4
10 Comments

Do you write a blog?

Hi guys!

Do you write a blog for your personal community/audience building or for promoting your startup's brand?

If yes which platforms lead to the best conversions? And why?

We, on Surfaces.One, provided a lot of interviews with our customers and have the next statistics:

  • Medium: good, but you cant operate with your subscribers' emails.

  • Substack: powerful, but ways to show info about you as an expert or about your company is a bit limited

  • Blog on own domain: great solution but required a lot of integration and maintenance: publishing platform + email services, CMS

  • IndieHackers: great, but the audience is only for its users

On Surfaces.One we try to make the writing and audience-building experience as easy and seamless as possible - your thoughts will help us a lot!

  1. 3

    I personally wouldn't invest much time into producing original content for 3rd party platforms or services. I don't have a blog, but when I do start building content, it goes there first, then it is chopped up for other platforms which will direct back to the blog.

    No chance am I giving a platform the ability to shutdown my audience overnight. My domain, my rules.

  2. 2

    When I started, I used hashnode, & later switched to my own website (https://www.pankajtanwar.in/). All blogging platform gives you SEO but It will not show the real you. On my own website, I can modify it as I want. It requires some work to set up everything. Hashnode is a great platform, it gave me magic powers to publish my thoughts at one-click but the engineer inside me was not happy!

  3. 2

    As the majority here I'm also an advocate of a blog on your own domain. It isn't requiere to much work for rolling. You just need to put a small server with WordPress that in my case also contains the project's LP (see https://bikepixels.com 🙃).

    Then as already mentioned you own everything: the content, the traffic, the users, their comments, their emails if you what to have a newsletter (highly recommend too), etc. Also as you get more experienced you can set more functionalities to the blog as on other platforms like internationalisation, charting, visualizations and anything you may want to appear in you posts.

    Finally, don't forget to make a backup of it from time to time as that is the most important maintenance task.

  4. 2

    can you check our site if it good or not. saasjournal.io

  5. 2

    What about Hashnode?

  6. 2

    I've had success writing on Medium, but only if the post includes a link back to my website.

    My blog at people.fish/blog is pretty successful toward creating new clients, but it's just a total guess as to what posts are going to take-off. I mean it's a complete guess.

  7. 2

    Yes I do write for my own personal brand, but I also run a YouTube channel / Twitch channel.

    I actually X-post across 3 platforms:

    • My personal site
    • Hashnode
    • Dev.to

    Hashnode has the highest tech conversion rate for me. In the future I am going to start adding in Medium, just for extra exposure.

  8. 2

    Yea, I think Ghost checks all the boxes

  9. 1

    As we can catch, important points for audience building writing tool are:

    • easy-to-create and easy-to-share mini landings with opt-in forms
    • newsletter feature
    • "About" page
    • contacts of user or company
    • blog functionality
  10. 2

    This comment was deleted 20 days ago.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 16 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments