Hi there!

Today on Let’s Connect, we will discover the secret sauce of The Content Strategist, a perfect example of an effective brand blog. Of course, it is not a coincidence we chose this platform since it is from a young company called Contently, whose goal is to help brands and journalists to publish more engaging stories on the web.

A visually appealing homepage

Let’s begin with The Content Strategist homepage. What is catching the eye as soon as you connect is the blog’s tagline, which immediately tells the user what he will find on the platform:

“Content Strategist: Insights and Analysis on Brands, Storytelling, and the Future of Content, by Contently”.

It couldn’t have been shorter and clearer. Every brand blogs should work on summarizing its message so effectively.

Then, we get the latest posts published on the platform. Nothing original, you think? I agree…

Consuming content on the Internet has long felt like drinking from a firehose. Yet the problem is getting even worse. Driven by a focus on page views and the growth of viral content from social sharing sites like Buzzfeed and Gawker, the volume of unfiltered and even unwanted content has exploded. Users continue to struggle to find the signal in the ever-louder noise.

In addition to wasting users’ time, this content discovery gap poses a significant opportunity cost for those who trade in information currency: publishers, analysts, investors, entrepreneurs, executives, journalists and other professionals. Like the adage “half of my advertising is wasted – I just don’t know which half,” the vast majority of content misses its target and goes unread, creating a vastly underperforming asset for producers and publishers. Fortunately, startups and innovative publishers are developing and employing strategies that promise to narrow the Content Discovery Gap.

Curation:…

As executive-in-residence at Scale Venture Partners, I’ve worked with a number of SaaS startups to help them refine the efficiency of their operations. One of the things that is often neglected is customer churn. Early focus on churn helps build discipline that becomes even more important as a company grows to $100 million or more in revenues.

In the bad old days of on-premise Enterprise software, a startup was considered to have traction when it got its first dozen paying customers. These were typically six-figure deals and required a lot of heavy lifting to get the customers into production. While the old-school field sales model was not particularly efficient, it had the virtue of driving an organization toward making early customers successful.

When you have hundreds or thousands of customers, though, things can become rather anonymous and it’s harder to make sure customers are using your product correctly. If customers…