee.)

“We are a tech company using content marketing to sell our products,” Islam says. Here are Islam’s top tips for techies on how to do content marketing well.

1) Be useful: Don’t make your content all about the product. Provide content which is generally useful. For example, if your product targets developers, Islam contends that “A good test is, would that piece get voted up on Hacker News? If you are worried that people will think it is marketing, it probably is marketing.”

2) Check your velocity: Provide content, either licensed or original, at a certain velocity. On social media channels this means 5-10 pieces of interesting content a day. “We use the rule of thirds: One third should be your original content, which could be deeper in the purchase funnel and be about your product, one third is generally useful content not about your product, and then the other third is opinion, some controversial stuff which will raise eyebrows.”

3) Share on Slideshare: “One of our best distribution channels is Slideshare, which you would never guess.” NewsCred recently posted a set of slides on 50 Content Marketing stats, which racked up 50,000 views in less than a week. “We used our network to amplify it using LinkedIn. Then certain people in our industry started sharing it on their sites.”

4) Lean on LinkedIn: Islam is a big fan of LinkedIn, especially for B2B businesses. “Don’t waste time with Facebook unless it’s a very consumer-facing app. LinkedIn has become a content site.You can push out whole posts to your company’s followers, you can put content in paid distribution through LinkedIn. Pretty soon they will launch a way to do sponsored posts targeting people who don’t follow your company. The company page is the hub, we also post in groups, we do content-based ad units, and soon we will do sponsored posts.”

5) Embrace Email: Email is still the biggest social network in the world. “People overlook email. It’s the best distribution channel in the world, but you are interrupting someone’s day so you should only forward something really funny or really useful or really interesting. Ask yourself  ’Is this something I would forward to my friend?’ You have to earn the right to send an email.”(source:venturebeat)