Content Marketing Strategy & Operations at ReadMe

When I started at ReadMe, there weren’t any existing content marketing initiatives. On top of that, the team had previously had a bad experience with former content writers being too focused on SEO or business jargon, at the expense of creating interesting content that aligned with the brand and its values. 

ReadMe’s product is essentially a CMS for API documentation, which also puts them in the interesting position of their end users being developers perusing the API documentation created by their actual customers. The customers themselves are typically non-technical — often, product managers or technical writers and editors. This means the team needs to connect with and educate potential customers while maintaining credibility with developers, without alienating either group. I also didn’t know much of anything about APIs before starting at ReadMe, which presented a challenge in some ways, but also made it easier to understand the position some of our customers were in. 

Over my time at ReadMe, my focus was on balancing these two target audiences while creating content that was genuinely useful to readers and could be strategically repurposed, letting our small marketing team get the most bang for their buck. 

In addition to the specific projects and initiatives outlined below, I also consistently wrote, edited, and published content. Here are a few sample posts: 

Miche took a high degree of initiative and ownership over our content strategy and execution. Instead of needing to be asked or provided with very tactical instruction, they’re able to translate a high level goal, outcome, or idea and make it happen.

— Sarah Spangenberg, former Head of Marketing at ReadMe

Resource Library: Strategy, development, and launch

The ReadMe Resource Library was created with multiple goals in mind: 

  • Improve SEO (both via content in general and via the content being on the main domain vs. a subdomain)
  • Give the marketing team more autonomy and more ability to self-initiate projects (by moving to WordPress, which is easier for non-developers to use and offers comprehensive integrations with other marketing tools)
  • Create a place to house in-depth customer-focused content that wasn’t a good fit for the help docs, so the team could use that content as a tool for customer engagement and retention
  • Tie content marketing more directly into lead gen and the marketing funnel as a whole

It was quite an involved project, but I was thrilled with the results — a library full of evergreen content that can be used for content marketing, lead gen, and customer marketing. I worked closely with AUQ throughout the process, with their team handling SEO research, assisting with content creation, and developing the backend of the website, while the ReadMe team worked on the bulk of the frontend design. There were a lot of moving parts, so I’ve highlighted the top-level notes below: 

Foundational work

Content strategy 

  • Reviewed existing analytics on most popular pages and categories of content, both on the blog and in the help docs, to get a clearer idea of what visitors were most often looking for and what their user paths through the site were like
  • Reviewed data on most popular search terms that matched up with our buyer and user profiles
  • Reviewed existing content and planned for what posts would be created before the launch to make sure there wouldn’t be any “orphan” categories or subcategories without any content
  • Interviewed team members and solicited their feedback on content strategy and information architecture 
  • Created new category and subcategory structure based on all of the above for the team to review 

Project management

  • Coordinated with internal stakeholders and AUQ to come up with reasonable milestones and launch timeline
  • Continued to meet with internal and external stakeholders over the course of the project to keep things on track and address any concerns 
  • Ensured any external stakeholder questions about the design were answered so as not to impede development timelines
  • Provided creative direction and feedback to both internal design stakeholders and external dev resources 
  • Kept the project on track and in-scope by assessing what specific features or elements could wait until a version two rollout, in the interest of getting benefits from SEO 
  • Worked with AUQ as well as internal design stakeholders to balance everyone’s concerns and ensure that we would be able to launch within the timeframe, while still having a finished product that matched ReadMe’s overall branding and the rest of the ReadMe site 

Content management & creation

Auditing and optimizing existing content

  • Went through 171 existing blog posts to assess what could be improved and moved to the resource library
  • Of those, moved ~50 to new resource library 
  • Edited all posts to make content evergreen, improve readability, fix typos, and make sure content matched the current style guide
  • Fixed any broken code or formatting (broken YouTube video embeds, code previews that lost their formatting, etc.) when importing and formatting posts

Content creation

  • Wrote copy for homepage and category pages
  • Substantially added to multiple posts from archives to improve 
  • Split or combined posts as needed to create more comprehensive and more SEO friendly content

I also worked with AUQ to have freelancers create new content, which posed several unique challenges. API documentation is a relatively niche topic, so we were looking for writers who had a technical background, but who weren’t necessarily “technical writers” (as that usually denotes someone who writes technical documentation, not someone who can write about documentation in a compelling and informative way). We settled with a mix of finding less-technical writers who were good at content-marketing-style writing and getting them up to speed on the ins and outs of API documentation, and finding more technical writers who created clean enough copy that I could easily edit their posts for tone and skimmability. 

