When it comes to maintaining a corporate blog, you may consider writing general thoughts on your industry and talking about more subjects rather than using it solely for your company’s announcements. It will drive traffic, and potential customers, to your website. That is what GoodBlogs is all about — except that you don’t have to hire a blogger.
Over the past couple of months, content marketing is a phrase that started to appear. As search engine optimization results in half-baked content that doesn’t work on social networks, a new strategy was needed. That’s why quality content became a requirement to drive a lot of traffic quickly.
Strangely, Digg was a big inspiration for the project. “The problem with Digg is that they don’t have any original content. They just link out to other people’s content. If they had original content I think they’d be a lot more successful. But nobody is going to take the time and energy to create that content for nothing… What if when an article was voted to the homepage the person who wrote it got paid? Then I bet a ton of people would submit original content,” said Jason Trout, co-founder of GoodBlogs.
GoodBlogs first used that idea to create a niche website called The Flaming Vegan and saw incredible social traffic. That is when they chose to provide the platform as well as their process to other companies.
For $3,100, GoodBlogs will start accepting blog posts on a niche subject written by random knowledgeable people. For example, a wine company will look for posts from oenophiles. Then, readers can vote and a couple of posts will land on the front page of the blog every day. If that happens, the blogger gets paid $10.
With that process, GoodBlogs doesn’t have any problem finding writers and attracting readers, and a company could benefit from the increase in traffic. The co-founders, Jason Trout and Peter Awad, are based in Decorah, Iowa with other employees working remotely. The company received angel funding and is ready to open blog on fishing for a fishing company, micro-brewing for a home brew supply company or knitting for a yarn company.