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| Why Startups Need to Blog (and what to talk about …) | Top |
| Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster ( @msuster ), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners . Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable Blogs. We all read them to get a sense of what is going on in the world, peeling back layers of the old world in which media was too scripted. By definition, if you are reading this you read blogs. But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? Absolutely. This is a post to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about. 1. Why If you care about accessing customers, reaching an audience, communicating your vision, influencing people in your industry, marketing your services or just plain engaging in a dialog with others in your industry a blog is a great way to achieve this. People often ask me why I started blogging. It really started simply enough. I was meeting regularly with entrepreneurs and offering (for better or for worse) advice on how to run a startup and how to raise venture capital from my experience in doing so at two companies. I was having the same conversations over-and-over again ( JFDI , Don’t Roll Out the Red Carpet when Employees are on the Way Out the Door , Don’t Drink Your Own Kool Aid , etc) and I figured I might as well just write them up and make them available for future people who might be interested. I never really expected a big audience or ever thought about it. I had been reading Brad Feld’s blog & Fred Wilson’s blog for a couple of years and found them very helpful to my thinking so I honestly just thought I was giving back to the community. The results have been both unexpected and astounding. Within 2 years I was getting 400,000 views / month and had been voted the 2nd most respected VC in the country by an independent survey of entrepreneurs, The Funded and sentiment analysis . I know that I have not yet earned these kudos based on investment returns (although my partners have. GRP Partners last fund is the single best performing VC fund in the US (prequin data) for its vintage year). But it speaks volumes to what people want from our industry: transparency accessibility authenticity thought leadership advice I’ll bet your customers, business partners or suppliers would love similar. 2. What I often get the question from people, “I’d like to blog, but I don’t really know what to talk about?” Or “I’m a new entrepreneur, why would I offer advice on how to run a startup?” You wouldn’t. You shouldn’t. Not only would it be less authentic but if you’re a startup it’s not immediately clear that other startup CEOs are your target market. They’re mine because I’m a VC. I care about having a steady stream of talented startup people who want to raise money thinking that they should talk to me in addition to the top others whom they’re targeting. Whom do you want to target? Who are your customers, partners or suppliers? My suggestion is to blog about your industry. Think Mint.com. In their early days they had an enormously effective blog on the topic of personal financial management . They created a reason for their customers to aggregate on their site on a regular basis. They became both a thought leader in the space as well as a beautifully designed product. They created inbound link juice on topics that drove more traffic to their site. Type “personal financial management” into Google. Mint.com is the second result. Smart. Think Magento. They are an open-source & SaaS provider of eCommerce solutions . They are the fastest growing player in the world in this space. They achieved all of this before they raised even a penny of venture capital. eCommerce is an enormously competitive search term. Yet type it into Google and the third result (behind the Wikipedia entry and ecommerce.com ) is Magento. Magic. They did it by creating a blog, discussion board and hub for eCommerce advice and information. So you developed a product for the mommy community? Blog on that topic. Do you have an application that helps mobile developers build HTML5 apps? You know your blog topic. Do you have sales productivity software? Obvious. Check out SalesCrunch posts . Blog to your community. Be a thought leader. Don’t blog to your friend (that might be a separate Tumblog or something) but blog to your community. If you’re going to pump out regular content that is meaningful, you obviously need to blog about a topic in which you’re knowledgeable, thoughtful and passionate. If you’re not all three of these things in your industry then I guess you’ve got a broader problem. Honestly. So my biggest recommendation of “what” to blog is a series of articles that will be helpful to your community. If you’re a lawyer, blog on a topic that would be helpful to potential customers. Show that you’re a thought leader. Scott Edward Walker does an excellent job at this. It’s the only reason I know who he is. I had seen his blog & his Tweets and then was interested to meet him IRL. Do a brainstorming session and create a list of 40-50 topics that interest you. Write out the topic and maybe even the blog title. Keep the list electronically. . Struggling to come up with enough topics? Take one topic and break it up into 10 bite-sized articles. It’s probably better that way anyways. I wanted to write about the top 10 attributes of an entrepreneur. I wrote it all in one sitting and then broke it up into 10 separate posts . It kept me busy for 3 weeks! Each one ended up taking on a life of its own as the comments flowed in for post 1 I had more thoughts to add to post 2 and so on. 3. Where You need a blog. Duh. If you’re a company