The Complete Web3 Agency Guide

Content marketing strategies have changed a lot over the past decade, but the basics haven’t changed. You need solid content that positions you as an industry thought leader and builds trust and reputation for your brand. What really changed is what content you create and the tools available for distribution.

Web3 is the latest marketing buzz term, and creating content for it can be difficult to navigate if you don’t know what you’re doing. But you shouldn’t ignore it — there’s plenty of value to be had by placing your content in the proper channels.

If you’re having trouble navigating this new frontier of web3, don’t fret. This guide will cover everything you need to know to get started. Let’s start by examining exactly what web3 is and why you need to know about it.

Image Source: Jernej Furman @ Flickr

What Is Web3?

Web3 is the term given for what’s known as the third generation of the internet. Like human generations, there’s no real concrete lines. The term is more meant to signify generational shifts in the developing technologies available and how we use them. Each generation has a different aim and goal, and it’s important to examine each generation to understand why people think web3 is so revolutionary.

Web 1.0: The Read-Only Web

Web1 is the original iteration of the internet at the tail end of the 20th Century. This is when personal computers were less ubiquitous, and browsing the web largely consisted of searching for static information posted on websites meant to be read. This is the version of the internet that spawned ecommerce — you’re presented with information and make a decision. Engagement and community were an afterthought.

Much of the design of web1 was caused by lack of technical infrastructure. It’s not that we didn’t think video streaming would be cool; it’s more that most homes only had access to 56k dial-up internet that didn’t have the bandwidth for today’s high-data applications. The closest to social media was internet chat rooms and forums, as the news rarely even had a comment section.

In the early days of the internet, it was mostly accessible only to the tech-savvy. People viewed television and newspapers as more reliable sources of information, and the internet was a wild west of piracy and unscrupulous actors in many people’s views. But all of that changed with the next internet generation.

Web 2.0: The Read-Write Web

Once corporations realized there was money to be made online, they started pouring more money into their websites than a Super Bowl commercial. The dotcom investment bubble forced a push to design a more user-friendly experience and make the interface more accessible. This created a boom in user-generated content.

Social media platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube defined the push into a more community-oriented web experience. It wasn’t enough to simply present the news anymore — you need to encourage conversation on platform, and it wasn’t long before Facebook was embedded into a large swathe of the internet.

Suddenly, the internet was cool, as influencers and creators broke into the mainstream and proved the staying power of online viral fame. Businesses continued to innovate using technology, and always-on connectivity became the norm.

A TikTok can make or break your business, and Yelp and Amazon reviewers hold a lot of power in this web-oriented world. The problem is that technology giants like Google and Facebook own all the content, and they’re generating billions of dollars by monetizing our content and data through advertising revenue.

Not only that, but you can easily be deplatformed and lose all the hard work you put into building an online profile. You’re forced to play by the rules of tech giants, and your effort doesn’t carry across into other sites. For example, success on Twitter won’t transfer over into Instagram.

This is where web3 comes into play.

Web 3.0: The Semantic Web

Web3 seeks to decentralize the ownership of our data and content online so that we have full control over where it’s posted and whether it can be removed. Although web2 is convenient, it comes at a price of being beholden to a small handful of powerful corporations on every end. This includes relying on enterprise cloud servers like Amazon, search engines like Google, and social media platforms like Facebook.

Although these major companies can apply artificial intelligence and other data-mining tools to provide a great experience, we’re given the power to control how our data is and isn’t used. And although blockchain data promises to play a role in the implementation of web3, it’s not the end-all solution for every problem.

The metaverse and web3 are interconnected and describe more than just virtual reality and the internet too. These terms describe how we interact with data as we move throughout the world and it’s tracked through our smart phones and devices. In many cases, it’ll involve machine-to-machine communication (and sometimes even quantum computing) without you ever needing to be aware.

Automation, 3D visuals, and sleek UX design combined with the Internet of Things, 5G communications, machine learning and AI promise to make web3 an engaging experience in which our data is as valuable of a resource as cash.

