A recent Ahrefs video by Sam Oh walks through the standard playbook for growing a new website from zero: get listed in directories, build free tools, start an email list, show up in forums, pursue sweat-equity partnerships. It’s solid advice. Every tactic on the list works. And none of them, on their own, will build a brand anyone remembers.
The video arrives at this conclusion too, almost as an afterthought. After walking through five repeatable systems, it pivots to something harder to operationalize: create experience-driven content. Do something interesting, then talk about it.
That pivot is where the real post lives.
The replication problem
Every tactic in the standard growth playbook has the same vulnerability: anyone can copy it. Directory listings are a checklist. Free tools can be spun up with ChatGPT in an afternoon. Email list mechanics are solved problems. Forum participation is just showing up.
This isn’t a criticism. These are table-stakes activities, and most companies still don’t do them well. But the returns on purely mechanical work are shrinking. When everyone has access to the same tools and the same playbooks, execution speed stops being a differentiator. You get listed in the same directories as your competitors. You build a mortgage calculator that looks like the other twelve mortgage calculators.
The playbook gets you traffic. It doesn’t get you chosen.
What “experience-driven” actually means in practice
The phrase “experience-driven content” sounds like one of those ideas that’s easy to agree with and hard to act on. But it’s more specific than it seems.
Most B2B content answers the question “what should someone do?” Experience-driven content answers a different question: “what happened when we actually did it?” One is advice. The other is evidence.
The difference matters because advice is abundant and evidence is scarce. A post explaining how to run a sweat-equity partnership is useful. A post documenting the specific partnership you built, what you offered, what they said no to, what actually moved the needle, is something no competitor can replicate. It’s inventory that only you can create.
This is why the best company blogs read less like resource libraries and more like build logs. They aren’t trying to rank for every keyword in their niche. They’re creating a body of work that makes a reader think: these people actually know what they’re doing, because they keep showing me the work.
The compounding layer
Here’s where the two halves of the playbook connect. The mechanical tactics (directories, tools, email, forums, partnerships) create surface area. They put you in front of people. But the experience layer is what makes those people stay, subscribe, and tell others.
A free tool gets someone to your site. A story about how you built that tool, what you learned, what broke, gives them a reason to remember who built it.
An email list gives you a channel. What you send through that channel determines whether people open the next one.
A forum post gets you visibility. Whether that visibility converts to trust depends entirely on whether you sound like someone who operates in the space or someone who read an article about it.
The tactics are the distribution system. The experience is the signal that travels through it. Without the tactics, nobody finds you. Without the experience, nobody cares that they did.
The uncomfortable implication
The Ahrefs video ends with a line that deserves more weight than it gets: “If you don’t have anything interesting to say, it’s probably because you’re not doing anything interesting.”
That’s the part most marketers skip past because it’s inconvenient. It means the bottleneck on your content isn’t your writing process or your distribution strategy. It’s whether you’re doing work worth documenting.
No amount of keyword research fixes that problem. No tool or template or tactic fills that gap. The companies that build lasting organic growth aren’t the ones with the best systems. They’re the ones generating raw material that only they can turn into content, because only they lived it.
The playbook gets you in the game. The story is what keeps you there.