What Does Your Company Blog About?

My startup is travel focused. And so naturally we blog (at http://blog.planitwide.com) on 2 topics:

a) Travel, which falls into a couple of categories:

i) Deep dives & reviews of quality travel resources and why someone should choose to use them in a specific (or sometimes broad) context

It's not hard to choose topic - we start with what we know & use - and that's a long list.

ii) Thought leadership on the travel space in general (which ties into why we exist in the first place).

These are the kinds of posts that (we believe) will eventually get us noticed and establish our credibility as people who know whtat they're talking about.

b) Startup Life Like every startup, there is a boatload of learning that happens. These are all perspectives that can benefit other people in the same boat.

Again, not hard to come up with topics, just see what you've learned trying to do xyz. Even (and especially) failure is valuable learning to share.

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2. Promoting content:

We promote on

a) Social Media: Twitter & Instagram (no bandwidth for more). Instagram is especially useful for showing behind the scenes stuff & sneek peaks at what's coming (which can then also be shared on Twitter - or other platforms) simultaneously.

b) Travel focused communities: /r/travel on Reddit & Outbounding.org. Being on here also involved mostly participating in discussions and building reputation. Our content promotion is an afterthought. People will discover it if they find it useful

c) Startup/tech focused communities: Hacker News, Inbound.org, Growthhackers.com, USVconversation.com. Again, same principle as other communities - don't talk about yourself most/all of the time. Build reputation first.

d) Medium: We cross post to collections we've created on Medium for additional exposure to the audience that comes there to read great content.

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3. Does blogging work?

Two things:

a) Rule of thumb is that if you're starting out, you're going to be blogging for near-zero audience for nearly 6 months. We've been at for 3-4 months and while we have some traffic, there's no real engagement (as expected) with our content yet in terms of shares/comments etc.

It all takes time and you have to stick with it.

b) Blogging doesn't necessarily mean you have to have a wordpress blog. It can mean you do it on Medium, or Tumblr or even as a video blog solely on youtube. It all depends on what your end goals are.

Hope that helps.

Link: http://www.additiveanalytics.com/blog/

How do I choose topics? I look over Google Scholar, Google News, PR sites, and government sites and find what seems interesting to me -- ideally stuff other people haven't written about. Then I write about that.

I promote the content via twitter (@addanalytics), LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook (totally worthless so far, maybe I am doing it wrong), sometimes Hacker News.

Does blogging work for your business? Yes, I've gotten some good leads via blogging. It has also improved my search engine rankings a bit although it's not magic.

Data, insights (about any popular topic), social analytics, and our own new product features. Recently wrote about Bitcoin, #AmazonCart, Google Glass.

http://blog.itrendcorporation.com

Why?

We are a startup, so any additional exposure is nice.

How do you choose topics?

Pretty much at random, but usually has to do with interesting data.

How do you promote your content?

post to Twitter, FB, LinkedIn.

Does blogging work for your business?

Still not clear. We do get meaningful traffic, but I suspect much of it is from techies trying to build analytics in-house.

We just decided to start blogging. We're aiming to build an audience with our customer base prior to launching v1 of our product.

Topics: We are aiming to choose topics that will provide insights, thoughts, and solutions that will add value to the day-to-day business happenings of our audience.

Promote: We have a mailing list of folks interested in the upcoming launch of Molo so we'll use that, Twitter, and news aggregators from our industry.

Does it Work: Hopefully, we have an advisor who is also doing B2B SaaS and he has found great value and good leads coming from the blogging he does. Only time will tell for us.

Check it out: http://about.g2crowd.com/blog Our site is also at http://g2crowd.com. (Might give you a better sense of what we're about.)