When should you have a blog dedicated to your side-project?
I’m thinking of creating a blog for https://subscriptionzero.com/. I have a medium blog, but it’s a hassle to make it behave as a traditional blog.
When did you guys start your blog? Is it even feasible? Writing takes a lot of time and I’m a solo maker!
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Blogging is a long term game. You can certainly grow without a blog, but definitely need some kind of channel that works for you and your product.
I think the real question is, what is the best promotional channel for you? Giving a away freebies? Social media? Paid ads? Social hacking?Video? etc. Because if you don't want to commit to writing (which is the impression I got from your post), you should at least have path to building an audience/customer base.
I agree.
Early on, you should focus on one channel that works. Don't force yourself to start blogging just because others do if you don't enjoy it.
Starting a blog is easy. Sticking with it long enough to see an ROI is hard.
I think it's not about blogging per se, but about how you can get people to link to your site, because ultimately that's the key factor in helping your site rank better on Google (increasing your domain authority).
Blogging is one way of doing it, but it's far from the only way. But if your blog doesn't drive traffic to your main landing page, nor is it ranked in Google, it's as if you never blogged at all. But if you can rank and you know how to harvest blog traffic and convert it into main page traffic, yes, blogging can be very valuable, especially if you target high-intent, low-volume keywords.
Also, here's another marketing idea. Recently I've stumbled upon the idea of "engineering as marketing," basically you offer a free useful tool related to your niche hosted on your main domain, and try to promote it and get people to link to it. That will also increase your domain authority and help your content rank better in Google.
Good luck.
"Engineering as marketing" 👈
I'm a big believer in this strategy, and I'm building my product around "freebies". Really, anything free that has value can work: visual generators, icon packs, mortgage calculators, audio watermarks, file converters... Could be a free tier in your pricing or completely separate tool. The idea is people are more likely to share free stuff than a blog article. Would you personally be more likely to share an article by DropBox about backing up files or an offer for free gigs of storage?
I think you should start one as soon as possible. I agree that blogging is a long term strategy, but content marketing also plays a key role in growing organically as a startup. Its also a great way to provide value on social channels up front to act as a funnel back to your product. You can repurpose your blog posts for social channels and reap the benefits. Hope this helps!
I struggle with this so, so, so much. I've probably spent a hundred hours trying to "plan" my content strategy. I teach classes, I build products, I'm trying to start a sustainable side business...how do I think about content creation? Is it related to a product, a side business, my own brand? I'm following along in this thread to see how others think about this!
I totally get it that writing takes a lot of time. It's been my biggest blocker, too.
In order to get writing I had to change the way I see writing, and look at a few benfits; for me those are primarily;
Usually I rewrite a single blog at least 2 times before I have something which I deem worthy to be published. Primarily doing this for myself helps crank out a few posts each month, which is good enough for me.
Writing is an interesting one, not only do you need to write you also need to spend 50%+ promoting it.
https://versoly.com/ (i built) might be a perfect match for you. Can host your landing page (don't waste time doing design focus on copy) and the blog.