Content marketing
Articles for your blog, researched and written in your voice, on a schedule you set. Where they publish, what they cover, how often, and how a piece gets better after it lands.
Turn this on and Ballad runs a blog for you: it decides what to write about, researches it, writes it in your voice, publishes it on your own domain on the cadence you set, and comes back to a piece that starts slipping.
The setup is a four-step walkthrough in your Inbox — Set up content marketing — and it ends with your first article written.
1. Where articles go
Articles publish to your site, not to a page on ours, so the search equity and the audience compound under your name. Two ways to do that:
- My site, by itself. Your site reads Ballad's content API and renders articles in your own design. Ballad publishes on schedule and tells your site to refresh. On Next.js this is a few lines — see Set up your Next.js blog — and any stack can read the same JSON.
- My CMS, by hand. For Webflow, Ghost, Notion, Substack or anything else that is its own world. Ballad hands you the finished article as rich text, Markdown or HTML with its opening image; you paste it where it lives and hand back the URL so the numbers attach to the right piece.
You can start by hand and wire the API up later. Nothing else in the setup changes if you do.
2. What the blog is about
One line — what this blog is about — steers what Ballad chooses to write. "How small teams run payroll without an accountant" gives you a year of articles. "Marketing" gives you nothing.
Then pick how articles open:
| Opening image | What you get |
|---|---|
| Brand card | The title on your colours, with your logo. The default. |
| Illustration | A flat editorial illustration in your palette. |
| Photo | A photo-real editorial render. |
| No image | The article opens on the words. |
Your own image always wins over a generated one, and you can change the style per collection later.
3. How often, and how deep
Set a cadence — two a week, one a week, one a fortnight — and Ballad plans against it. It writes ahead, so you open a full calendar rather than a blank page.
Most pieces are essays. Every few articles one is due to be a depth piece, and those work differently: Ballad sends three to five questions to your Inbox first, under Ballad has questions. Your answers are the only anecdotes, numbers and customer names the article is allowed to use. That's the difference between an article that could be about anyone and one that could only be about you.
Depth pieces come in four shapes:
- Comparison — you against the alternatives, including the honest "use theirs if…".
- Guide — the step-by-step for something you actually do.
- Case study — drafted from a customer interview, with their consent on every quote.
- Original data — built on numbers only you have.
4. Review, publish, refresh
A finished draft lands in your Inbox with the article on the left and the rendered page on the right. Edit anything; your edits teach the voice. Approve and it publishes on its slot.
After it's live, three things keep happening:
- It gets promoted. Press Promote this on any article and Ballad proposes a week of posts, a thread, an image card and a newsletter issue that carry it — each pinned to a day, all approved at once. See social media.
- It gets measured. With the beacon installed, each article carries a number that means something: the signups it brought, not the likes. See Measure what your content does.
- It gets refreshed. When an older piece loses its search position or its traffic halves, Ballad proposes a refresh and rewrites it in place, at the same URL, rather than publishing a near-duplicate.
More than one blog
A collection is a lane: its own cadence, its own subject, its own path. An engineering blog and a founder journal can run side by side at different paces, and a changelog is just another collection with its own kind. Add them under Settings → Collections.
What it never does
- It doesn't publish before you approve it.
- It doesn't invent a customer, a number or a quote. Specifics come from your interview answers, your product, or research it can cite.
- It doesn't open two articles the same way. Openings are rotated and checked against what you've already published.
Next
- Set up your Next.js blog — publish to your own domain.
- Measure what your content does — know which article did it.
- Social media — carry each article into the feed.