Understanding Web3 Content Marketing

Image source: DiggityMarketing @ Pixabay

Content marketing is the art of creating stellar content that positions you as a subject matter expert (SME) and industry thought leader. If you’re already creating great content, you simply need to migrate it into the new web. This means integrating AI and blockchain-based tools into your web stack to ensure you’re reaching out on all distribution channels while also protecting your intellectual property (IP) from thieves who could destroy your brand.

There are three main avenues to create content online: blogging, podcasting, and streaming. Each reaches a different audience, and ideally, you’ll have a presence with all of them. If you already have an existing blog or channel, these are simply supplemental tools and add-ons that can help you futureproof your owned media and content for the web3 age.

1) Blogging in Web3 — As a ghostwriter with a writing agency, I’m a firm believer in the power of the written word, especially online. Every business website should have at least a blog (a news section is also helpful when your business reaches a certain size). Blogs fill your site with pages of contextual information telling readers and robots alike who you are and what you do.

WordPress is my preferred content management system (CMS), as it’s easy to setup, universally supported, and can be upgraded with some powerful plug-ins. Using WordPress, you simply need to install and download some plugins to support web3 on your existing site. Plug-ins like BlogPassport and WordProof make it easy to track any content you post on your site.

You can also blog directly on the blockchain, which each post becoming its own non-fungible token (NFT). Steemit is the blockchain blogging platform on the Steem blockchain. It eventually forked into Hive, which now has its own unique blogging community and blockchain after the community rallied against Tron CEO Justin Sun buying the platform. And you can also mint NFTs from your blog posts on Mirror, which uses the Ethereum blockchain connected via Metamask.

Each of these platforms has its own unique community, and you’ll need to do some work to ensure you tailor your content to each one. If you do, you’ll find the benefit is amazing — not only are your blog posts immutable, but they’ll also continue to fork and gain in value. And you’ll earn crypto tokens through the platforms that can help fund your next project.

Be sure you’re confident about what you’re publishing, because it can never be deleted. There are some workarounds to modify the information in the blog, but the post’s slug will still remain forever logged in an immutable public ledger.

If you’re so inclined, you can even find WordPress plugins to accept crypto payments. But we’ll go more into setting up web3 domains below in the web3 stack section.

2) Podcasting in Web3 — Unlike text, which takes up very little storage space, audio files are a bit larger. This is especially true when you start using high-quality audio files necessary to produce a professional podcast recording. Still, audio NFTs are technically possible, and that gave rise to podcast NFTs.

Audio NFT marketplaces like NFT Tone and Audius cater to musicians in their marketing materials, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t use them to mint NFT podcasts. You can also use a service like InfiniNFT to mint audio NFTs to list on supported marketplaces. This service promises to store the audio on-chain using a low-fee Layer1 solution.

Of course, these are just the blockchain-based publishing tools we’re talking about so far. There’s also plenty of AI tools to consider for your web3 stack, including Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) and other natural language processing (NLP) tools. I’m not a big fan of using GPT-3 tools like Jarvis.ai for writing, because the quality simply can’t match a human.

However, AI-powered voice transcription service like Otter.AI are an indispensable tool for podcasters. These tools can be used to transcribe a podcast recording so you can harvest information from it later. Every interview you do has valuable contextual keyword data related to your business, and by transcribing it, you can create long-form blog posts that help drive relevant traffic to your site and business.

If you’re publishing podcasts without comprehensive written data, you’re wasting a lot of free content resources that you may be overpaying to recreate on the backend.

And, social audio platforms like Twitter Spaces, LinkedIn, and Discord can double as social podcasting platforms. Set up interviews and do live shows in front of a crowd while also harvesting audience participation to build community and audience. Social audio is one of the most overlooked avenues to build your brand’s presence online. The crypto community is especially active, so you should find success with a regular schedule of live audio events.

