Crypto Marketing Guide 2022 Part IV - Blogging, Q&A, and Forums

The Web2 introduction to public blogging quickly made companies aware that organic indexed content rapidly increases your search visibility.

So how do we produce vast amounts of unique content to get indexed in search engines? Let's get the users to post it and moderate it!

Blogging

You will have a much higher chance of showing up in search engine results and gaining free organic traffic to your website through the written blog content you create.

In-house Blog

An in-house blog is the company blog directly hosted on the company website. An in-house blog can be either manually coded, or you can use content management software like our beloved Ghost or good old WordPress to handle the blog management for you.

Keep in mind that while manually coded blogs are in general more secure and flexible, a simple WordPress-driven blog can be run by the marketing team directly without consuming any developer power, and enjoy thousands of readily made plugins to improve the website search engine optimization (SEO), localize content, and enhance the visitor experience. However, if your company is making its first steps, consider a Ghost or WordPress-powered website until you have a professional front-end development team to run something fancier on Bootstrap or whatever.

Medium

Medium is an open publishing platform that connects readers and writers by interest. Medium decided to go deeper than just a simple forum and took a new approach to digital publishing as a whole. Medium provides a vibrant space for novice writers, independent journalists, and renowned writers to come together and connect with their audience and other professionals in their field on a global scale.

Medium statistics you should know in 2022:

• In 2022 Medium got over 100 million users
• Medium has a domain authority (DA) of 95. That’s pretty damn good, and any posted content gets indexed almost immediately.
• The most all-time popular Medium tag is Politics.
• Medium’s Startup tag accumulated about 490,000 followers
• Medium’s Blockchain tag amassed nearly 480,000 followers
• Medium’s Cryptocurrency tag accumulated about 345,000 followers
• Medium’s Technology tag accumulated about 335,000 followers

Medium is one of the biggest public blogging platforms out there and naturally gets a lot of daily traffic. In the case of the crypto industry, many blockchain product companies have their publications up on Medium to tell their business stories.

Should you run an In-House Blog or a Medium Blog?

Should you choose to run your company blog in-house or on Medium? I get this question quite often. The answer is “yes and yes,” you should choose to run both because they have different goals, reach different audiences, and for the most part tell different stories. Plenty of giant crypto companies, like Coinbase, run both in-house and Medium blogs.

External publishing platforms like Medium, HashNode, Dev.To and alike are excellent for reaching new audiences with exciting news and stories about your company, executives, business niche, products, and crypto market analysis.

From the SEO perspective, deploying high-quality, relevant content on your in-house blog works towards raising your domain authority (DA) as you attract search engines, organic visits, and potential backlinks to your content.

On the other hand, deploying content on Medium allows you to tap into a massive audience outside your sandbox with barnacle SEO efforts and get solid backlinks from strong domains. But that is a topic for a whole another article.

Just remember - deploying high-quality content means you are building something towards SEO, keywords, and Domain Authority, and if you deploy it outside of your own blog, you are building someone else's house.

Now, take the above with a grain of salt and consideration that link building is still a valid tactic when you ride barnacle SEO on some huge platform like Medium to tap into new audiences. But Google is a fickle mistress, and don't act surprised when it doesn't like your backlinks with the next update, and suddenly you're having your face on the floor with your rankings.

Building toward strong DA (Domain Authority) with in-house blog content is always safer, although a much slower tactic. I'm not saying "don't publish on the major publishing platforms", what I am saying is "remember what you're building, and save high-quality content for your website blog, your DA will thank you later".

Hacker Noon

Hacker Noon is a digital publishing platform for technologists to read, write, and publish. Hacker Noon previously was a Medium publication, but they’ve split their ways (not touching this drama in detail, you guys can Google it). Now Hacker Noon 2.0 is a well-ranked independent technologist blog with an open and international community.

Hacker Noon statistics you should know in 2022:

• Hacker Noon features 15,000+ contributing writers publishing stories
• Hacker Noon's audience is 3,000,000+ monthly readers
• Roughly 23% of Hacker Noon traffic is from the US
• In 2021, Hacker Noon published 10,355 stories and 13,637,478 words
• In 2021, 36,905 Hacker Noon stories were featured around the web 180,379 times; each story gets an average of 4.9 backlinks from quality sites around the web.

Hacker Noon features over 20,000+ Blockchain and Crypto-related articles across 15+ related tags, and you should consider it as a marketing channel if your audience includes DeFi technology geeks and developers.

Steemit

Steemit is an interesting alternative to Medium and Reddit. Steemit has taken a decentralized crypto approach to social media by building a living, breathing, and growing social economy - a community where users are directly rewarded for sharing their voices. While most social media sites only work for the benefit of their shareholders, Steemit believes that the platform's users should receive the benefits and rewards for their attention and the contributions they make to the platform.

The Steem blockchain mints new STEEM tokens every day and adds them to a community's "rewards pool". These tokens are then awarded to users for their contributions, based on their content's votes. Users who hold more tokens in their account as "Steem Power" will get to decide where a more significant portion of the rewards pool is distributed.

Q&A Marketing

You can’t argue that a significant part of Internet content is about people sharing experiences. A large amount of Web2 content is dedicated to people asking questions on different topics and people answering them.

From the SEO perspective, search engines just love indexing the Q&A content since it tends to answer most questions people came to ask the search engine in the first place.

Quora

Quora is a questions and answers platform. It was founded in 2009 by two ex-Facebook employees and has seen tremendous growth ever since its release. In general, Quora is seen by its users as more organized than Yahoo Answers, classier than Reddit, and more opinionated than Wikipedia.

