Your startup needs a blog. If you look into the most successful startups, you’ll notice a pattern – all of them invest efficiently into content marketing and capturing leads via their blogs.
However, the world web is already heavily saturated with content. Over 2 million of blog posts are published daily, meaning you have quite a huge competition out there. Anyone can start a blog a blog these days – that’s simple. However, not everyone can create a massively popular resource that generates sales and leads for your business round the clock.
When it comes to blogging, most startups have somewhat overrated expectations and often overlook the following essentials.
Blogging Is About Your Audience, Not Your Business
One of the worst mistakes newbie publishers make is being way too self-indulgent. Yes, you’ve started your blog with purpose of telling the world about your awesome product. No, talking about it all the time will not drastically boost your sales.
If you want to get actual results from your content marketing, focus on delivering value to your readers – educate ‘em, inspire ‘em, tell them how you can solve their worst problems. Talking about you and your experience is fine, but only when it comes to illustrating some points to your readers and adding personality to your posts.
Before you type your next story, ask yourself this simple question: What’s in it for my readers?
Publishing Daily Does Not Stand for Better Results
Are you sure the readers will feel excited when a new post notification lands in their inbox?
Are you sure you can produce epic content on a daily basis and promote the heck out of it? Do you really have those budgets and resources?
Sure, crafting a 300 words piece is easy. It takes 30 min to an hour max. Crafting a blog post that attracts tons of social shares, traffic and links takes a little more than that – 20 to 30 hours as top bloggers say.
Forgetting About the Tech Side of Blogging
From the tech point of view, maintaining a popular blog is just a tiny bit easier than a full-scale online service. You need to pay attention to the security issues, especially when it comes to plugins; schedule regular website updates and test-drive your blog’s speed and usability. Last, but not least – make sure you use a reliable hosting provider e.g. managed hosting by Hostgator that can handle a massive traffic spike when one of your post goes viral; here are some tips to make that happen.
Aiming Too Broad with Your Topics
When most people start blogging they want to cover it all in one single post, thus aim for big topics like:
- “How to Launch a Successful Startup”;
- “Small Business Best Practices”; and
- “How to Do Search Engine Optimization”.
Such topics are just too general and you won’t be able to cover them properly. There’s just too many nuances and details you are likely to omit, meaning your content will sound fluff.
Instead, get really specific. Your ideas should not exist in a vacuum. Think of them as part of the big content plan that serves your company goals. Address the very specific concerns your users have, educate your audience and offer practical solutions to their biggest problems if you want to make your blog work for your business.