3) Streaming in Web3 — Video streaming is an even more unique usage of web3 technologies, and there’s plenty of AI and blockchain technology to be used within the video production and streaming process. When creating videos, once again, you’ll find success with NLP tools that can help transcribe your audio or even create a teleprompter of your script.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki listed NFTs as one of the video-sharing company’s top priorities for 2022. It’s unclear exactly what this means so far, but it could be any combination of Twitter-like NFT profile pics, token-gated subscriber NFTs, and even crypto payments for creators.

D.Tube is an aspiring YouTube competitor on the blockchain, and it publishes videos on both the peer-to-peer (P2P) interplanetary file storage (IFPS) and the Steem blockchain. This is a great option for those seeking to pioneer a new avenue that sidesteps the popular Alphabet video platform. Others like LBRY are in much earlier development stages, but they’re still usable and worth checking out.

And if you want multichannel distribution, you still can’t get much better than OBS Studio. This open-sourced desktop app has a wide array of plugins so you can livestream across multiple channels simultaneously, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, Facebook, and TikTok. This helps you cast a wide net to reach audiences across all platforms without the need of reuploading it on each channel.

Of course, I’d recommend using unique content on each channel for maximum effect. Viewers on Twitch won’t respond to the same content as viewers on LinkedIn, for example, so be sure you’re providing value on each platform. Otherwise you’re wasting your content and likely creating more problems for your business than it’s worth.

This isn’t the end of web3 content marketing though — creating the content is just one aspect. Web3 is all about community, and using NFTs for token-gated content is an effective way to build a future-proof community.

Minting NFTs for Token-Gated Content

One of the most successful use-cases of NFTs is for token-gated content and communities. NFTs are much more than just monkey jpegs — in fact, they’re not even that, since the jpegs themselves are more often stored on IPFS than directly on the blockchain’s smart contract. They’re more meant to act as a record of ownership, but that ownership can also be used to create token-gated content.

Services like Collab.Land and POAP each has a unique solution for using NFTs to build community around your content.

Collab.Land lets you mint and launch an NFT collection that can be used as an encrypted key. This key can be set to unlock private VIP areas of a website, premium blog/podcast/streaming content, hidden Discord channels, email newsletter subscriptions, and even lifetime deals on decentralized software as a service (SaaS) applications.

POAPs are NFTs used as digital mementos for life events, and they’re often used to reward attendance at events. If you were there, you can claim a POAP that’s stored in your wallet and also can be used to access token-gated content. This is a great way to build FOMO among your audience and help encourage attendance numbers at your live and virtual events.

Like any premium subscription content, be sure you’re providing real value to your token holders. These are fans of your work who paid their hard-earned money to be a part of your community, so you want to give them their money’s worth. If you can accomplish this, this layer of web3 content marketing can provide exponential long-term returns.

And no content marketing plan is complete without considering search engine optimization (SEO).

How Web3 Search Engine Optimization Works

Image source: Tumisu @ Pixabay

SEO is the art of making your web content visible to online search algorithms and robots. You’ll need to consider onsite SEO, offsite SEO, and technical SEO to succeed in web3, and there are some solid AI and blockchain-related tools that will help you get there.

For starters, AI-powered SEO tools like Morphio and LinkHunter help you keep an eye on search trends, perform keyword research, and find backlink opportunities. These tools use AI to perform thousands of searches and scrape data from different resources to provide you with comprehensive reporting to help drive your overall keyword strategy.

And keywords are important for reaching your intended audiences. If you want to be associated with web3, crypto, blockchain, AI, metaverse, NFT, and all these other technologies, you’ll need to start talking about them and provide context as to what you provide. If you don’t keep up with emerging technologies and the terminology used for them, you’ll fall behind and possibly lose clients and customers to a less-qualified business that does speak the lingo.

Once you have identified the relevant keywords for your business, you’ll need to start publishing it online on your website using the tools mentioned above. And as mentioned above, web3 blogging platforms like Hive, Steemit, and Mirror are great to post written content with backlinks back to your web properties to help build site authority.

