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independenceone source · 1 more author in those circles
standing

contested · 2 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

mixed results

confidence

medium

evidence

3 claims · 3 articles · 3 receipts

window

2012-12-21 → 2017-04-18 · nothing since 2017

a single source, nothing corroborates it · contested

Publish on other people's sites, not only your own

Borrowed audiences beat your own by an order of magnitude, and enough placements inside one window makes a market think you are everywhere at once. A syndicated version of an old essay outperformed anything on its author's own site. The measured exception is a small technical niche, where the same tactic returned few enough subscribers that talks and the local meetup did better.

Where this splits

Guest posting paid off well on general audience blogs and disappointed badly in a small technical community, where meetups and conference talks outperformed it.

2 claims against 1

Cory Zue · Nathan Barry

Publish on bigger sites, borrowed audiences beat yours

  1. 01Treat guest posts as credibility and relationship building, not traffic: publish enough of them in the same window that your market keeps bumping into you and assumes you are everywhere
  2. 02Submit your writing to a larger publication in your space; a syndicated version can reach far more people than your own site does.
the objection · 1 claimNathan Barry

In a small niche, talks beat guest posts

For a small technical niche, guest posts are a poor subscriber source: conference talks and the local meetup did more than the guest posting funnel

What it returned

  • 622

    Guest posts brought a disappointing number of signups; only 622 emails were added across six months of writing in the small Ember community

  • Nine guest posts around the launch; readers commented that they had seen an absurd number of his posts that day, which was the intended impression

  • An early essay of Zue's was republished by Hacker Noon on Medium and drew considerably more engagement than he had expected.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.

More in pr

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.