One of the greatest challenges as a startup is nobody really likes being the dedicated PR person of the organisation. Often a startup company is formed by someone who is business minded or with a technical or creative background, very rarely does any one of them enjoy writing as a start. However, one of the most critical things, also probably the most reason why most startups fail is marketing. Everyone is so heavily focused about the product or the idea rather than how it should be marketed. Sitting through lengthy discussions on how to improve the user flow and the over all user experience. There are huge discussions about what competitors are allowing users to do and how we can better improve the offering.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that user experience and interface is not important. It is. In fact, it is probably amongst the most important things that one needs to think about when moving forward with an idea. But, if nobody knows about the product or service, what use is a good interface and experience?

This is when a blog comes in handy. Let’s go on a reverse engineering model to understand what I mean.

The ultimate aim is to have people looking for your product, it would be best if it was by its name. But that is not going to happen for your product or service from day one. Hence, you need to make people aware of your existence and the service your product is associated with. The best people to help you do this would of course be your existing users. So, what you need to do is to get people to spread the word about your product or service. For this to happen you need a natural user experience or flow. Nobody is going to break their usual chain of actions to help promote your product for nothing. They will probably only do it if they are incentivised OR if it comes in their natural flow.

But how do these people know about your product in the first place? Well you can have some massive awareness campaign that consists of search engine marketing (SEM), Display advertising (banner ads and such) and finally even social media marketing (SMM). Having said that, all of these advertisements cost money. It could start small, but it would probably add up to be more than just a few thousand dollars per year.

So now the question is, what else can you do to ensure you continue to get people visiting your website after the paid campaign has ended? The answer would be to have a good, search engine optimised, website that helps you sell your product or service with you having to spend heaps of money on marketing over a long period of time. The best place to start would be a blog.

Having fresh content on your website is definitely a good thing. Having interesting topics that you or anyone in your organisation can write about would surely increase the chances of the article actually being shared by a reader. As you start writing more articles, your blog gets more interesting, as it gets more interesting, it gets a larger viewership. Google likes that and will start listing you higher in search results. People love it and they end up sharing it on their social media channels. With the blog you are not only allowing people an opportunity to visit your website while they read your blog, you are also associating yourself and your product or service with the article you are writing about. For example, a baker would not always write about cars and expect it to generate leads for his bakery.

To make your article more successful, research some keywords and figure out what people are searching for. Start getting acquainted with the Google adwords keyword planner tool. With this tool, you get a good idea of what people are searching for as you decide on what you want to write for your blog article. Adding phrases of relevance to more frequently searched phrases will definitely work in your favour.

As you write the article, think about the actual situation you have faced and what you are doing about it. A good article consists of the following parts :

  • A possible situation which you have faced which you feel others may face as well.
  • An introduction to what you are going to write about
  • The actual solution
  • A closing statement or summary

Once you are done with the article, get a fellow staff member to read it and edit its contents to make it grammatically correct.

The bottom line is, nobody is going to search for your product or service unless they know about it. To make them aware about it, you need to ensure you portray yourself as someone they can trust when thinking about the possible solutions to their problems. A blog article can help you do this. So go on, start writing your blog. You know you will need it someday. Hopefully, that someday is soon.