Also consider staking the most relevant terms to your business in Presearch. Presearch is a web3 search engine that uses blockchain technology to tokenize the search process. You can either stake its $PRE token to a specific keyword to run a sponsored search result for it or you can stake it to run a node and ensure you’re personally processing searches relevant to your business.

These options could put your brand in front of a lot of eyes for cheaper than comparable searches on Google. And sometimes just by showing up in web3, you’ll build a reputation among that community that will inevitably lead to more sales. But it’s not enough to just post content on your website if you want to build an SEO presence. Social media also plays a large role in building traffic and community with your content in web3.

Web3 Influencers and Social Media

Image source: Geralt on Pixabay

Traditional social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and Telegram are filled with a vocal crypto community. These tech, business, and finance experts can often be found in group chats discussing some high-level topics. But you’ll also find plenty of crypto conmen in these crowns shilling the latest NFT mint or airdrop that promise to make you rich.

But often they end up as rug pulls, meaning the founder pull out all liquidity and crash the stock, thus pulling the rug on their investors.

Coffeezilla is one of my favorite YouTubers, thanks to his crypto forensic skills and ability to call out scams, frauds, and rug pulls in the crypto sector. He’s one of web3’s most necessary layers of security because of his willingness to report on what’s happening on the public ledger. The last thing you want is to be stuck holding the bag in a bad investment, and crypto is unfortunately rife with these situations.

Of course, not everyone in web3 is a scam, and you can leverage social media to connect with high-profile web3 leaders like Vitalik Buterin and Charles Hoskinson. These leaders created the underlying blockchain infrastructure on which much of the burgeoning web3 tools are built. And you’ll often find them attending and speaking in social audio rooms like Twitter Spaces while also dropping gems via text too.

Discord is also a very popular place for implementing token-gated content as described earlier. Discord has a lot of options for crypto connectivity through its automated bots and web hooks. Several decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are forming and organizing on Discord as we speak, and they’re set to create a big splash in the coming years. This is becoming a pivotal place for web3 to organize away from the prying eyes of public search engines.

But these are all web2 social media platforms, and web3 is all about pulling the control away from centralized organizational power. Emerging platforms like Deso (short for decentralized social) are hoping to redefine the traditional social media platform to tokenize usage. Unfortunately, many of its social platforms like Bitclout have a bad reputation among creators for locking their balances and failing to provide any real innovation.

Platforms like Rally let creators issue their own creator tokens, but it hasn’t gained much traction either. Thankfully, most people I know were able to liquidate their Rally coins, unlike Deso and Bitclout. These proprietary tokens are often given out on social media to encourage attendance and participation in AMAs and other live events.

And as mentioned above, tools like Collab.Land and POAP can also incentivize attendance and participation with awards.

Also, consider building a DAO of your own. These DAOs have managed to gather community for a wide range of goals, including Blockbuster DAO attempting to buy and revive a dead brand, LinksDAO trying to build a decentralized country club, and BitDAO, which is the world’s largest DAO treasury with over $2 billion of crypto assets under management. Each DAO is decentralized, and you can submit proposals simply by holding and staking the proper governance tokens. Everything is automated through a smart contract, and DAOs are quickly becoming a powerful force in the modern post-pandemic economy.

However, it’s typically the wacky DAOs that get all the media attention. That means as important as community management and social media are, you’ll still need a solid public relations strategy to stick out in the web3 world.

Web3 Public Relations Agencies

Public relations hasn’t changed much over the years. Besides tools like HARO, MuckRack, and Qwoted acting as a CRM of journalists, most agencies are still doing the same old things. This means pitching and publishing stale press releases in the same spots and getting the same coverage on the same channels.

There’s still value to appearing on television, but it’s important to understand what it is and isn’t. And there are several crypto PR agencies ironically working hard to get innovative web3 entrepreneurs and founders on web0 TV news outlets. I often work with web3, metaverse, and decentralized finance (DeFi) companies on their web3 branding, publicity, and community management. This is all part of content marketing, and the strategies should all work in tangent.

