Allen Stern who writes CenterNetworks, a blog that’s becoming an important hub of the NY tech community, has a post up today that’s worth reading. It’s titled Are You Maximizing Your Product Blog? and in it Allen discusses the importance of a blog to a startup.
Allen does a great job covering the benefits to a startup but only touches on how to make your company’s blog a valuable asset. Here’s a quick list of tips that we’ve learned from our experiences
1) Invest into the blog: adding a Wordpress install to your site enables you to have a blog, it doesn’t mean you have anything of value. Just like any other asset that returns value a blog requires active investment. Write. Engage. Converse.
2) Achieve the right equilibrium: while writing regularly is required, being a perpetual Don King for your product will erode readership. It’s important to balance all things “company” - promotion, how-to, announcements - with other thoughtful posts. These can range from industry trends, technology insight, startup tips, and other interesting content.
To ensure we have the right mix we don’t resort to strict measurement, rather we regularly…
3) Take the temperature of the community: the best way to know when your equilibrium is off? When silence appears. When we launched the latest version of BlueOrganizer we posted a lot of how-to’s, announcements, tips, etc. It was a quiet place on the blog. Realizing this we posted on our trips, on startup tips, and other fresh topics. It’s important to remember that nobody connects around a product how-to.
4) Humanize yourself and, in doing so, the company: This is the power of a blog as a communication medium. Hi, I’m Fraser and I write with (a bit) of personality. So should you.
5) Build friendships: This boils down to sincerity. Care about your users and they won’t be classified as users for long. They’ll be friends. And that’s a powerful thing.
6) Engage. Engage. Engage.: This is equal-parts of the previous 5 tips. Engage your readers. Call them out by name (Hi Leigh, Anne, Marc, and others). Link to them. Ask them specific questions (Adam, wouldn’t it be great if the band pulled in filtered RSS around the specific event to bootstrap content on the IWasThere Network?)
7) Be honest: It goes far for earning credibility and credibility is a credit you can call on later.
8) Talk about what you’re building: It helps on a few fronts. You get rich feedback (that you haven’t fully thought about), it generates buy-in, and it prepares individuals for pending features and changes. The last two are more valuable than you may imagine.
9) Leverage social channels: we twitter links to some posts, we encourage subscribing to our RSS feed, we’ve added Digg buttons in the past to important posts (and made Digg’s front page). These create social stakes in the ground that drive traffic back to the blog. We get great daily traffic from delicious tags, Digg’d stories, Stumbled posts, etc.
10) Invest into the blog: It’s hard work but the returns are significant. Write. Engage. Converse… regularly.
