4 ms·

What are peoples' thoughts on the marketing effectiveness of quality relative to quantity in blogging? We have recently started publishing what we consider to b

by foob 9y ago

What are peoples' thoughts on the marketing effectiveness of quality relative to quantity in blogging? We have recently started publishing what we consider to be very high quality material (the majority of them have front-paged on HN if that's any indication). Most of these have been published on [1] so far but we're in the process of transitioning to a more official company blog [2]. A close friend who really knows his way around marketing has been advising us to write more fluff pieces. We're really torn over this because we strongly dislike vapid content as consumers. I would be really curious to hear any anecdotes on the relative merits of the different strategies. [1] - http://sangaline.com http://sangaline.com [2] - https://intoli.com/blog/ https://intoli.com/blog/

dfcowell 9y ago
The answer to this depends entirely upon who you're trying to reach with your tech-blog-as-marketing approach. If it's primarily recruitment-oriented marketing, or you're marketing a tech product (apologies, I haven't checked the link - but it's not relevant for this general advice). If it's recruitment-focused or you're a tech provider marketing to technical customers quality is probably more important. The intended audience is educated enough to spot and dismiss fluff outright and anyone that doesn't isn't a recruit or customer you want. If your goal is marketing to non-technical people who buy your product a technical blog is probably irrelevant at best and potentially destructive at worst. If the customer is non-technical and doesn't understand the material you present publicly, they may be scared off. Fluff pieces that demonstrate knowledge with lots of buzzwords that appeal to middle-upper management will be more effective with this audience.
- foob 9y ago
  Thanks, that meshes well with my thoughts on it. We're less concerned with hiring right now than with acquiring more clients, but our customers are generally developers at small to medium sized startups. We fall into that category ourselves so we've felt like things that would appeal to us would also appeal to our customers (and vice versa).
  - brightball 9y ago
    See Codeship's blog for a consistently published tech blog for a product targeted to a tech audience. They do a really good job with it. https://blog.codeship.com/ https://blog.codeship.com/ Disclosure: I periodically write for Codeship.
    - dfcowell 9y ago
      As an unfortunately ex-codeship user, I can vouch for this - and for the quality of their product/support.
    - cconstantin 9y ago
      The blog seems to be down at the moment
AznHisoka 9y ago
Do both. Put your really impactful content in your blog and your fluff pieces into its own section/knowledge base. (stuff people will probably search for but wont share). People who find your blog will just see the impactful stuff and will want to subscribe.
pryelluw 9y ago
Who buys your product? Blog with them in mind. If you are not selling to engineers, fluff typically works best.
ontouchstart 9y ago
From marketing standpoint, you might want to study the sharing pattern of your readers. Some people are excited about headlines and link baits. These people also have short and shallow attention. Some people like deep domain specific information. They might be your target audience. You want your messages to reach the right audience organically.
ontouchstart 9y ago
BTW, I am a kind of reader who is interested in meta stories, i.e., stories behind the stories. Following you blog and I find the meta link on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sangaline.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sangaline.com It would be interesting to do some graph analysis on it.
- foob 9y ago
  Awesome, I really love meta-analyses too! Our product involves web scraping so it's a natural fit to write articles about scraping and analyzing data in general. A few of our articles so far [1,2,3] would probably be classified as meta-analyses and we have some more in the pipeline! Feel free to sign up for the newsletter in the footer of http://intoli.com http://intoli.com if you would like to read those articles after they're published :-). [1] http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm/ http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-new... [2] http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/ http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-remov... [3] http://sangaline.com/post/wayback-machine-scraper/ http://sangaline.com/post/wayback-machine-scraper/
  - ontouchstart 9y ago
    Perhaps you can use web scraping to build bots to read and classify these tech blogs. I am sure the API to these metadata graphs will have strategic values to VC, recruiters, tech consultants, etc.
gk1 9y ago
Evan, I wrote something recently that might be helpful: http://www.gkogan.co/blog/software-companys-blog-not-journal/ http://www.gkogan.co/blog/software-companys-blog-not-journal...

by foob 9y ago

dfcowell 9y ago

The answer to this depends entirely upon who you're trying to reach with your tech-blog-as-marketing approach. If it's primarily recruitment-oriented marketing, or you're marketing a tech product (apologies, I haven't checked the link - but it's not relevant for this general advice). If it's recruitment-focused or you're a tech provider marketing to technical customers quality is probably more important. The intended audience is educated enough to spot and dismiss fluff outright and anyone that doesn't isn't a recruit or customer you want. If your goal is marketing to non-technical people who buy your product a technical blog is probably irrelevant at best and potentially destructive at worst. If the customer is non-technical and doesn't understand the material you present publicly, they may be scared off. Fluff pieces that demonstrate knowledge with lots of buzzwords that appeal to middle-upper management will be more effective with this audience.

foob 9y ago
Thanks, that meshes well with my thoughts on it. We're less concerned with hiring right now than with acquiring more clients, but our customers are generally developers at small to medium sized startups. We fall into that category ourselves so we've felt like things that would appeal to us would also appeal to our customers (and vice versa).
- brightball 9y ago
  See Codeship's blog for a consistently published tech blog for a product targeted to a tech audience. They do a really good job with it. https://blog.codeship.com/ https://blog.codeship.com/ Disclosure: I periodically write for Codeship.
  - dfcowell 9y ago
    As an unfortunately ex-codeship user, I can vouch for this - and for the quality of their product/support.
  - cconstantin 9y ago
    The blog seems to be down at the moment

AznHisoka 9y ago

Do both. Put your really impactful content in your blog and your fluff pieces into its own section/knowledge base. (stuff people will probably search for but wont share). People who find your blog will just see the impactful stuff and will want to subscribe.

pryelluw 9y ago

Who buys your product? Blog with them in mind. If you are not selling to engineers, fluff typically works best.

ontouchstart 9y ago

From marketing standpoint, you might want to study the sharing pattern of your readers. Some people are excited about headlines and link baits. These people also have short and shallow attention. Some people like deep domain specific information. They might be your target audience. You want your messages to reach the right audience organically.

ontouchstart 9y ago

BTW, I am a kind of reader who is interested in meta stories, i.e., stories behind the stories. Following you blog and I find the meta link on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sangaline.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sangaline.com It would be interesting to do some graph analysis on it.

foob 9y ago
Awesome, I really love meta-analyses too! Our product involves web scraping so it's a natural fit to write articles about scraping and analyzing data in general. A few of our articles so far [1,2,3] would probably be classified as meta-analyses and we have some more in the pipeline! Feel free to sign up for the newsletter in the footer of http://intoli.com http://intoli.com if you would like to read those articles after they're published :-). [1] http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm/ http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-new... [2] http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/ http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-remov... [3] http://sangaline.com/post/wayback-machine-scraper/ http://sangaline.com/post/wayback-machine-scraper/
- ontouchstart 9y ago
  Perhaps you can use web scraping to build bots to read and classify these tech blogs. I am sure the API to these metadata graphs will have strategic values to VC, recruiters, tech consultants, etc.

gk1 9y ago

Evan, I wrote something recently that might be helpful: http://www.gkogan.co/blog/software-companys-blog-not-journal/ http://www.gkogan.co/blog/software-companys-blog-not-journal...