Contributed article strategy for open source startups
I wrote a bit of a rant about content marketing earlier this week, but it focused mostly on blogging. Which is important, but I thought I’d do another very tactical post, this time about contributed articles, because I think most startups underuse them. I also still have a toe in the tech media world, through the column I write for The New Stack.
First of all, contributed articles are articles you write and get published in a publication, like The New Stack, Forbes, Container Journal, etc. I’d also count an article you write and have published on another company’s blog a contributed article, particularly if it’s a big company with a big audience. You want these to be published under your byline, and you should get a bio published that goes along with the article.
Contributed articles are an awareness play. They do not close deals, but they do gain you huge amounts of credibility with your market (if you publish them in places your market is already reading, and that they trust) and with investors, because investors who specialize in open source companies are reading the same publications.
The reason I thought to write about them now is Open Core Venture’s focus on starting your content marketing six quarters before you plan to raise a seed round. If you were super serious about your content marketing strategy from day 1, I think you would do a weekly blog post and a monthly contributed article. Note that I’ve yet to see a company actually do this, but I don’t have attention to spare for every company out there, so I’m sure some do.
Getting contributed articles right can be tricky. Unlike with your blog posts, you have to convince someone else (the editor) that the piece is worth publishing. That’s why they give you credibility, it’s also why they’re harder to do. Here’s some musts for contributed articles:
The must be absolutely non-commercial. The only place you promote your project/product/company is in your bio. Otherwise, they should focus on the problem space you work in. This is the most frequent mistake founders/marketing leaders make about contributed articles.
They should be opinionated. If you’re just saying things that everyone already knows and agrees with, no one will publish it, read it or talk about it.
They should implicitly position your project/product as the solution to the problems you outline. But you have to do this without mentioning your project/product/company.
Contributed articles should be published in the publications your target market reads. In order to get this right, you have to a) know who your target market is and b) know what publications they read. That seems obvious, but many maintainers/founders aren’t entirely clear on either. It also means that you might not be publishing places that generic developers read. For example, if your market is the military, you’ll want to publish contributed articles in publications that software engineers in the military and at defense contractors will read.
Contributed articles are a great way to evangelize an open source project. Sometimes you can get away with being a bit more promotional if you’re evangelizing an open source project that doesn’t have a company attached to it. So if you’re, for example, promoting an open source project you made as a side project, contributed articles are a really good way to start increasing awareness.
Contributed articles are a long game. And they’re cumulative. You’ll get more than 10x the value from 10 contributed articles than from one contributed article. Being consistent is hard, but it’s the key to a contributed article strategy. The chances that you’ll get a contributed article published and see a bump in revenue the next day are pretty much zero. If that happens, it will be a short-lived bump, almost certainly.
Lastly, and I’m going to repeat this, because it is probably most important. The best contributed articles are bold and somewhat controversial. They state an opinion that you know some people disagree with. They attempt to persuade readers that your point of view is correct. These articles generate the most discussion, and they also do the best job of attracting people who agree with you to join your community and/or become customers. So before you start writing a contributed article, make sure you’ve clarified the opinions that are core to your project/product/company.
P.S. Apologies if you’re getting multiple emails, I’m switching email platforms and the process has been less smooth than I’d hoped.