4 ms·
>Blog. If you make great content, people will read it and share it. This reminds me of a jwz quote, except I would rewrite it as such: Some people, when confr
by jere 13y ago
>Blog. If you make great content, people will read it and share it.
This reminds me of a jwz quote, except I would rewrite it as such:
Some people, when confronted with a marketing problem, think "I know, I'll blog about it." Now they have two marketing problems.
The whole premise of an article like this is that a great product won't draw in users by itself, but it's assumed that a great blog will draw in readers magically. I'm not saying you can't build a large readership. We've seen it done many times. But I'm skeptical that you have to do any less work than you would just to promote the product in the first place. The internet is filled with blogs that nobody reads... I'm writing one myself.
- bliti 13y agoOTOH, I know of tech startups growing like crazy without a blog, or public facing website. Content is great and all, but its not a magic bullet. Off-topic: The design of that blog. and the landing page feels weird. Doesn't really flow very well, and is hard to read.
- ivankirigin 13y agoYour comment is timely because I spent more time promoting this post than writing it. Compared to the last blog post on the blog, it got 100X the traction after ~3X the promotion effort. I completely agree actually. The relationship between frequency, quality, promotion, and traction on a blog is fascinating.
- ttunguz 13y agoIt's hard for me to make a justifiable comparison between product dev and content dev. There's just too much variability between the two. I do think a blog is a product and it requires the same level of distribution focus that another software product would. It requires a similar level of instrumentation and analysis.
- bliti 13y agoHow does a blog post gain traction? I thought traction was a term used to define an increase in sales numbers over a short period of time. Maybe you mean it drew in more traffic?
- ivankirigin 13y agoTweets, traffic, shares, comments. Mainly traffic though. Others have email subscription for future posts. It can get quite complex.
- grinnick 13y agoHow are you promoting the post? When I think of ways to promote blog posts I can only think of ideas which are quick (post to HN, tweet about it etc.). What are you doing differently?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pault 13y agoThis doesn't really answer your question specifically, but one helpful way to think about it is to invert your process. Most people create content and then try to find a traffic source for it. The most successful marketers I know find traffic sources and then create content for them.
- grinnick 13y agoThanks. That does resonate with me actually.
- lnanek2 13y agoJust getting on the front page of HN means he got 10k+ views from interested people in the right field for their product for the cost of a blog entry. Just a link to yesgraph.com probably would not have done that. It certainly wouldn't have done that more than once like a blog can. You can't really claim the blog was a bad idea when it just succeeded wildly.
- jere 13y ago>Just getting on the front page of HN means he got 10k+ views.... You can't really claim the blog was a bad idea when it just succeeded wildly. Ugh. I have no idea how you get such success with marketing (e.g. HN front page), beyond... wait for it... telling people how you were successful with marketing. If you're so lucky, more power to you. And for the record, I never said a blog was a bad idea.
- grinnick 13y agoThe problem is that the cost isn't just the time that it takes to write this one blog entry. You have to factor in the time it takes to write the blog entries which get very few views.