and if hanging it off of your company website makes sense for the link traffic – go for it. If you’re head of marketing at a company and keeping a more generalized blog (in addition to your company blog) so that you can influence brands & agencies – it can be separate. I chose for my blog to be independent of my firm, GRP Partners. The reason is that I wanted to be free to say what I was thinking independently of my partners. My views don’t always represent theirs and vice-versa even though we’re pretty like-minded (we’ve worked together for 10+ years). I chose a title that represented a brand that I wanted to emphasize – Both Sides of the Table. I chose it because I thought it would represent who I am – mostly an entrepreneur but somebody with investment chops. I wanted to differentiate. So. People keep asking me, “why would you write on TechCrunch?” I guess I would have thought it was obvious. Apparently not. People say, “aren’t you driving traffic away from your own blog?” Facts: I don’t really care about total page views or uniques other than as a measure of whether I’m improving. I don’t sell ads. I DO care about “share of mind,” which means that I want fish in the pond where the people whom I want to speak with hang out. I know a certain number hit my blog. But I’m not so arrogant (or successful) as to think they come all the time. So I take my show on the road. If I can write about a topic for which I’m passionate about and double or triple the number of people who read it – that’s gold dust. That’s why I never stopped anybody from taking my feed and republishing. As it happens, since I began writing at TechCrunch my viewership has continued to go up, not down. I always publish on my own blog the day after it runs on TC. I want the historical post there. A large number of readers on my site get it from Feedburner or newsletter feed. I also get a lot of inbound links from writing here. I try to make any inbound links to my blog authentic to the story. But each story has driven 1,000′s of views. The majority of my traffic still comes from Twitter. TC posts = more Twitter followers = more conversion when I do write on my own blog = more Feedburner / newsletter subs = more traffic. It’s an ecosystem. Simple. So once you have a blog, a voice and a small following – don’t be shy about writing some guest posts for target blogs. Remember – for you that’s likely not TC – it’s the place your community hangs out. 4. How Be authentic. Don’t try to sound too smart or too funny. Just be yourself. People will see who you are in your words. If you try to make everything too perfect you’ll never hit publish. If you try to sound too intelligent you’ll likely be boring as shit. Most blogs are. I hate reading blow hards who try to sound like they’re smarter than the rest of us. Be open and transparent. Get inside your reader’s minds. Try to think about what they would want to know from you. In fact, ask them! Don’t be offensive – it’s never worth it to offend great masses of people. But that doesn’t mean sitting on the fence. I have a point of view and I’m sure sometimes it rankles. But I try to be respectful about it. Sitting on the fence on all issues is also pretty boring. And don’t blog drunk. Or at least don’t hit publish ;-) Mostly, have fun. If you can’t do that you won’t last very long. How do I get started? First, you’ll need a platform. I use WordPress . Some people swear by SquareSpace . There are the new tools like Tumblr and Posterous . I’ve played with both and they’re pretty cool. They’re more light weight and easier to use. Importantly, they’re more social. It’s much easier to build an audience in social blogging platforms the way you do in Twitter or Facebook. T hen you need to decide whether to use the “hosted” version or the “installed” version. At least that’s true in WordPress. The advantage of the hosted version is that it’s easier to get started. The disadvantage is that you can’t install a lot of additional tools that use Javascript. I started with the hosted version and then migrated to an installed version so I could use Google Analytics and some other products. You then need a URL. It’s true you can be something like msuster.typepad.com but that’s kind of lame so I wouldn’t recommend it. Just get a real URL. I think it’s important to think about what image you want to portray when you pick your URL name. It doesn’t need to be short. You’re not trying to build a consumer website. My website is a pretty long URL but people manage to find it. Much of my traffic is through referring websites and/or social media. Some search. What are YOU trying to convey? What will be your unique positioning? Don’t just write a carbon copy of what somebody else is doing. That’s boring. So I wrote a post, now what? Don’t blow your load on your first post. Slice it up enough to do many posts. I think most blogs are between 600-1000 words / post. Once you’re written a few posts don’t try to make the flood gates open at once. Slowly build your audience. Make it organic. If you write good content and consistently you’ll build an audience over time. The number one thing that kills 95% of blogs is that they do 5 or 6 posts in rapid succession and then peter out. It’s lame to go to a blog where this happens. And then 8 months later they do the obligatory post saying, “OK, I’m going to be more committed to blogging now!” and then another 4 months go by. If you’re really not going to write that often at least don’t put dates on your posts. But if you write good stuff, but in an effort and keep going – it’s a marathon – you will see results over time. How do I build an audience? If you build it, will they come? No. A blog post is just like a product. First it needs to be good. And then you need to market it. It doesn’t just happen. You should be subtle about how you market it, but market it nonetheless. If you’re too squeamish to ask for help in promoting it or to do so yourself then you’ll never build an audience (you’ll also likely not make it as an entrepreneur. Sorry. But that’s true.) The obvious starting point is to email a few friends and let them know you have a new blog. Don’t be overbearing – just an email saying, “wanted to let you know about my new blog.” I also recommend you put a link to it under your email signature (in a color other than black). You also should have it be what your Twitter bio links to. Every time I | |
