Should you invest in content promotion and link building in a recession?
Here are my 2 cents.
We’re approaching a recession, it seems inevitable at this point. Many SaaS companies are scrambling to cut their content marketing budgets and laying people off.
The question is:
How long is it going to last? It could be 1 or 2 years… who knows?
Can you cut content marketing for this long? What are the long-term effects if you zoom out?
As I wrote back in March 2020 here. Now is the time to choose to survive or die.
I think SaaS companies have the opportunity to: – See investing in content promotion as investing in the S&P 500 In the short term, it’s down: Everyone is selling off their stocks.
If you zoom out, it’s up: And the people who invested while the market was down ended up coming out better on the other side.
Recessions are the best times for smaller companies to close the gap with their competitors. Bigger competitors will cut the channels they think are going on autopilot forever (SEO). The problem is, keyword rankings and links are constantly fluctuating and easily lost.
Zoom lost 156 unique dofollow backlinks to the blog in the last 7 days:
and 148 pages dropped off the top 3 rankings for them:
Why not come in and snatch those from them? The same goes for backlinks with the concept of “cumulative advantage”: What begins as a small advantage gets bigger over time.
Example: This company starts off ahead with 50 links but stops promoting its content today (recession) and picks back up in October. They built 141 links in 12 months.
This company starts off with only 10 links but keeps promoting its content through the recession. They built 177 links in 12 months.
So, the trick here is to:
- Pause and zoom out – It’s an annual (or longer) investment paid monthly (see it as DCA’ing), not a monthly expense.
- Be strategic in how you invest your budget – See the situation for what it actually is, an opportunity to get ahead.
In short, it’s not just about how you save going into recession – but how you are set up coming out of it.
Make it about the long play – Do you retreat, flail, or advance?
Here’s another great article by Marc Thomas at Powered By Search that inspired this thread.