SaaS businesses now increasingly rely on organic traffic from search engines for generating leads for their businesses. It’s scalable and cost-effective — especially in the long term. But what if you want an immediate return on your content investment? Certain content types promise immediate ROI. Here are three types you can experiment with:

1. Write a “best” article featuring yourself

Instead of thinking content marketing is only about non-promotional “self-awareness”, write an article about the broad category your SaaS company belongs to. Feature yourself in a well-placed manner, telling the reader how you’re unique.

For instance, website building software companies, like Squarespace, could create an article around the top portfolio website builders like this one by The Creatives Hour. The key is to mention yourself organically. Do it tastefully, only telling what’s unique about you — not trying to take the first spot and appealing to “everyone.” Overly self-promotional articles won’t rank for “best” variation of keywords because the intent for such keywords is informational.

Here’s another example of a “best” article from Business 2 Community: Best tools and services for content marketing. It’s casting a wide net, though. You can consider niching down to the specific category of your software. For instance, “graphic design software for content marketers” or “content analytics software” and the like will, in most cases, serve your business than a generic “best” article.

2. Launch your own course

In 2020, the pandemic accelerated the adoption of online education. It’s time hence for you to capitalize on the trend by offering a free course as it could act as an effective lead generator. Ahrefs, an SEO suite, did this by offering their paid course “blogging for business” for free. HubSpot has even started a dedicated academy for its audience.

Don’t delay building yours in 2021. Get started with creating a course around a major pain point of your audience. A great aspect of courses is that you can even package and sell them with your software subscriptions. vidIQ, a suite of YouTube growth tools, offers a few courses for free in their academy. But some are restricted to their paid customers exclusively:

You can even consider selling your course separately and having content act as a “revenue center” for your business. This is something I’ve seen Surfer SEO do. They sell their SEO writing masterclass on their academy for $199 separately from their on page SEO tool.

3. Write an alternative article

The “alternatives” format of articles lets you piggyback on the popularity of your competitor brands. Suppose you’re a company selling grammar checking software, a pretty competitive space (with Google generating over 69,70,000 results for the query). Creating recognition and trust for your brand will take time.

To get immediate revenue from content, you can write an article around Grammarly’s alternatives (a leader in the software category of grammar and punctuation checker software). Mention yourself but do an honest review of other competitors as well that someone looking for switching from “Grammarly” can consider checking.

Pro tip: Instead of writing a listicle article in this alternative format, you can also consider an exhaustive comparison with one key competition in a “vs.” format. Here’s an article comparing Adobe Portfolio with Squarespace. This format carries benefits similar to the alternative format.

Final thoughts

All of these content strategies work having been executed by billion-dollar brands such as Shopify and HubSpot. So go out there and implement one of these for your SaaS business in 2021 — it will deliver an immediate ROI! Just remember not to go overboard promoting yourself heavily (except if you’re creating a course around your software itself).

Are there any other content types you would like to recommend? Let me know in the comments below.

A version of this article originally appeared at dev.to.