Neil Patel On Effective Blogging Strategies For Startups

#BiteSize is a video series where leading experts answer some of the most pressing questions entrepreneurs have while building or marketing their startups.

In the latest episode of #BiteSize, Neil Patel offers his best strategies for a startup launching a blog as part of their  content marketing strategy.

Neil Patel

Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. Neil has also been awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives.

Transcript of the Video

If you’re launching a blog, here are a few strategies. One, only write content that benefits your ideal customer. That doesn’t mean you write content on your product and services. But, in essence, you want to help your ideal customer solve their problems.

For example, at Crazy Egg, we help marketers with their conversion optimization, usability, improving their designs so they can get more sales. In that sense, people use Crazy Egg because they want to generate more sales from their websites.

But there’s more aspects to sales than just conversions. A lot of our customers also focus on traffic building. Even though we don’t offer traffic building services, we still blog about traffic building services to help them out. So that way, we’re helping them overall. Then the users will be like, “Wow, these guys have awesome content. If these guys have content that’s useful and great, I wonder what’s their product like.” And then they’re much more likely to signup.

In addition to that, you always want to ask questions at the end of your blog post. When you ask questions at the end of your blog post, you’ll get more comments. Make sure you respond to every single comment.

Third, when you link out to people within your blog post, make sure you email those sites letting them know you’ve linked out to them and ask them to share your content via the social web. That’ll also help you get more traction and traffic.

Fourth, don’t write a blog post unless you’re proud to put your name on it. So, if you don’t really feel passionate about your blog post and feel somebody else’s name should be on it, that means the content’s not good enough. So you should just scrap it and write something else.

Fifth, spend half the time on headline. Headline is almost everything. So if you spend an hour writing a blog post, spend another hour crafting a headline.