Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York City and popular blogger at Joel on Software is done blogging to build business.
The best evidence suggests that there are many other effective ways to market Fog Creek’s products — and that our historical over-reliance on blogging as a marketing channel has meant that we’ve ignored them. I realize now that blogging made me, and Fog Creek, a big fish in a very small pond. As a result, we have the undisputed No. 1 product among the 5 percent to 10 percent of programmers who regularly read blogs about programming. Meanwhile, we’re almost unknown in every other demographic.
Fair enough. But for those who want to keep at it, Spolsky’s Inc. article offers some good advise from Kathy Sierra.
When you’re using a blog to promote a business, that blog can’t be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.
I agree with this, and I don’t. People do want to learn to be more awesome and if they find that in a blog, great. But people also want to connect with a writer that they like, someone who speaks their language and makes them laugh, think, cry, etc.
AdPulp exists to help make advertising more awesome. If I become more awesome in the process and you become more awesome in the process, that’s terrific. But the road to this new awesomeness can’t be a single track.
Everyday, I see blogs and increasingly Twitter channels where the writer never veers off message, never tells a personal story. For me, that diminishes their contribution. I want to get to know the person and the person’s work. The two go hand-in-hand.
