April 17, 2019 at 16:50

Content Marketing in the USA, Latin America and Asia: Useful Tips, Links and Tools for Budget Promotion



    Image: Unsplash

    Going beyond the home market for any startup is not an easy test. You have limited resources, you know little about the specifics of promotion in new countries, you did not work with local languages.

    The task of reaching even the smallest audience in different parts of the world without huge costs seems impossible. In fact, with the help of content marketing tools, you can solve it without any special costs. Today I will talk about how best to act in various situations, and what tools to use. Go!

    USA: difficulties and ways to get around them


    The leading country in the world, a huge market, fierce competition. This is all you need to know before starting your project promotion activity here. What worked perfectly in Russia, in America, most likely will not work precisely because of the enormous competition.

    If on RuNet you can pick up online media, send your column to the editor, get an answer and get publication even for free, then in the USA this does not work. Editors of popular online media are attacked by hundreds of startups every day, so it’s very difficult to get their attention - there are even services that sell their contacts for money. And even if you manage to start a dialogue, the process of publishing one article can stretch for months. And no one gives guarantees that the material will be released in the right format and in general will eventually be released.

    A more effective way of content promotion in the American market today is to use the Medium platform in combination with some other social services.

    To publish your content, you need to use “publishing” on Medium - themed blogs and even entire media that grew up on the Medium platform are called. Moreover, the audience of such publications may exceed the number of readers of traditional online media. For example, here is a comparison of the popular Medium blog on Hackernoon technology and one of the largest media in the same field Venturebeat:



    To find popular publications it’s convenient to use the toppub site - and with it you can find blogs that are popular in the niche you need:



    In addition using the Smedian resourceYou can find publications that are looking for authors, and submit a request. One click, editor’s approval, and you can submit your articles to this publication for review directly from your Medium profile. You won’t even need to write to anyone. It is very comfortable.



    This way you can get good coverage - for example, here is a graph of the number of readers for one of the popular guides that I prepared for Hackernoon:



    Using publications on Medium will allow you to attract a certain number of readers, but you should not neglect the independent promotion of content. After publication, engage in reposts (or, as marketers say, “sowing”) links to your article on various English-language resources.

    The most obvious place for this is a resource called Hacker News.. This is an aggregator of links to technological articles. The project was launched by one of the most famous startup incubators Y Combinator, it is visited by more than 13 million people:

    image

    Good articles on technology have every chance to get to the main page and get traffic. Even a couple of dozen minutes on the main Hacker News will give you hundreds and thousands of visits.

    And of course, you should not forget about Reddit. This, in fact, is an aggregator-social network, divided into many subsections (subreddits) with its own audience. Not all of them can publish links, somewhere only text articles are allowed, but you can easily select several sections for PR of your article. You can do this with a simple Google search like “technology / keywords from an article in English + subreddit” - you will immediately see many articles listing the necessary subsections.

    There are a bunch of subreddits on marketing, project management, usability and design - reddit covers all the topics that the startup founder can think of. As a result, the publication in Hacker News + of several thematic subreddits may well bring tens of thousands of readers.

    Latin America: where to get content, how to promote it


    If your team does not have native Spanish speakers, then you will need someone to help localize the content. You don’t have to invent anything here - go to Upwork, where there is a huge selection of native speakers from all over the world. Publish the task and in an hour or two you will have a dozen candidates, or even more.



    The number of responses to one of the tasks published by me

    Of course, you will get your content faster if you translate it into English beforehand - there are not so many objective native speakers of Spanish with good knowledge of Russian.

    Once your content is ready, you need to publish it somewhere. The easiest and fastest option is to choose any free blogging platform like Medium. Or if you want to attract maximum traffic to your site, then create a dedicated version of the blog there and post the texts there.

    Two resources are perfect for “sowing” content:

    • Taringa.net is a popular aggregator site in Latin America, somewhat similar to Reddit, with more than 21 million visitors.
    • Meneame.net - 9.5 million visitors.

    On each of them you can publish links and articles, there is no particular difficulty. Some resources, like Meneame, impose additional restrictions - for example, before publishing your post, you need to make 7-8 likes to other users' posts.

    Thanks to the auto-translation feature in Google Chrome, publishing the content itself is also


    straightforward: the Meneame website interface automatically translated into Russian

    In addition, there seems to be sections on different countries in Reddit, and the content is published in local languages. If the topic of your publication may be interesting from the point of view of such communities - for example, we somehow promoted a service for learning English, which many people need at work - it is simply necessary to use them.

    Here are the subreddits in which you can share your content:


    Using this almost free - with the exception of the cost of localizing content - will allow you to reach thousands and tens of thousands of Hispanic readers per month.

    Asia: local languages ​​+ English


    Perhaps the most difficult market for budget content promotion. However, the scheme that we used in Latin America also works here. Thanks to Upwork, you can quickly find an artist who not only adapts your materials, but also helps with their sowing.

    All this will cost you a couple of tens of dollars. Regular work in this direction can bring good results. For example, when we needed to attract Chinese users for a test to check the grammar of English texts for the test , we used the described scheme and in a couple of days received about a hundred registrations of all published articles from each other.


    Chinese startup publication example

    Another not-so-obvious idea is that you can interact with Asian readers using the English language! For example, in Singapore, Hong Kong or Japan, quite a lot of people know this language enough to consume content. Therefore, there are completely English-language sites, such as Tech In Asia , which have their own programs for external authors (contributors). With a little luck, you can publish your materials there.

    It is important to understand that the preferences of Asian readers differ from those adopted in the West. According to our research , they prefer not-so-short texts, like an audience from the USA, but medium-length materials:


    Popularity of articles of different lengths on Tech In Asia

    Conclusion


    Content marketing is a difficult way to promote that does not give instant huge returns. However, with some skill, experimentation and time spent with it, you can reach an audience in various parts of the world. And more importantly, for a startup at the start of the journey — at virtually zero cost.

    Such budget content marketing is an excellent option for testing hypotheses and attracting first users from new countries. Once you understand the preferences of potential buyers in the target countries, you can more effectively use paid promotion tools in these regions.
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