SEO

  • Edited all content for SEO
    • Updated header text and link anchor text throughout all posts 
    • Added alt text to every image in every post 
    • Updated and added links to most relevant doc page or new resource library content, removing links to older posts 
  • Manually set up 301 redirects using YAML (through Ghost, the prior CMS) from old content to new content, so we wouldn’t be dinged by Google for duplicate content 

Miscellaneous

  • Set up list and opt-in form in Hubspot and added to homepage 
  • Created outlines for future marketing automation funnels based on emails captured via the Resource Library 
  • Reviewed design templates in Figma and provided feedback and direction from a content and IA-focused perspective
  • Coordinated with external and internal dev resources to set up and troubleshoot the reverse proxy setup 
  • Reviewed and QA’d all post and page templates to ensure they functioned as designed 

Results

  • The resource library launched with 28 posts (the original goal was 15 posts), with more content added after the launch
  • There was a 15.4% increase in content views when comparing the first five months post-launch to the five months directly pre-launch
  • When comparing the second half of 2023 to the second half of 2024, total site sessions were up 12.6% and users were up 9.9% YOY

I’ve had the pleasure to work alongside Miche on a number of content focused projects ranging from article creation to author hiring to web design & development. Miche’s ability to plan, manage and prioritize these projects has been an irreplaceable contribution to getting them finished on time.

My team and I reported to Miche directly and have always appreciated their ability to navigate complex situations and set clear, measured and achievable goals for us to follow. Whether it was setting content strategy or helping us understand technical design requirements.

They are an asset to any team and I’m happy to recommend them for any content, product or project management work, and hope to have a chance to work together again in the future!

— Kirill Sajaev, Principal at AUQ

Sales enablement

Whitepapers 

When I joined ReadMe, the sales team didn’t have much in the way of collateral they could use when reaching out to and/or nurturing prospects. One of my first projects was a “Why DX Matters” whitepaper to help close this gap. 

Another request the sales team had was a whitepaper focused around building your own API documentation solution (vs. buying from a vendor). This was a common question during the sales process, so it was important to get the content right. I went through multiple iterations of content based on my own research, reading customer interviews, and feedback from the sales team. 

After coming up with a final version that everyone liked, I created a variant of the content that was focused almost exclusively on cost as a decision-making factor. This gave the sales team the ability to test both versions and see if one resonated with prospects more than the other, which could then in turn inform future sales and marketing strategies. Each variant had different tracking links within it to test their effectiveness. Aside from writing the content, I also provided design direction for the PDFs. 

Example whitepapers: Why DX Matters: Driving API Success with a User-First Approach, Build vs. Buy for API Documentation (and the more specifically cost-focused variant for the sales team to test)

Conference collateral

Every year, ReadMe has a booth at GitHub Universe and AWS re:Invent, and in 2023 those conferences happened not long after two launches. To support the sales team in showing off our new features, I created one-pagers showcasing our latest additions. 

For these one-pagers, I: 

  • Created copy for two one-pagers focused on Micro and Developer Dashboard 
  • Set up UTM tracking links specific to each conference to use in variants of the PDFs
  • Sourced an external designer to create the PDFs 
  • Coordinated between external designer and internal design stakeholders to ensure that the resulting PDFs were congruent with our brand 
  • Created lead-capture landing pages in Hubspot to coordinate with each of the PDFs

I also wrote copy for promotional materials for other conferences and sponsorships as needed. 

Example conference collateral: ReadMe Micro: Because Microservices Deserve Big Solutions, Developer Dashboard: Personalized, Realtime API Insights Inside Your Docs

Case studies

Throughout my time at ReadMe, one of my focuses was to build up the case study library. With a product as open-ended as ReadMe, and the added complication of the buyers not necessarily being the end users, case studies can be especially useful to sales and marketing. They give the reader a very concrete picture of what a before/after picture can look like, which is often more persuasive than a straight-up sales pitch. 

One of my favorite things to do when conducting case study interviews is widen the scope of the interview to learn more about the specific person and their background. Not only is it great for customer relationships (everyone loves to get quoted), it’s valuable information for me as a marketer, and there are always actionable takeaways for others. I did this at ReadMe wherever possible — in the below list, I’ve added links to the interview posts next to the case study. 

