Great article today on Inc.com about Joel Spolsky, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software, on why his blog was so successful. According to Joel your blog must be about something that is much larger than your company. No one wants to know about the day to day activity that goes on inside the company. They want information that is interesting to them. If people learn something useful while being at your website they will come back for more.
The ability to draw people back time after time is as crucial to your blog as it is to your company. You want repeat customers. They take less work than winning over new customers and they come with an inherent loyalty and a tendency to refer or link your website.
These days, it seems like just about every start-up founder has a blog, and 99 percent of these bloggers are doing it wrong. The problem? They make the blog about themselves, filling it with posts announcing new hires, touting new products, and sharing pictures from the company picnic. That’s lovely, darling — I’m sure your mom cares. Too bad nobody else does. Most company blogs have almost no readers, no traffic, and no impact on sales. Over time, the updates become few and far between (especially if responsibility for the blog is shared among several staff members), and the whole thing ceases to become an important source of leads or traffic.
There were far fewer blogs when I set up mine, Joel on Software, 10 years ago (even before I started my company). The site quickly became a popular hub for programmers who wanted to discuss all sorts of things — how to write elegant code, how to deal with unreasonable deadlines, how to get paid more. As the blog grew — eventually, it surpassed one million unique visitors a month in traffic — it also drove interest in my start-up, Fog Creek Software, and our products.
So, what’s the formula for a blog that actually generates leads, sales, and business success? I didn’t even understand it myself until last year at the Business of Software conference, when one of the speakers, a well-known game developer and author named Kathy Sierra, blew me away with an incredibly simple idea that explains why my blog successfully promoted my company while so many other blogging founders foundered.
To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you’re using a blog to promote a business, that blog can’t be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.
Key term is to make the blog about the readers and not about you. The same goes for creating powerful SEO. If you want Google or other search engines to find your website you need to provide useful content that your readers will enjoy.
