Common Blogging Mistakes Made by Startups | Hacker News Reader

Common Blogging Mistakes Made by Startups

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89 pointsacangiano39 comments

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!

... this is one of the main points I tried to get across when I spoke at the HN London event!

And exclusively because of your talk we changed our blog to http://www.hackerjobs.co.uk/blog

As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on having prominent 'Share This' features. Personally, they piss me off. I think they are ugly and I find them a bit 'needy'. If I think your content is worth sharing with my friends, I'll simply copy and paste the URL into Twitter so that I can append it with my own thoughts. I'm not interested in your company deciding what my tweet is going to say on my behalf.

The risk with having share boxes is that lots of zero's can look desperate/needy like you say. Getting them to look non-ugly is also sometimes challenging.

I agree with you that if someone it motivated to share they probably will, it's a difficult thing to test though.

I see where you are coming from, and it's certainly a choice up to the individual blogger. However, I wouldn't underestimate the laziness of the average visitor. Making it easier for them to share, definitely means more traffic.

For example, this article of mine has 1.2K Facebook Likes and 179 retweets: http://stacktrace.it/2012/01/07/10-consigli-per-interagire-c.... Of these, 400+ were made from the AddThis widget. It's hard to say how many would have bothered otherwise, but it'd probably be a smaller number.

Also keep in mind that they can act as social proof. Sure, a series of 0s look needy and desperate. But when you are good at promoting your content on your own, these counters may actually give people more confidence to share the content themselves.

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/

The link you are giving is 5 years old. But more importantly Matt Cutts says this which is not the same as what you are claiming (with support from that link):

"My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site."

"Personal preference" and "confident with the architecture" doesn't equal "less effective from an SEO standpoint".

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

Solid idea for sure.

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

Has anyone recently moved a blog from a subdomain to a directory and seen observable improvements in search traffic? I find this incredibly difficult to believe these days. Google can sniff out content farms, but somehow blog.domain.com vs domain.com/blog is a mystery? (Yes, I've read Matt Cutts' ancient and ambiguous post on the matter).

It's a matter of PR. A blog subdomain and the bare domain will have two different PR scores. The blog subdomain will receive links and that will add to its PR. If the blog is on the bare domain then PR transferred from links to the blog go to the bare domain. That gives you more PR for the bare domain than if you were to split the two out. It's a design decision in how they see separate domains.

I've heard the logic. What I'm looking for is evidence that it actually happens for blogs.

I don't see why it would apply any less for a blog than it would for other subdomains.

I think the reason is obvious - why would Google want to treat blogs differently because of something so trivial as subdomain vs directory?

I'll buy that it may be a challenge to determine which subdomains should be treated as part of the main domain and which should be considered separate. BUT you can make exactly the same argument for directories (or pages for that matter). In the end, the selection is meaningless - either the site is meant to be an extension of the main domain or it's not. Figuring out which is which is an exercise in determining relevance. And given that Google has spent an obscene amount of effort on that very problem over the last couple years, I think it's reasonable to assume they've got this one licked.

But I really wish someone had some data. Or even an anecdote. Because I could be totally overestimating Google's sophistication.

I'm not aware of any specific case-study evidence, but in general, free wordpress/blogspot/tumblr etc do not outrank self-hosted blogs just because they are a subdomain of the highly valued domain like wordpress.com. (Of course, maybe it's just because the root domain doesn't link out to those random blogs in the way that a self-hosted site and subdomain would.)

Wait, do people still bother with PageRank these days?

Are you sure about the subdomain thing? I hear conflicting opinions on that. Thought google actually evened it out.

I vaguely remember reading that subdomains being inferior is no longer the case. The Matt Cutts post is from 5 years ago, can't find anything more recent than that, but this post discusses it.

http://www.whitefireseo.com/site-architecture/subdomain-or-s...

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

"they take what's already inside your company/brain/startup"

I agree.

There are actually valid reasons why companies want to keep information on themselves non-public to not give tips to the competition. Much of this has disappeared on the internet with the general openness. But only some of the rules of business have been re-written, not all of them. Of course if you want to release disinformation that the competition reads that has value, but obviously takes a bit of effort to be done correctly.

Walt Disney assembled Walt Disney World in Florida by setting up all sorts of intermediaries and even flying through various small airports so as not to tip off competition. He went to a great deal of trouble to keep his plans private (and of course there is Apple secrecy as well).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Resort

I think another way of looking at this is to realize that if you are going to blog you must be intentional about it; you need to understand:

1) This is why we are blogging - including understanding the intended audience

2) This is who will be responsible for blogging - how much time and energy will be put into it by which team members

3) This is how we will measure the effectiveness of our blog

And then be prepared to iterate on those points. I've seen too many startup blogs with a few[1] posts from the early days, clearly with the best intentions, but then a silence that makes you wonder whether they still exist - better they never blogged.

[1] http://xkcd.org/1070/

For us blogging has been core to helping build a relationship with our customers, as well as brand awareness and recognition. It's not just something we do when we're bored.

"spend about a week trying to understand your customers needs and figuring out how to better serve them"

Effective blogging is one of the ways to do this. The point is not about blogging just for the sake of bloggin. Point is about spreading word about your startup, sharing your experiences, how you do things etc. These things will always intrigue a potential customer or well wishers of your startup.

I disagree as well. I agree with what you say in the last sentence, but I do not think too much time spent on blogs is anywhere near the most common blogging mistake made by startups.

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.

But your blog is (or should be) one way to have a conversation with customer (or potential customers, at least). Blogs aren't just for pushing stuff out, there should be a measure of interaction as well. Ideally, a blog post should spark a discussion...

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.

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.

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

#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.

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.

■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.

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.

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

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

> "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.

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.

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