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Common Blogging Mistakes Made by Startups
- TomGullen 14y agoHad 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 http://blog.example.com is inferior to http://example.com/blog 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!
- Peroni 14y ago... 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 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.
- TomGullen 14y agoThe 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.
- acangiano 14y agoI 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-con-il-proprio-geek-di-famiglia/ 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.
- acangiano 14y agoIn 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/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
- larrys 14y agoThe 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".
- TomGullen 14y agoWebsite 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
- acangiano 14y agoSolid idea for sure.
- damoncali 14y agoAnother important one to add is not to host your blog on a subdomain for SEO. http://blog.example.com http://blog.example.com is inferior to http://example.com/blog 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).
- coderdude 14y agoIt'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.
- deanpcmad 14y agoWait, do people still bother with PageRank these days?
- damoncali 14y agoI've heard the logic. What I'm looking for is evidence that it actually happens for blogs.
- coderdude 14y agoI don't see why it would apply any less for a blog than it would for other subdomains.
- damoncali 14y agoI 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.
- ThomPete 14y agoAre you sure about the subdomain thing? I hear conflicting opinions on that. Thought google actually evened it out.
- analog 14y agoI 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-subfolder-post-panda/360/ http://www.whitefireseo.com/site-architecture/subdomain-or-s...
- philwelch 14y agoThe 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.
- acangiano 14y agoI 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".
- philwelch 14y agoBlogs 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.
- njx 14y agoI 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.
- philwelch 14y agoWell yeah, link-building and tweeting are also low-priority tasks compared to better understanding your customers and building something they want to pay for.
- SeoxyS 14y agoThat'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.
- jarrettcoggin 14y agoI 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.
- Goladus 14y agoYeah. Point #4 should be point #1 and titled "blogging boring, useless, or poorly-written content."
- sparknlaunch 14y ago> "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.
- hoopism 14y agoAmen 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.
- mkr-hn 14y ago#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/ 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.
- renegadedev 14y agoI 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.
- mhartl 14y agoI learned something really useful from this: I didn't know about MailChimp's RSS-to-email service. Good tip!
- PStamatiou 14y agoNone of those matter if your content is not good. Start there.
- iamdave 14y ago■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.
- ams6110 14y agoHere'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.