When I began at Near Me about a year ago, our content marketing was nowhere close to where it is now. Creating a blog schedule with consistently published articles help put us on the map. This constant flow of content grabbed a huge following, and ultimately, benefited us by boosting our company’s visibility, credibility and generating quality leads. For more tips, read one of the first blogs I wrote.

How blogging helped Near Me increase traffic by 300%

You would think that with all the innovations in media, including audio and video and virtual reality, people would be attracted to more technically advanced mediums -- not true. A blog post I wrote about Irina Frodin, CEO of No taxi received the most hits with almost 500 views (our most ever), while my recent article with Brian Solis received the most LinkedIn Shares with over 250 and counting. It seems that people still want to read, so you need to give them what they want. For advice on content strategies, check out this article.   

Quality vs Quantity

What reasons can be attributed to these successful posts? I’m not one to toot my own horn, but good writing skills don’t hurt. In addition to my graduate studies in English, I received training on how to write a blog by writing and editing my peers’ work during my first months here as an intern and I continue to collaborate with a team of contributing writers. Are you thinking, “I’m a lowly startup with hardly any employees and can’t afford rockstar writers.” In reality, you can! If you don’t have writing skills or can’t afford someone in person, here are resources that can help:

https://www.semrush.com/

Semrush offers tools and resources for increasing SEO and accessing high revenue content strategies.

http://www.curata.com/

Curata is a site that finds relevant articles within your industry. We use if for our curated series. Instead of spending hours scanning websites for interesting topics, summaries of articles show up in your feed, giving you an endless flow of content to cherry pick from.

http://www.writeraccess.com/

Don’t have the writers on your staff? No problem. Sites like Writer Access and elance are a one stop shop for scoring writing talent. A helpful rating system lets you scroll through a collection of writers, with varying specialties and experience.

There’s no denying it, Content is King. Whether you’re a peer-to-peer marketplace for educators, sports equipment or taxis, you need to grab customers and there’s no better, tried and true way to accomplish that. We’re still learning as a startup ourselves, but have done a lot of the hard work so you can stay focused on what’s important -- keeping your customers happy!  

Have suggestions on how marketplaces can improve their Content Marketing? Let us know in the comment section below or tweet us @NearMeCo