Create a blog to gain visitors
So I'm at stage 0 of growth actually as I'm launching my product, and I spent some time already trying to post about it on different websites.
Now I want to begin to write a blog to solve some people's problems and maybe gain some visitors on my website. But I was wondering:
Is it better to create a general blog or a blog that is linked to my product?
Let me explain, I was thinking about either writing a general blog, on a different domain than my product, and talk about a lot of different things (for example some guides to help people code their SaaS), or either write a more specific blog that is linked to my product (for example my product helps reduce churn, so I write some articles about how to reduce SaaS churn).
While creating a more specific blog can help me get more visitors to my product's website, I'm afraid that all this work will be done "for nothing" if this product fails and I begin to work on another product in (let's say) 2 months.
What are your thoughts on this? And your personal experience? Did you write product-specific blogs? Or do you have personal blogs? Or both?
Thanks!
An important benefit of blogging on the same domain is that it will help with SEO.
Links pointing to your articles will increase domain authority and help your commercial pages rank better.
I would recommend going this route unless you want to blog about completely unrelated topics.
I'm thinking of both.
I'm an approved writer for The Startup on Medium, so I plan to publish an article relating to data concepts/design that can be leveraged for startups (and put a shameless plug to my future product without making it obvious that I'm advertising it). This will expose the product to a lot of people, but I imagine only a small portion will actually be interested.
For those that do end up going to my product's website from Medium (or other traffic sources), I plan to have a blog on the website specifically geared towards topics relating to the product (e.g., salary negotiation tactics). The goal of the "specific" blog is to gain credibility/trust from end users and to boost my SEO.
I think the best blogs are generally a combination of "what are people searching for on Google" and "who would be interested in using my product."
SaaS churn is a pretty hot topic right now so I think you are on the right track with that. I don't think there's anything wrong with experimenting in more tangential topics. (Like how meditation apps might talk about the importance of sleep in their blogs).
Personal blogs can be more enjoyable, but I find it hard to get direct value from them. I tried that for a while and it hasn't done much besides making a few of my friends think I'm a decent writer...
I have been thinking about the exact same thing and I have decided to create 2 separate blogs. One for the business and will post news, progress and articles focused on how to use the product.
And use the personal blog to post articles related to my product and anything that is similar to it hoping to rank on different focused keywords and of course post few links to the business.