Many of these clients are working on reputation management and crisis management communications. Gamers, for example, really hate NFTs. Crypto mining helped drive GPU prices up, and play-to-earn is viewed as a cash grab from greedy enterprises. While music fans are lining up to spend millions on unique musical experiences like Coachella, major video game companies like Ubisoft and even Discord got widely booed for announcing crypto- and NFT-related product integrations.

This means when I’m working with a blockchain gaming client, I have to spend a lot of time researching the pain points. I watch videos of game developers and players alike trashing the blockchain video game industry, and then I address point-by-point how my client’s game is different.

Communicating ideas to the public and media transcends any individual technology. And right now, there is a distinct lack of viable PR tools in web3. While this may change in the future, nothing can replace the ability to network and build meaningful relationships with journalists. Thankfully, PR is something AI will never fully replace. Like blogging, it requires human interaction that’s not easy to do artificially.

With that said, there will surely be new web3-enabled tools that leverage AI and blockchain technology to make it easier to engage with the media. It would more than likely be CRM related however, as canned automated pitching are likely to forever remain as useless as AI writers. Advertising in web3 opens a lot of new options though.

Advertising in Web3

Image Source Nick Youngson @ Picpedia

Advertising in web3 involves a few steps already mentioned in this guide, including keyword staking in Presearch and minting NFTs. However, that’s just one small part of the available options. The first to be aware of is the Basic Attention Token ($BAT) and Brave Browser.

Brave is a Chromium-based web3 browser built specifically to support the decentralized web. It has native integration for blockchain-based websites, IPFS, TOR, torrents, and more. Tracking cookies and plugins are automatically off by default, which helps when you’re trying to bypass certain annoying features online. This makes it a powerful, secure, and private browser you should consider using as your main to help take a bite out of Google.

And, it also integrates $BAT, so you can earn crypto simply by viewing ads while you browse. As an advertiser, learning to use $BAT can help you generate more return on ad spend (ROAS) in the web3 world. Not only can you do it from your website, but you can also advertise directly with Brave. This integrates your ads into the browser whenever a new tab is open and provides maximum visibility.

BAT is an Ethereum ERC-20 token, but the Brave Browser does not directly run on the blockchain, which would be painfully slow. But it does provide a nice entry-level way for brands to advertise in web3. You can also consider advertising within dApps the same way in-app advertising works (except decentralized).

Tokenized ad platforms like NYIAX and BitClave are creating solutions to bridge the trust gap between personal data and advertising. Each can be useful and should be considered when allocating advertising budgets, as they’re growing their bases and helping users form a more transparent relationship with advertisers.

If you’re looking for an advertising and marketing networking group, JumpDAO is filled with professionals. There are weekly news roundups and tons of opportunities to get involved and share resources with some of the brightest minds in marketing and advertising.

Some major brands are buying metaverse land in games like Decentraland and The Sandbox as a form of advertising. This land can costs as much as real-life land though, with some plots selling for millions of dollars a piece. And it’s not yet exactly clear what the long-term ROI of such purchases will be, considering neither of these games has a very large daily active userbase.

Still, the advertising potential is huge, and brands like Adidas and Snoop Dogg made as much of a splash outside those games just by participating inside. Sometimes that media exposure can be worth more than the actual project itself. You shouldn’t just dive into web3 and buy any and every tool that comes your way though.

Here are a few essentials to consider adding to your web3 stack.

Building a Web3 Stack

Unfortunately, there’s no AppSumo nor Product Hunt for web3 deals. And searching for web3 tools in those marketplaces so far comes up with sparse results. You’ll find the occasional crypto payment processor or WordPress plugin (as mentioned above), but there’s no NFT-based LTDs and very little in the way of blockchain-based tools.

While I’ve gone over a plethora of tools already, there are a few more you need to know about if you want to get started with content marketing in web3.