| What Bill Gates Could Learn from Chris Rock | Top |
| Editor's note : The following guest post is by bestselling author and former venture capitalist Peter Sims . His next book is Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries . He can be found on Twitter @petersims. In his recent article on TechCrunch, " Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who's Right—Bill or Steve? ," Vivek Wadhwa sparked a national debate about education that raises important questions for us all. If you haven't read the article yet, Wadhwa , a professor at Berkeley and Duke University, surveyed 652 chief executive officers and heads of product engineering at 502 U.S. technology companies and found that only 37% held engineering or computer technology degrees, and just 2% held mathematics degrees. The rest had a wide range of degrees, from business to the humanities. Yet in industry and education circles, STEM – teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – has gained cult-like status as the primary solution to our national innovation challenges. Earlier this year, President Obama announced a $250 million public-private initiative to recruit and train 10,000 more STEM teachers. Bill Gates is one of the leading proponents of STEM while, as Wadhwa notes, implying that other educational investments, such as the liberal arts, should be curtailed. But while investment in STEM is critical, it alone neglects the development of the types of skills that actually lead to discovery, creativity, and innovation. So, for instance, when comedian Chris Rock performs on HBO, the work is widely considered brilliantly creative, yet his routines, as with all stand-up comedians, are the output of what he has learned from thousands of little bets in small clubs, nearly all of which initially fail. (As Stanford Professor Bob Sutton notes, writers for The Onion , known for its hilarious headlines, propose roughly six hundred possibilities for eighteen headlines each week, a 3 percent success rate.) Rock must persistently tinker using an iterative approach to discover and develop fresh material. And the cycle repeats, day in, day out. Similarly, as I described in my last TC guest post , despite the myths, most successful entrepreneurs don't begin with brilliant ideas, they discover them. It's an approach that can be learned and taught, but rarely is in today's schools. That's because our educational system emphasizes spoon-feeding us knowledge, such as scientific tables or historical information, and then testing us in order to measure how much we've retained about that body of knowledge, rather than teaching us how to create knowledge . Utilizing existing knowledge works perfectly well for many situations, but not when doing something new, creative, or original. We are given very little opportunity, for instance, to perform our own original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are judged primarily on getting answers right. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own. This must change. In an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think, Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, surveyed over three thousand executives and interviewed five hundred people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products, including the likes of Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and VMware's Diane Greene. They found several "discovery skills" that distinguished the innovators from the non-innovators, including experimenting, observing, questioning, and networking with people from diverse backgrounds. As Gregersen summed up their findings: "You might summarize all of the skills we've noted in one word: 'inquisitiveness.'" When Barbara Walters interviewed Larry Page and Sergei Brin , rather than crediting their computer science degrees as the driving factor behind their success, they pointed to their early Montessori education. (The Montessori learning method, founded by Maria Montessori, emphasizes self-directed learning, tinkering, and discovery, particularly for young children.) "We both went to Montessori school," Page said, "And I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what's going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently." These findings raise critical questions for us all. Specifically, what is the purpose of education? Is it to convey knowledge, as the current system is weighted, or it to inspire and nurture the ability to constantly learn? Even though it's too late for most of us to attend Montessori, we can change the way we've been trained to think. That begins in small, achievable ways, with increased experimentation and inquisitiveness. Those who work with Jeff Bezos, for example, find his ability to ask "why not?" or "what if?" as much as "why?" to be one of his most advantageous qualities. That's why, borrowing a phrase from Ryan Jacoby , an associate partner at IDEO : questions are the new answers. | |
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