Quora statistics you should know in 2022:

• In 2022 Quora has over 300 million monthly active users.
• By demographics, Quora has a 57% male and 43% female user ratio. Over 33% of Quora users are 25 to 34 years old.
• Over 75% of users access Quora via their mobile devices.
• Quora does not publicly release details about its user base, but roughly 35% of Quora users are from the US, according to external analytics.
• Quora is increasingly becoming the place for business audiences, competing with LinkedIn – of all the companies using Quora Ads, 60% are B2B, and 40% are B2C. Businesses using Quora Ads have reported up to 4x more conversions than other ad platforms.
• Quora users are also considered highly educated. Over 65% of Quora users have a college degree, and 28% have a graduate degree.
• Adult users of 18 years and older with a household income greater than $100K spend 2x more time on Quora than on LinkedIn, bringing significant buyer power to Quora.
• Users spend on average 4:11 minutes per day on Quora.
• Quora has the domain authority (DA) of 91, which is quite significant and indexed rapidly.

Entertainment, travel, business, marketing, learning, and technology are the most popular topics on Quora. The Quora platform sports many crypto-related questions, answering which will increase your brand's publicity and knowledge leadership image.

StackOverflow

Unlike Quora catering to a more generic audience, StackOverflow is a public knowledge-sharing platform of coding questions and answers for developers and tech geeks. Stackoverflow is a community-based space to find and contribute answers to the technical crowd, featuring a large blockchain developer community.

StackOverflow statistics you should know in 2022:

• In 2022 StackOverflow has over 100 million users.
• StackOverflow also features very popular knowledge sharing and collaboration SaaS for large organizations and small teams.
• The major part of StackOverflow users is hardcore IT specialists, represented by DevOps, Data Science, Software Engineering, and Technical Support specialists.
• StackOverflow contains technical topics across 170+ Q&A developer communities.

Forums

Even though many phpBB-driven forums and bulletin boards are a thing of the past Web1 experience, replaced by more vibrant and interactive social community platforms of Web2, many geeks, developers, and crypto enthusiasts are still out there, discussing topics on the forums.

Reddit

Reddit is a massive forum with a heavy focus on its communities. Reddit is the natural Web2 evolution of the Web1 forums and is the most extensive collection of online forums divided by interests called Subreddits. Besides an array of forums, Reddit is also a social news site, with lots of people visiting Reddit daily to read news and discuss different topics.

The reason for Reddit's popularity is the guaranteed high-quality content shared by the community. The users on Reddit are usually very active and post something new and interesting all the time.

Another reason for Reddit's popularity is that the general public trusts the opinion of other users more than the brand stories, assuming everything the brand tells them is advertising. Sad, but true – many people are actively searching for the opinions of other users like themself, even appending "reddit" to their search engine requests.

Reddit statistics you should know in 2022:

• In 2022 Reddit has over 450 million users worldwide, with over 55 million daily active users.
• Most Reddit users are from the US, with over 230 million users.
• Reddit is one of the ten most popular social networks in the US, with over 18% of the US adults using it.
• However, Reddit’s global popularity as a social media platform is somewhat lower, as the 15th most-used social platform worldwide, just behind Pinterest.
• Reddit users spend on average 10 minutes per website visit over 8 pages.
• Reddit is most popular among users aged 25 to 29.
• There are over 2.8 million subreddits (community forums by interests) and over 130,000 active communities with at least 5 comments per day.
• Bets time to post on Reddit for major highlighting is weekends and Mondays in the morning of the US timezone.
• Reddit titles between 60 and 80 characters perform best and receive the highest amount of upvotes.

Reddit’s content isn’t limited to just plain text and images, as you would assume for a forum. Reddit rolled out its native video sharing feature in 2017 to allow users to upload their videos onto the platform for up to 15 minutes as an alternative to posting links to third-party sites like YouTube. The Reddit video feature has exploded in popularity. Users are now watching over 1.5 billion native videos on the platform every month, which constitutes a significant proportion of the content users are sharing on the site.

BitcoinTalk

Founded by mysterious and anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto – also the founder of Bitcoin and grandfather of the open-source money era, Bitcointalk is a public forum where blockchain enthusiasts, developers, and crypto investors discuss topics about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain in general.

BitcoinTalk started as an open internet forum dedicated to the discussion of Bitcoin; however, over the years, the talks of Bitcoin price speculations have been overshadowed by discussions of Altcoin bounties and announcements.

• As of February 2022, Bitcointalk features over 1.7 million unique visitors.
• Bitcointalk users spend on average 5:30 minutes per day going through the topics.
• Almost all Bitcointalk users are male, and ladies are a rare sight in this geek playground.
• The most all-time popular topic of Bitcointalk is the Bitcoin Wall Observer price movement & discussion.

At Bitcointalk, you can find discussions about blockchain technologies, crypto mining, and many cryptocurrencies as well.

Summary

That takes care of modern blogging platforms, and that's not nearly half of them. I will keep updating. Hopefully, you understand the difference between building a solid silo content SEO and fickle barnacle backlinking SEO, and how to leverage both in your crypto marketing efforts.

Thank you for reading! Make sure to subscribe for more stories delving deeper into the intricacies of modern crypto marketing.

We’re nowhere near finished talking about all the strategies, channels, and tools at your disposal for crypto marketing in 2022. Up next is discussing crypto B2B marketing strategies, crypto SEO marketing strategies and tools, using search & display ads to support your content marketing efforts, graphic design platforms and tools, how to tackle crypto influencers, email marketing, how to leverage your recruitment and HR for marketing, crypto airdrops, shillings, and community incentives.

Stay tuned for more crypto marketing stories!