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I work at a lot of startups, and these days more and more are building tech blogs. With titles like labs or engineering at acme inc, these can be great ways to build your brand, and bring in strong talent.
So how do we make them succeed? It turns out many of the techniques that work for other blogs apply here, and regular attention can yield big gains.
1. Am I using snappy headlines?
Like it or not we live in a news world dominated by sites like Upworthy, Business Insider, Gawker & Huffpo. Ryan Holiday gained fame using a gonzo style as director of marketing at American Apparel. Ryan argues that old-style yellow journalism is back with a vengence.
Click bait asside, you *do* still need to write headlines that will click. What works often is for your title to be a little sound bite, encapsulating the gist of your post, but leaving enough hook that people need to click. Don’t be afraid to push the envelope a bit.
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2. Line up those share buttons & feedburner
Of course you want to make the posts easy as hell to share. Cross posting on twitter, linkedin, facebook and whereever else your audience hangs out is a must. Use tools like hootsuite & buffer to line up a pipeline of content, and try different titles to see which are working.
You’ll also want to enable feedburner. Some folks will add your blog to feedly. Subscriber counts there can be a good indication of how it is growing in popularity too.
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3. Watch & listen to google analytics
You’re going to keep an eye on traffic by installing a beacon into your page header. There are lots of solutions, GA being the obvious one because it’s free. But how to use it?
Ask yourself questions. Who are my readers? Where are they coming from? How long do they spend on average? Do some pages spur readers to read more? Is there copy that works better for readers? Are my readers converting?
It’ll take time if you’re new to the tool, but start with questions like those.
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4. Optimize your SEO a little bit
Although you don’t want to go overboard here, you do want to pay some attention. Using keyword rich titles, and < h2 > tags, along with wordpress SEO plugins that support other meta html tags means you’ll be speaking the language search engines understand. Add tags & categories that are relevant to your content.
Don’t overdo it though. Stick to a handful of tags per post. If you add zillions with lots of word order combinations & so forth, this kind of stuff may tip of the search engines in ways that work against you.
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5. Search for untapped keywords
When I first started getting serious about blogging, I had an intern helping me with SEO. She did some searching with the moz keyword research tools and found some gems. These are searches that internet users are doing, but for which there still is not great content for.
For example if results showed “cool tech startups in gowanus brooklyn” had no strong results, then writing an article that covered this topic would be a winner right away.
These are big opportunities, because it means if you write directly for that search, you’ll rank highly for all those readers, and quickly grow traffic.
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