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)
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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"?
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)