
Common Blogging Mistakes Made by Startups - acangiano
http://technicalblogging.com/5-common-blogging-mistakes-made-by-startups/
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TomGullen
Had a quick read through of this, very good. Another important one to add is
not to host your blog on a subdomain for SEO. <http://blog.example.com> is
inferior to <http://example.com/blog>

I couldn't agree more about not using it for a corporate news feed, this is
one of the main points I tried to get across when I spoke at the HN London
event! It's a lazy thing to do, and just appeases a managers checklist of
things they must have. Blog? Tick!

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acangiano
In my book I shortly address the SEO issue by saying: "The subdomain
blog.yourcompany.com looks arguably better and is easier to host separately;
however, it’s also less effective from an SEO standpoint. [6]"

[6] <http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/>

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TomGullen
Website owners could setup blog.example.com to redirect to example.com/blog
easily, and when handing out the URL they could tell people to go to
blog.example.com and everyone wins

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acangiano
Solid idea for sure.

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philwelch
The most common blogging mistake made by startups: wasting too much valuable
time and runway worrying about blogging. For every hour spent working on your
blog, you should spend about a week trying to understand your customers needs
and figuring out how to better serve them.

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acangiano
I disagree, Phil. Blogging should be part of your marketing efforts. And your
team does need marketing, regardless of how good your product is and how well
you understand your customer's needs. Definitely spend time understanding your
customers, but don't ignore promoting and marketing your product. It's a
common mistake among programmers who tend to believe in an absolutely utopic
meritocracy where "if you build it, they will come".

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philwelch
Blogs are mostly one-way marketing, they take what's already inside your
company/brain/startup and push it out towards the world. That's the exact
opposite of the direction that matters most.

OK, a blog is often useful since your customers will want you to communicate
with them in some way. But worry about doing that effectively before you worry
about incrementing some integer on a social networking site.

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njx
I disagree. Blog is great marketing tool. "Inbound Marketing" is the word.

All your other efforts have an expiry date, like link building is not
permanent. Tweets expiry and vanish.

Blog and its content stays just like your website.

With Blogs you are announcing, educating and engaging all-in-one.

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philwelch
Well yeah, link-building and tweeting are also low-priority tasks compared to
better understanding your customers and building something they want to pay
for.

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SeoxyS
That's valid advice, if you want your blog to feel like techcrunch-quality
crap. You could also, you know, take the time to write content that stands on
its own and not try to use your blog as a way to shove marketing down our
throats. Massive share widgets need to die.

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jarrettcoggin
I think you missed point #4. Point #4 talks heavily about making your blog the
go-to blog for a particular topic, regardless of whether a reader actually
uses your product or not.

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Goladus
Yeah. Point #4 should be point #1 and titled "blogging boring, useless, or
poorly-written content."

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mkr-hn
#1 blogging mistake: treating it like an info dump and bragging platform.
Blogs are a place to share and gain knowledge. For a business, they're a place
to demonstrate your competency to the market and to attract new customers.

Example: <http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/>

99% of his blog is him yelling at the traditional publishing industry. That it
sells a lot of books is a happily encouraged byproduct.

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renegadedev
I hate articles like these for the sole reason that they go into a laundry
list of things to do or avoid. A few examples of blogs doing things the right
way would go a long way in educating us, instead of preaching.

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iamdave
_■Link to the homepage or landing page of your choice from within your
navigation bar. Home should link to your main site’s homepage, not your blog’s
index. Call that link within the navigation bar Blog instead._

Nailed. it. Agree 100%. So many times I've read a great blog post and wanted
to see more about the product and was stuck on the blog's index because "Home"
took me to the blog, and the masthead containing the product logo did the
same.

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ams6110
Here's what I think: there is no "top ten" things that will guarantee a
successful blog. It's mostly about the content, but every blog is different,
and will attract a community of followers (or not) based on a number of hard-
to-quantify attributes. I would just say, be yourself, and write about
interesting things.

Oh and if you think I'm going to follow, friend, like, or recommend a blog
that mostly about hawking a product, you're in dreamland.

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mhartl
I learned something really useful from this: I didn't know about MailChimp's
RSS-to-email service. Good tip!

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PStamatiou
None of those matter if your content is not good. Start there.

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sparknlaunch
> _"Blogging mistake #1: Not prominently linking to your main site

> Blogging mistake #2: Not integrating with social properties

> Blogging mistake #3: Making it harder to subscribe to, and regularly follow,
> your blog

> Blogging mistake #4: Only blogging about product announcements

> Blogging mistake #5: Hiding what your product is about"_

Agree in part to these but blogging and social media are overplayed. Building
and integrating all these elements, and building a sufficient & quality
following is tough work.

These tips certainly point novices in the right direction, but even doing
these well doesn't mean you will succeed - at blogging or at your startup.

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hoopism
Amen to overblown. I've seen many high paid persons who have made careers of
being C-Level bloggers... You'd better be tying some type of metrics to the
value of your blog to justify spending that much effort on it.

