Add industry publications

Industry publications are where your content suggestions come from. Without them, Smarkly can write what you ask for but cannot tell you what is worth writing about this week.

How it works

You add the publications your industry reads. Smarkly checks them regularly, and when something turns up that relates to what you do, it becomes a suggestion with the source attached.

You are never handed a topic with no provenance. Every suggestion points at the article behind it, so you can read the original before deciding whether it is worth your time.

Choosing them

Pick publications your customers actually read, not the ones that publish the most.

A trade publication specific to your industry beats a general business title, because the specific one produces items you can respond to with authority. If you sell to accountants, an accounting trade title is worth more than a national business paper that covers accounting twice a year.

Three or four good sources is a working setup. How many you can have depends on your plan.

What makes a source work

It publishes regularly. A site that posts twice a year will rarely produce a suggestion.

It has a feed. Most publications do, and Smarkly finds it automatically from the address you give.

It covers your subject rather than your customers' subject. A publication your buyers read is useful. A publication about your buyers, written for someone else, usually is not.

When suggestions do not appear

A few reasons, in the order they are worth checking.

The source was added recently and has not been checked yet. The first fetch is not instant.

The feed is there but nothing recent matched your business closely enough. Relevance is scored against what you do, and a publication covering a wide field will produce fewer matches than a narrow one.

The feed stopped working. Publications change their site structure and break their own feeds more often than you would expect.

What the scoring means

Each item is scored for how closely it relates to your business, using the facts on file and your audience.

The score is about relevance, not quality or reach. Smarkly has no view on how popular an article is or how much traffic it got. It knows what your company does and whether the article is about that.

Which is another reason the facts matter: a thin profile makes the scoring vague, and vague scoring makes the suggestions feel random.