Comment by acangiano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acangiano | Hacker News Reader

The 5 most common mistakes I see startup doing with their company blogs:

* Not linking prominently to their main site. (rdl is right on the money.)

* Using Google AdSense or similar programs on their blog. Sending away prospective customers for pennies is far from a good plan.

* No calls to action. Insightful articles are nice, but you need to lead the reader to take action, whether it's signing up for your newsletter, RSS feed, checking out your main site, a particular product, simply get in touch to say hi, or something else.

* Targeting the wrong audience. If you are blogging for customer acquisition, you need to answer the questions your customer base has. Blog about the information they are after. BTW, your audience is not everybody. Your audience is a specific, narrow group of people.

* Failing to promote their posts. Build it and they will come doesn't work in the blogging world.

I'm the author of TFA. The fourth item you mentioned (targeting the wrong audience) is important, but I would add that sometimes you need to target different audiences with different content that has nothing to do with attracting users or converting customers. For instance, I've seen companies big and small writing posts that target developers or experts in some field (who you may need to hire in a few months' time). There may also be utility in writing posts that target the competition -- I've seen companies that have blogged about taking legal action against someone or filing for IP, which could be signals to other companies to watch out (or we'll come after you) or don't bother trying to compete (because you'll have to engineer around our IP).

In terms of your point about calls to action, I feel that insightful posts aren't just "nice," if they are truly informative or useful to the reader the CTA should be obvious -- this is the kind of company I want to find out more about, or I am going to follow the company/author on twitter. But that also ties into your first point -- make sure readers can take that action on their own by linking to the main site/Twitter feed/etc.

> I would add that sometimes you need to target different audiences with different content that has nothing to do with attracting users or converting customers.

Absolutely. You could for example have posts aimed at recruiting talent. The key is targeted blogging, instead of posting randomly (which many startups do).

Good advice. I'm currently looking into starting a blog to give insight to our company, your comment would be a great addition to this guys blog post though.

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