
How We Grew Our Blog to 5,000+ Subscribers in Five Weeks - grinnick
http://groovehq.com/blog/in-five-weeks?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=10750480&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8Tj7p_-a-s-eMaBcb-zyKRBQfYh1hUuQKHmhrdfb4jS3brqsRojh4C6abKlxJ7VP2MF8Wvj6Nin-wAd2uZS43EM-Oauw&_hsmi=Optional.of%2810750480%29
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guybrushT
Nice post.

Summary: Find your voice (Be authentic). High quality visuals. Give reasons
for others to care about (or subscribe to) your blog. Get noticed by
influencers.

I hope this is accurate.

Also, one more implicit take-away: make sure readers to come back to read next
week by ending a post with a cliffhanger (e.g. I will tell you how this blog
got 1000+ subscribers in a day if you come back)

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robomartin
The key take-away here is that a business blog is and should be treated as
another product. Then it is easy to see it must deliver value. To some degree
I compare this to the millions of news sites out there. They all regurgitate
the same news. You could go anywhere and read almost exactly the same thing.
The truly interesting ones go beyond rewording an AP story by providing
research, insight and analysis that users value.

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personlurking
I once spent a month creating and tweaking a country-specific tech news blog
and realized that 85% of the tech news (in this other language) was
regurgitated US tech news with, as you said, pretty much exactly the same
info. Eventually, I put a stop to the blog because it wasn't something people
were looking for (that is, translated, country-specific tech news).

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jesseddy
It's nice to see a company writing posts with this much transparency. While
it's not _simple_ to grow a blog presence like this it does take persistence
and knowing a few solid techniques. Thanks for sharing.

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alexmturnbull
thx Jess! Glad you're digging the series :)

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mikeg8
I would have enjoyed the post more if about half way through, a giant popup
didn't make me choose between entering my email or clicking a link that read,
"No thanks, I don't want to grow my business." Pretty aggressive experience...

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WA
This is interesting and I love how transparent they are. It's also well
written and has indeed nice visuals.

Thing is, their blog doesn't talk about customer support at all. It's about
earning money. A multi-part series on the _Journey to 100K a month_. So, the
take-away is not really a take-away in my opinion.

 _Find your voice._ Sure, but the blog has nothing to do with customer
support. Optimizely does talk about split testing. Helpscout does talk about
customer support. Copyblogger does talk about copy-writing.

I'm curious wether the next blog posts after this _Journey to 100K_ will be as
successful. So far, I don't think that they really found their voice and their
authority in their respective niche.

If it drives new customers to their SaaS, that's great for them, but blogging
about their successes and getting more success by doing so, seems to be a bit
early to give "key-insights" into the business of _how to write your own blog
that brings you success_.

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startupjerkfest
if you look at the blog as an attractor for a market segment, (i.e. startups),
and you can make the startups believe you are similar to them (just like you
are, we struggled to get traction, and here is how we did it & you can do it
too, etc... - i.e. the topics of this blog post series), then when the times
comes for those startups to buy a customer support app, the hope is they will
remember groovehq and recall the warm fuzzy feelings and try it.

people buy from people they "like", and they "like" them because they sense
they have something in common with them.

also the implied "we are helping other startups succeed by sharing our lessons
learned" influences others whom are not directly in the target customer
segment. and when they hear about someone who needs a cust support app, they
can recall and recommend groovehq, because the thought has been planted. the
lessons in the blog have not touched on the above influence directly (yet),
but a main lesson that appears again and again is the need to do your
homework, research, analyze and study current market leaders, and apply your
hypothesis from what works for them to your own situation. not copy the
methods directly, but apply a framework of concepts, customized to your
product, customer segment, situation, etc.

this is just one set of topics, and it is getting attention, so their approach
seems to be working. later, they could start a topic series about customer
support, and since they already have an audience, the impact would be greater
than the vanilla blog posts about customer service that they had written
before. this secondary topic series could focus on what they didn't like about
leading cs help apps like zendesk, etc. that would attract csr's that felt the
same way about zendesk, form an association between like minds (i.e. they
think just like me, so i like them), and increase mind share and curiosity
about the app. a lead is created.

if you haven't had the experience of trying to sell your product or service
through a website, (where you didn't speak directly to a lead / prospect /
customer), you'd never know how hard it is to estimate and understand why
people buy things. many times it has nothing to do with logical comparisons of
features and benefits, instead it come from something their mother told them
when they were 5 years old (i.e. pretty means you can trust someone, etc). and
if people only bought the BEST product on the market, there would only be 1
product / company in each segment, and that's not true. consider how many
Apple haters there are who use an Android phone. some people buy other brands
simply because they hate the leading brand. so there is an opportunity for
every company to fit in somewhere.

i hated this series when i first started reading it. now i digest it with a
inquisitive eye that attempts to look behind the curtain to figure out their
goals, strategy & tactics, to see how it can work for me. i'm not trying to
learn directly from what Alex writes, but learn what he is doing and why it
"appears" to be working in his favor at this current moment.

and in regards to transparency, i must comment on these blogs thru hacker
news, because i was blocked from using disqus on their site, probably because
my initial criticism of their approach was not aligned with their goal of
getting everyone to "like" them. just my assumption, but why else would i have
been "blocked"?

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theklub
Not knocking this post, but I find it funny because anytime I've used
wordpress to create a website I get 100+ spam users/subscribers a day.

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startupjerkfest
use the akismet plugin to block majority of spam comments / attacks

