Content marketing

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:

• Ballad as your CMS (the default, and listed first). Ballad holds the articles and your site shows them, in your own design, through the Next.js package or the content API. Approve, and it's live: 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. You can pick it before your site is wired up; approved articles wait, published, until your site fetches them.
• Your own CMS. Webflow, WordPress, Ghost, Notion, anything. Ballad gives you the finished article (rich text, Markdown or HTML, with its opening image) to paste in, and you tell it the live address so the numbers attach to the right piece.

You can switch from one to the other 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 background jobs without Redis" 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.

Topics come from evidence before they come from your positioning: questions your buyers ask AI assistants where a competitor is named and you aren't, the questions and objections your audience keeps raising, what you've shipped lately (the why behind it, not the announcement), what the analyst says to do more of, and threads in your market. The positioning is the fallback when nothing fits. The review opens with Why this topic and the evidence behind it.

When there's one open, every other article is aimed at a search you could win: a search your site already shows for but no article answers, from Search Console, or one your buyers make that you don't show for yet, from Ballad's keyword data. The title, the opening and the description are written for that search, and Ballad reads what ranks on Google's first page for it before it plans. Signals › Search keeps a week-by-week record of where each one lands. See Connect Google Search Console.

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 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. An article ranking 6th to 20th for a search, or on page one with few clicks, gets a refresh aimed at that search, which can retitle it.

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.

More than one author

A blog can have several authors: you and a co-founder, say, or you and the company voice. In the collection's Authors, tick who writes for it, give each a share (1×, 2× or 3×), and choose the lead, whose morning sets the schedule. Ballad picks each article's topic, then the author whose beat fits it, nudged toward whoever is behind their share. Each article is written in its author's voice, theirs to approve, and published under their name. Fill in each author's beat (in their voice settings) or the matching has nothing to go on.

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.