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Meet Kaitlyn and Amber. Together they’ve been talking about the recent funding of Udemy, an Education startup, where people from all over the world can teach or learn.
This startup has raised an impressive $65 Million Series D funding and what everybody knows by now is that nobody invests in companies which are bad at marketing.
What Kaitlyn didn’t know was that Amber actually hopped on a Skype call with one of the top level managers at Udemy and managed to find out a few secrets about how they thought about marketing.
All startup founders know that they need channels through which they can acquire customers. They go along the lines of Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Content Marketing, etc. Some are outbound some are inbound.
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What people NEVER seem to know is what really made Kaitlyn get out-of-balance on the spot: Udemy purchased content.
They actually bought content from another startup that helped them create most of the blog content for them.
[bctt tweet=”Udemy, a $ 113 Million USD funded startup outsources content creation #contentmarketing #startups”]Alex from GrooveHQ (a popular customer service startup, known for their great blog) would never agree to such a strategy. The fact that he does not agree does not mean that the strategy would not work.
I think Udemy is one of the most successful in their field, and that’s why this thing deserves proper consideration.
[bctt tweet=”5 Million Users is what Udemy has and 80% of their traffic comes from a blog written by outsourced writers”]First off: Udemy buys content for their blog.
The question is: Which of their content is produced by their in-house writers? Which is produced by their outsourced writers?
Amber found out that all of their blog content was outsourced, so that they could keep their very specialized writers to produce content ONLY for the instructors who sold their courses on Udemy. (they have Awesome content for instructors, btw)
It’s very interesting when you find this out at first, but it makes total sense when you start considering salaries. If you’d work with a company like Squirrly for this, it would cost about $50 for an article and it would go from Writer to Quality Assurance Expert to Proofreader, and only then back to you.
That’s like a minimum of 3 people that your company would have to pay each month to get these jobs done in order to publish great content on the blog.
An article / day would mean $1500 per month. When compared to at least $10,000 for the salaries, I think it makes a lot of sense. Especially because you don’t really need an article every single day to go out. (you also need time to promote it)
[bctt tweet=”The #blog that explains why it made sense for a Million Dollar #startup to outsource all their blog content”]It was a smart way in which they better used existing resources: both inside the company and outside of the company.
Second: Udemy got some pretty amazing results for the Acquisition segment of their growth hacker’s funnel.
This way of blogging is what brings them 80% of ALL their traffic.
What impressed Kaitlyn about all this was the efficient way they’ve used resources, the open-mindedness that brought a great #win for their company and most of all: the results in terms of traffic.
If you want to learn more about creating content with an external marketing team, my friends at Squirrly are happy to chat with you.
Our fully managed marketing plan will get you guaranteed traffic to all the articles produced by our in-house team. You’ll get great social media marketing, along with great new blog content.
