My company has heavily invested in blogging [1] which has helped us become influential in the product space (enterprise ETL around Apache Airflow). As an engineer, every time I write a post I try to balance time vs ROI. I think it's more valuable to pump out a good post that takes 5-10 hours of effort (not counting writing the code etc) vs tons of very low effort posts when you're first getting started. Occasionally, you can find time for a high investment post like 20+ hours but this is pretty difficult and probably not worth your time at the early stages.
If 10 hours invested into writing a good post turns into thousands of page views turns into a small number of conversions, this can be very beneficial in growth.
One trick you can do is recycle ideas across blog posts, meetup talks, and conference talks.
Another thing to think about is that not every engineer enjoys investing in writing. If it's not something you enjoy, I wouldn't force yourself to do it. Some people are much better at formats like podcasts or videos (personally I'm the opposite though).
Happy to answer more specific questions if interested (email in profile). Feel free to reach out.
It definitely is crowded. I'd say that the strategy varies by department (in engineering, we have a lot of freedom with technical posts) so we tend to write about using flagship frameworks and platform design decisions.
At the end of the day, the goal of my technical content is just to write interesting things that draw other engineers and technical people like data scientists to our blog and site. It also helps establish credibility in a crowded space. (I'd also start to like doing tutorial posts in the near future.)
I think if you have the opportunity to speak with leaders in your industry and work collaboratively on blog posts / podcasts / etc that speaks volume as well. We've done some of this already and it draws a lot of highly engaged traffic.
You need to weigh up your perceived benefits of blogging against lost progress of other aspects of your business.
In the early stage, focus should be on generating money so you become self sustainable. If blogging is part of that strategy, so be it. But blogging for bloggings sake isn't probably a good spend of your time.
However, the relationship between doing something here = an equal loss somewhere else is rarely true - so if it's something you enjoy doing as something different to your normal routine then why not.
We've written a fair few blog posts in the past and always focused on keeping them high quality and is has paid off in some ways - I would say though that writing a good quality blog post easily can take 1 full days work. If you're looking to outsource it, you're doing it wrong.
I started blogging recently to document my experience starting a startup. In my posts I just make sure to mention where I'm at so people know that I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about yet :)
Yes. In fact, you should generally start marketing anything while it's still fairly early in development. Build up a fanbase and supporters before your product or service is released so it gets a lot of users on day 1.
This will also get you more press coverage too, which is much easier to come by when journalists know they've got a guaranteed audience for stories about your startup than if it's a completely untested idea with no existing audience.
Do you have spare time to blog? If yes, blog. If no, what will you avoid doing in order to blog and will that other thing have a higher immediate ROI than blogging?
When your startup is young, your job is to keep it alive (which usually means to get it growing). Blogging can help, but don't blog if there are other higher value things that you can do.
My company has heavily invested in blogging [1] which has helped us become influential in the product space (enterprise ETL around Apache Airflow). As an engineer, every time I write a post I try to balance time vs ROI. I think it's more valuable to pump out a good post that takes 5-10 hours of effort (not counting writing the code etc) vs tons of very low effort posts when you're first getting started. Occasionally, you can find time for a high investment post like 20+ hours but this is pretty difficult and probably not worth your time at the early stages.
If 10 hours invested into writing a good post turns into thousands of page views turns into a small number of conversions, this can be very beneficial in growth.
One trick you can do is recycle ideas across blog posts, meetup talks, and conference talks.
Another thing to think about is that not every engineer enjoys investing in writing. If it's not something you enjoy, I wouldn't force yourself to do it. Some people are much better at formats like podcasts or videos (personally I'm the opposite though).
Happy to answer more specific questions if interested (email in profile). Feel free to reach out.
[1]: https://www.astronomer.io/blog
At the end of the day, the goal of my technical content is just to write interesting things that draw other engineers and technical people like data scientists to our blog and site. It also helps establish credibility in a crowded space. (I'd also start to like doing tutorial posts in the near future.)
I think if you have the opportunity to speak with leaders in your industry and work collaboratively on blog posts / podcasts / etc that speaks volume as well. We've done some of this already and it draws a lot of highly engaged traffic.
In the early stage, focus should be on generating money so you become self sustainable. If blogging is part of that strategy, so be it. But blogging for bloggings sake isn't probably a good spend of your time.
However, the relationship between doing something here = an equal loss somewhere else is rarely true - so if it's something you enjoy doing as something different to your normal routine then why not.
We've written a fair few blog posts in the past and always focused on keeping them high quality and is has paid off in some ways - I would say though that writing a good quality blog post easily can take 1 full days work. If you're looking to outsource it, you're doing it wrong.
This will also get you more press coverage too, which is much easier to come by when journalists know they've got a guaranteed audience for stories about your startup than if it's a completely untested idea with no existing audience.
When your startup is young, your job is to keep it alive (which usually means to get it growing). Blogging can help, but don't blog if there are other higher value things that you can do.