Tech blogging is on the rise though most of startups see it as a secondary thing. They're totally right but there's one condition to it – it requires skill as well as time. A lot of companies are comfortable with solving this problem by outsourcing content creation and hiring agencies or freelancers.
That's debatable whether you should really do it or not but let's focus on one detail that may save you from getting zero engagement, because nobody gives a rat’s ass about your blogs. It's how you pay for the content you get and we'll try to explain why exactly word count model just doesn't work for tech blogging.
Quality content requires creativity
This is something close to what Gary Vaynerchuk has to say about your follower count.
“...the right question isn’t “what do followers get me?”. The right question is “What am I trying to achieve?”. You see, I’m a reverse engineer.”
Quality content is always aimed at what you're trying to achieve. It's about your story, values, goals, passion and so on. This is the only way to get attention, get engagement and finally sell something.
Pay-per-word model kills it. It makes people add redundancy and unnecessary details. Authors have to think about getting their word count right in order to get paid instead of thinking about your business goals. Forget about creativity and tailoring your content to specific audience.
Pay-per-word model is a legacy model. Who gives a crap about the word count on your HN or TechCrunch article today? Nobody. It's all about the story.
It's stories that sell
And designers, engineers, growth hackers telling real life stories about their work, businesses, problems and wins. Not same old press releases and ads.
Reaching your milestones is cool but we'd love to know more about How you managed to get there. Don't just check-in on your next round, tell us How it went: people, reasoning, problems, solutions and holding your papers signed.
Pay-per-story model
Stories actually. Don't worry about word count as it gets you nowhere and indicates your incompetence in asking right questions on marketing:
“It’s all strategy, but I’m always thinking about the bottom line, which is: “Why?” It all has to be reverse engineered.
”
Gary's right, and this is why we're not doing a project for you if there's no way we can access your staff. We believe that companies and tech startups underestimate the value of real voices – their people getting in front of the mic. This what we're always looking for and use it as raw materials in order to put together something interesting and valuable for your business.
Professional content is not supposed to be picked apart because individual words don't matter as you don't get paid per pixel, wireframe or line of code.