Buy Web3 Domain Names — The first thing you’ll want to do in web3 is register your own unique domain name. These domain names are used to identify you on the blockchain, and they can be used as an easy-to-remember crypto wallet address, as well as a platform to build decentralized websites and dApps. You can obtain a crypto domain from various services:

1. Unstoppable Domains is what I chose. You get the address for a lifetime, and you can connect Ethereum, Bitcoin, and others directly to it to send/receive crypto. You can get .x, .zil, .NFT, .crypto, .DAO, and more You can publish on either Ethereum or Polygon, and it may be worthwhile to get your name across all the top-level domains.
2. Ethereum Name Service is in charge of the .Eth names. This is for Ethereum only and may be renewed every one to ten years. The longer you pay for it, the cheaper it is. But with gas fees as high as they are, these are far more expensive than a normal URL.
3. Bonafida is where you get a .sol address through the Solana Name Service. This is done through an auction, so there’s a chance you’ll be outbid on your own name. Solana is much less user-friendly than Ethereum, but it’s cheaper in gas fees, so you may prefer it.

There are surely others by now, but those are the top 3 to watch. you can also create an NFT domain on the blockchain using services like Steemit (Steem blockchain), Hive.blog (Hive blockchain) or Mirror.xyz (Ethereum blockchain). These are blogging platforms built on the blockchain, and every blog post I publish is its own NFT. These domains work the same as ENS, and mirror directly integrates into ENS.

Something to keep in mind is that NONE of these services are registered with ICANN, which means that none of these top-level domains are internationally recognized on the internet. In fact, .Eth is reserved by Ethiopia, something Brantly Milligan (ENS founder) was well aware of when starting his ENS project a few years back. He then accused UD of violating ICANN, despite none of their domains being reserved yet.

As they fought on Twitter over the holidays, all I saw was the problems in getting one of these domains in the first place.

I don’t walk around with my social security number and bank account tattooed on my forehead. But anybody can look up an ENS domain on Etherscan to see exactly what any of these .Eth people on twitter actually own. I can see all their NFTs, their ENS airdrop that they probably didn’t report to the IRS, their other wallets they interact with, etc. all attached to their name. That’s beyond dangerous IMHO, so I keep my domains away from my OpenSea wallet. And neither of those wallets is my main, which only sends money to those wallets through an anonymizing service.

Also consider that ENS domains can expire for nonpayment. If gas prices hit $200 and you can’t afford to renew, your name goes up for sale. I can then buy it, and it’ll map your name to my address. Then I get to profit from any crypto sent to you via old links you published everywhere.

In that sense, it’s important to understand that a domain name, like any NFT, is just a redirect link. The actual file isn’t stored in the blockchain. You don’t need an ENS domain to create a website on IPFS (interplanetary file system). You can easily make a crypto-compatible website with WordPress plug-ins.

Everything is shiny and new right now, so people explain that it’s easier to use crypto and NFTs with a blockchain name. That’s somewhat true (qr codes make it plenty easy enough), but it’s also easier to compromise your account. You’ve taken something decentralized via the blockchain and introduced a single point of failure that can be exploited in multiple ways.

NFT and Token Issuance — We’ve already reviewed some of the tools available to mint your own NFT or issue creator tokens. But there are still more to go, as web3 development is a large industry filled with a lot of stuff to do. Thirdweb, Cardstack, and Alchemy are among the solutions for web3 and smart contract development. Each provides a different environment and requires a varied level of programming skills from no-code to expert.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of every tool available. It’s simply the tools I’m familiar with and have used or met the people behind. That doesn’t mean I personally endorse any of these tools, and I’m not in any way associated with any of the projects mentioned above.

However, if you’re going to be involved in content marketing for web3, these tools are great to get you started. Each tool is a piece of the overall suite you should have at your disposal if you want to be successful. And if this is all too much for you, don’t fret — I run a full-service web3 consulting agency and can help you navigate everything. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn to learn more and discuss how my team can help you achieve web3 success.