Example case studies: 

Thanks to Miche, ReadMe has a strategic perspective on content marketing that’s not only targeted at our personas—which range from technical to non-technical, and SMB to Enterprise—but also fully SEO-optimized. In our time working together, Miche has built out a robust case study library, sales whitepapers, a fleet of blog posts, and built out ReadMe’s resource library, which is poised to be a significant leads driver.

In addition to being a phenomenal asset to any marketing team, Miche is an absolute joy to work with. They are a brilliant writer, SEO whiz, and always willing to pair on a writing assignment, marketing activity, or lend an ear when you need to talk through something. We’ve partnered on numerous launches and it’s a great feeling to trust that whatever support you ask of them will always be delivered to the highest standard. It’s a gift when your relationship with your coworker evolves into friendship and I feel lucky to say that about Miche.

— Rachel Kalt, Product Marketing Manager at ReadMe

Other work

SEO initiative

My content marketing work is always informed by SEO best practices, but in 2024, we wanted to make SEO a focus for the ReadMe site in general. Due to a few missing SEO pieces, our organic traffic was lower than it should have been, and there were also knock-on effects like driving up PPC ad costs (due to Google’s page relevancy score — higher page relevancy = lower ad costs). With multiple large launches on the horizon, I wanted to get our SEO in the best shape possible. 

Over the course of May 2024, in addition to my other work, I: 

  • Uploaded updated sitemaps for docs.readme.com and readme.com
  • Fixed broken links across the blog, main site, and help docs
  • Added canonical tags across main site 
  • Added interlinks (between blog posts, docs to blog posts, blog posts to docs, docs to case studies, etc.) where relevant
  • Worked with dev team to coordinate changes to site code so canonical tags would be automatically added to new pages in the future 

There were a few challenges here — I got to learn how to canonical tags to pages built with JSON through GitHub, which was an entirely new experience. Despite those challenges, the initiative was completed within a month and we started to see results immediately. 

Results: 

The sitemaps and the first batch of canonical tags were added on the week of 5/3/2024. Over the next six weeks of traffic, organic search sessions were up 8.85% and engaged sessions from organic search were up 12.95%, compared to the previous six weeks.  

Process management

As a relatively small and flexible team, there weren’t any “standardized” project or process management systems in place for the marketing team. While I understand wanting to keep things lightweight, I’m also a firm believer in having documented processes and having a single source of truth for important projects. Over the course of my time at ReadMe, I: 

  • Created a content calendar in Notion, complete with a backlog, planned pieces for the quarter, tentative publishing dates for those pieces, and tied all existing content ideas to specific goals for the marketing department
  • Created a wiki homepage for the marketing team, with SOPs documenting common processes, points of contact listed for other teammate’s reference, and notes on ongoing projects and priorities
  • Coordinated with teammates to create a calendar that combined scheduled events, social media posts, and data from the content calendar, so that there was one comprehensive marketing calendar in place for use by people both on and off the team 

Miche is our resident Notion wizard — the content calendar is not only a work of Notion art, but is tactically extremely helpful for tracking the status of pieces in progress. They spearheaded a team brainstorm and solicited content ideas and needs from other teams to synthesize into a huge backlog. Quarter by quarter, they pulled the highest priority topics from the backlog to work on in addition to topics to address any new business needs that have emerged or for upcoming product launches not already on the roadmap.

— Sarah Spangenberg, former Head of Marketing at ReadMe

Launch support

For launches at ReadMe, I typically owned any blog content related to the launch, as well as editing (and drafting, when needed) the docs pages, emails, social media updates, and Intercom posts associated with the launch. 

Example launch post: Take Your Docs to the Next Level with Owlbot AI 

From Day 1, Miche was phenomenal to work with. They came to our first meeting with an organized content strategy–complete with a hyperlinked table of contents–that helped make our job as SEO consultants so much easier. Thanks to Miche, we knew what the priorities were and how to focus our research to create a business-first SEO content strategy.

It was obvious how passionate Miche is about delivering high-quality work that represented the brand well. I’ll miss working with Miche, and hope we get the chance to cross paths again some day.

Consider yourself lucky if Miche has shown an interest in your company; it’s rare to find someone who demonstrates such a high level of commitment to their work AND is an absolute joy to collaborate with. 11/10 would recommend them.

– Lacey Rasmussen, Content Manager at AUQ