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I am creating a blog for our startup, and imagine the blog would be a great place to post on product news, product tips, and our companies attitudes to various technologies and events that are related to us.

However, I am hoping to have many articles that are are helpful to our target users but not related to our product directly - except that they show that we care about our customers.

Where is the best place to put these? The company blog? Industry web sites (which would give us credibility and drive traffic to us)? OR my personal (but currently defunct) blog?

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3 Answers

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One advantage to blog content that is not necessarily product related is that it gives you a chance to be both "human" and an expert in front of potential customers.

People like to do business with people they know, like and trust (sorry for the cliche). Posting helpful information builds trust. Responding to comments shows you are really there and human.

Use your blog categories to separate company-related news and product-related information from articles. And make use of an "About Us" section to let people know something more personal about you.

Finally, create good content. Everybody markets. Not everyone does so with good content.

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Yes, I definitely intend to put good content up. Partially because I believe that we are trustworthy (and we might as well do the leg work to show so). Good idea about using categories and the about us section. – Vineet Oct 13 '09 at 23:20
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If the articles are helpful to your target users but not directly related to your product, put them on your company blog. You want your company blog to be more than just a PR/marketing machine for your company. Put all the useful and informative content there as possible. Then link to/promote it from all the other industry sites where you're a member. Potential customers will trust you much more when they see advice and helpful information that is not trying to sell them on your company. And, as a result you'll get more links to your blog, which takes care of credibility.

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It is definitely a possibility that I am considering. However, my biggest fear in putting everything on the company blog is that then it becomes easy for people to discount the writing because it is on our site and is 'just marketing'. – Vineet Oct 13 '09 at 4:31
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In my experience it has the opposite effect. People will get a better impression of your company related content, it it's mixed in with lots of other helpful information. – BigStartups Oct 13 '09 at 6:47
Hmm... thanks! I guess I need to wrap my head around this part. I think we will have to make sure we brand our blog based on our corporate look and feel but not to do so overtly to have the negative effects. – Vineet Oct 13 '09 at 23:22
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Create sub domains for each "channel" and develop a reputation for your brand around the expertise in each of those verticals. You might set developers.company.com to evangelize the work your business might be doing with open source software or R&D; this is completely parallel to your core product & service but helps define the brand as having expertise behind the core business.

If you use a platform like WordPress MU (instead of just WordPress) this is very easy to do. MU creates a multi-blog platform with a uniform template and management across multiple sub domains. Set up, set up MU as you would WordPress then recognize that the only difference is a distinct section in the upper left of your admin dashboard to manage the "blogs" separately from each blog.

You are using WordPress aren't you? ;)

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By the way, sub domains have the added value of a little SEO benefit (and downside). To some extent, subdomains are treated like distinct websites so their links to one another help boost your relevance. Downside is, you are essentially creating a new site that has to be indexed and ranked. Over time, this is immensely beneficial but be forewarned that it takes some time for that benefit to materialize. – Paul O'Brien Oct 14 '09 at 0:11
I like what you are saying, and am thinking of having a subdomain, but instead of having one for each channel I think we will just use categories. I would like to have multiple subdomains, but we don't have the resources right now to author that much content. – Vineet Oct 16 '09 at 3:02

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