Should my startup have its own blog?

It's called content marketing, and startups do it to attract visitors to their websites through search traffic, social shares, etc.

The goal is to convert those visitors into customers or at least capture their email address.

So yes, I'd say it's a must have 🙂

Personally, I've seen a lot of startups have half-baked blogs that don’t provide any sort of value, including mine 😂(which I’m also working on revamping).

Blogs (if done wrong) are easily the biggest waste of time in my opinion as most of them now are just spammed with call to actions, have generic advice, and just plug their own company every chance they get.

That’s actually the reason why I prefer following individual peoples’ medium/substack blogs over company stuff these days.

Butttt, on the other hand, if you get it right and actually provide value in the content, it's one of the best marketing channels because it's systematic and sustainable.

I add blogs to most projects because they drive organic search traffic. Once (and if!) you get the flow of traffic going, it becomes a gift that keeps on giving.

I have seen the alternative strategy whereby a company tried to create traffic by advertising (threw ~ 200K at it). It ramped up their stats for the duration of the campaign but as soon as the money was gone, the numbers dropped. I can still see their numbers in the search console and my organic traffic currently outperforms theirs 10x after 1.5 years of effort whereas they started 4 years ago.

When you build it organically and over time, it is yours to keep independent of money thrown at it, but a fair warning, it will take a long time. It is also difficult to predict what will work, so I suggest you just keep writing and analyze afterward once you have the stats.

May have missed it in here... ahrefs has a huge course on blogging for business: https://ahrefs.com/academy/blogging-for-business

Publishing content on a blog is one great way to build traction and grow an audience for your startup through social media, different aggregators and search engine results. If you don't have a big budget for paid advertising, it's probably the most effective and self-sustainable way you can grow a startup.

If you need more ideas and inspiration, here's how one blog post changed the traction for my startup.

Definitely yes!

In my case, all my waiting list for my upcoming book about web application deployment are coming from my blog. I have over 300 subscribers now. Cannot imagine doing it without it.

Even better if you have a specialized blog for the brand on the same domain. I am now thinking of starting some of my other new projects by creating content first and not second.

That said, writing is hard and many times not all that rewarding. Luckily, given you have a marketing budget, you can bootstrap it with external authors.

Good luck!

Actually, you don't need a blog. Google picks up all kinds of page and content updates regardless.

It's better to think what kind of big problems you can solve for your target customers, then determine the best content storytelling type after that (downloadable report, podcast, growth tool, quiz, you name it), rather than jamming a patchwork series of articles into a Blog and leaving it to wither on the vine at the end of your sitemap.

And if you want to do a genuine content marketing push, start a branded publication that stands alone from your product and put genuine resources into it, like what Stripe does with Increment (and IndieHackers!)

Deborah Carver nails it here: https://technologist.substack.com/p/ct-no43-why-the-ongoing-obsession

Yes. 3 main reasons I can think of:

1. They're lead-gen tools
People share your articles if they're valuable. It drives traffic, positions you as an authority/expert, and people sign up for your software's free trial.

2. They get you backlinks
If you want SEO traffic, you need to rank pretty high up for your relevant keywords. If you want to rank pretty high up for your relevant keywords, you need to get backlinks. If you want to get backlinks, you need linkable content, be they blog articles, infographics, etc.

3. They get you email list subscribes
Depending on your business model, the size of your email list could correlate quite strongly with your MRR.

I've been running my blog for about a month and half now, and it's driven me a lot of traffic and sign ups and revenue to my main landing page.

I run a Twitter growth hacking blog for my startup, Zlappo.

Plus it's practically free, so why not?

Definitely! Diving deep into keywords and putting that knowledge into blog articles will, like most people here said, give you a lot of organic traffic.

I had a side project that I last touched around ~5 months ago, before I abandoned it I had create a blog and created about ~6 articles with relatively low-competitive keywords and medium traffic, it still generates about ~10 or so users per day to this day which isn't bad considering the articles weren't that well written.

If I were you, I'd keep at it with the blog and try to learn more about keywords and how to use them to generate organic traffic. Best of luck!

Yes, but only if it is going to get the time and attention it needs. Otherwise it could end up hurting more than doing good. IMHO

In my opinion the earlier the better. Now you don't need to write everyday, but if it comes easy to you an article every week or two shouldn't be too hard.

I took a quick look at your blog, but it seems your posts are more specific to your product. Not what someone (who doesn't know you) would be searching for on Google.

If your goal is to get potential leads (which I'm assuming) then write stuff on topics that your potential clients might be searching for.

Example: "How to visualize your software development process"

You can check out this discussion, I think it has very valuable insights. Check out also the link to the ahrefs course

Apart from SEO, having your own technical blog is a great way to show your tech expertise, transparency, and build trust in your product. War stories and complex problems solved elegantly always make a great read.

Blogging could be a great long term investment into SEO.

Chances are people search for all kinds of questions related to the pain / problem that your app solves - “long tail” of searches that have a specific intent and for which your product could be the solution.

When done right, over time blogging could become a great channel of free traffic and solid conversion rates.

There is a great free video course from Ahrefs called Blogging for Business which I would recommend to anyone starting their own blog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLGCSC1C2OQ&list=PLvJ_dXFSpd2tbI3mYhAO8oZ2NYMrJuNPq&index=2

That's how Figma got their first 100 users, through blog posts.

Feel free to submit your blog posts on my web app, https://intrgr.com. It will be recommended to everyone who's interested in that content. The algorithm prioritizes blogs over mass media content.

Let me know if you want a vanity token for your profile link instead of the random string if you'd like.

I also have a blog for my startup, you can check it here : (https://couponlak.com/blog/) it's extremely important to focus on the content marketing plan, especially at the beginnings, due to many reasons :
1 - Blog posts are fast to index in Google, you if you have a good piece of content, you'll be ranking it easiely.
2 - Marketing to an article and posting it at social media is much easier than posting or marketing to your service "directly".
3 - You gain a lot of social signals and backlinks if you do it correctly, so you'll have better search results.
4 - Google loves services or websites that provide real content for users.

You should try into medium, hashtags can bring a lot of traffic and you can also write for major publications with hundred of thousands of users and get more exposure if you share real value...
https://medium.com/@fivesecondshq