Blogging Skills You Need For Your Startup

Yes, your startup still needs a blog. To build a successful one, here are the blogging skills you'll need to develop or hire for...

Blogging For Startups

Blogging isn't new, but it can be one of the best tools at the disposal of today's startups. It is in fact one of the most scalable strategies to develop an organic self-sustained distribution channel for your business, and one of the most recommended initiatives by some of the best startup accelerators.

This can be an efficient and highly cost-effective way to accomplish many goals for lean startups, as well as a way for funded startups to establish a major competitive edge in their industries.

A blog can make your startup. On the Dealmakers Podcast, more than one highly successful startup entrepreneur has credited a single blog post with enabling them to attract investors and get funded. This hack alone can be worth many millions of dollars for those that need capital.

Blogs have also proven to have immense value by themselves. In many cases, they become the most valuable asset a business owns. Some have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

The SEO benefits of blogging can go a long way in getting seen by various types of search engines, and gaining the visibility your startup needs to attract investors and customers.

This is also a powerful sales tool. One that can be used for educating customers, positioning, building relationships, staying top of mind, and converting readers into paying customers.

Don't underestimate the power and value of blogging.

The Blogging Skills You Need For Your Startup

So, what do you need to build a brilliant blog that can deliver on your goals?

Writing

Blogging is about the text. It is writing driven. That doesn't mean that you as the founder have to spend time writing blogs every week. In fact, you shouldn't.

If you are a very talented writer, then you may wish to author the occasional post yourself. Yet, despite how valuable blogging is, this isn't going to be the highest and best use of your time as a founder and CEO. You'll probably need to devote a substantial amount of your time in the early days to hiring and driving fundraising efforts. The best returns on your time are going to come from driving sales and partnerships and expansion. You really can't afford to spend time on less than the highest value tasks. Not if you are going to remain competitive.

So, you'll need to hire a great blogger and copywriter. This can be full time or part-time. Many hire project managers or CMOs to manage this division, and end up with a whole team of writers.

If you have specific things you want to convey, you can provide your team with bullet points and even recorded audio clips of what they should include.

The number one thing here is quality. Writing isn't something to skimp on. If you can't afford to do it well, you can't afford to do it poorly. That will just be counterproductive.

Multimedia Design

It's no secret that everyone absorbs content in different ways today. Or, that Google seems to love content that is rich in different types of media.

Adding audio, images, and video to your content can all help amplify results and multiply the returns on your content marketing and blogging efforts.

Having an affordable graphic designer and video editor on hand can help with repurposing your text content into these different formats and generating original multi-media content that is inclusive for all types of people in your audience.

Keyword Research

If you are blogging for SEO benefits you need to know that search engine optimization is mainly driven by keywords. These keywords will also help optimize the costs and ROI of any PPC ads you are running as well (i.e. Facebook and Google Ads).

There are two important things to remember about keyword research that most overlook and fail on. The first is that this isn't a set it and forget it task. The best keywords are constantly changing. This research should be updated at least monthly - with the best blogging incorporating the best keywords in real-time.

The second is that keywords must be relevant and have commercial value. The number one mistake made here is outsourcing keyword research to agencies that don't understand your domain and end up ranking you for the wrong things and at a substantial cost.

Linking

Links are the next major factor for SEO after keywords. Links give authority signals to Google and other search engines and help direct readers where you want them to go next.

You'll be creating links in your posts to trusted third party websites to create more trust in your content, as well as weaving in links to your other pages to give them authority, rankings and drive traffic to them.

Promotion

The 'viral' blogs you hear about and see are typically the result of great promotion and significant investment in promotion. If you don't have the budget, you can be lean and scrappy, but you need to promote to maximize results.

This involves pulling in readers and traffic from other platforms across the web, gaining inbound links from relevant authority sites.

Analytics

You've got to watch the analytics, and have someone with the skill of interpreting those metrics to figure out not just what's working and not, but why.

Idea Generation

If you really plan to start cranking out a good amount of content or do it for long enough, you'll need ideas for what to keep writing about. Many novice writers and content marketers get stuck here. You may want to hire someone just to come up with great titles and topics for your blog posts.

BIO

Alejandro Cremades is a serial entrepreneur and the author of The Art of Startup Fundraising. With a foreword by 'Shark Tank' star Barbara Corcoran, and published by John Wiley & Sons, the book was named one of the best books for entrepreneurs. The book offers a step-by-step guide to today's way of raising money for entrepreneurs.

Most recently, Alejandro built and exited CoFoundersLab which is one of the largest communities of founders online.

Prior to CoFoundersLab, Alejandro worked as a lawyer at King & Spalding where he was involved in one of the biggest investment arbitration cases in history ($113 billion at stake).

Alejandro is an active speaker and has given guest lectures at the Wharton School of Business, Columbia Business School, and at NYU Stern School of Business.

Alejandro has been involved with the JOBS Act since inception and was invited to the White House and the US House of Representatives to provide his stands on the new regulatory changes concerning fundraising online.