Startups Stack Exchange Archive

How to keep startup’s blog properly?

I’m trying to figure out how to blog about my company. There are several problems:

1) Auditory - when product not launched yet, it’s mostly likely to write about technical and business problems and issues what could be more interesting for other entrepreneurs rather than for end customers.

2) Where to host it. At my own site or using resources like reddit or medium? It can make my blog more visible but on the other hand, it doesn’t help to make my own startup more visible. And will it work for my startup’s marketing?

3) How to find readers? I’m doing my blog now and some of my articles can be found organically but I still don’t have many readers. And I don’t know how to appeal them, where to tell about my blog.

Thanks

Answer 11596

I have worked with a dozen startups and the common theme between all of them during their early stage was they thought a core marketing strategy included a strong blog presence. If you are of the same mind, I highly suggest you abandon that thinking. Blogging to early provides no value to the business and will have no impact. It will cloud your vision from tackling more important action items and forfeit your time.

There is a time in place for blogging depending on the maturity of your company. Allow me to clarify when the right time is and when it is not:

  1. If you have not built the product, do NOT blog, instead invest all energy into building.
  2. If you have a product ready and do a alpha release to a closed circuit user base, do NOT blog, instead invest all energy in getting their feedback.
  3. If you have a product ready and do a beta release to a closed circuit user base, do NOT blog, instead invest all energy in getting their feedback.
  4. If you have a product launched to the public and are NOT seeing new users signing up for the service with weekly incremental growth, do NOT blog, do everything to understand how your current user base can help promote your product.
  5. If you have hit a user adoption milestone which brings in revenue and proves your product works as intended, consider blogging but do NOT let it distract you from growing your company/product, listening to users, and monitoring shifts in the industry you are in.

Taking a step back, if you are really psyched about writing and keeping users or interested parties engaged in the progress of your startup, consider producing a email newsletter once a month (or a frequency which reflects progress). That will have a better reach and impact than blogging, I promise you! Moreover, it will force you into the mindset of collecting email addresses which are the lifeblood of all early stage startups. Build your startup website with CTA to sign up for a newsletter, and forget pointing them to a blog.

I hope this helps.

To answer your questions directly: 1.) skip 2.) Use Medium for a chance to grab organic traffic. 3.) Use social monitoring tools like Zignal to find relevant conversations on social networks, then join the conversation by adding value or DM the person.

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