I watched a 37signals video yesterday that challenged my thinking a bit. Jason spoke on the benefits of sharing knowledge and experience in order to create an audience who will buy your stuff. He likened this concept to the food network, where chefs show you how they cook and even provide the recipes. Technically someone could take the recipes, go next door, and start a competing restaurant. The reality is that they don’t and the result is fantastic publicity for the chefs + entertainment for the viewer.
Too many businesses fear disclosing some piece of information which might give something away to the competition. But what happens the next time a potential customer encounters a problem after figuring out the initial challenge which brought them to you in the first place? By then they will look to you for help again as they get deeper into what they are trying to do. To apply this to our blogging at Elias: I think we should post on our experiences – both Magento related and start-up in general.
The principle is to allow whatever you learned today to feed your creativity for blogging. And don’t worry too much about the perfect post. Most people only read the last couple of posts anyway, so if you feel like one entry isn’t great then you can simply cover it up with a few new posts.
And by the way, a great place to find blogging inspiration is your sent folder, which is where this post originated.
Josh,
Both you and Jason are right on here. I think one of the things we all often miss out on is going to our sent folder for the inspiration for our blogging.
I have benefitted from hearing you preach this early on. Hopefully the community is benefitting as a result!
Lee
Great post – and I’d love to read more about what goes on “behind the scenes” at Elias. I think you guys could make a lot more noise if you wanted to! 🙂
Thanks, John. I’ll point the team to your comment as encouragement. It takes a very intentional mindset to do the things that make blogging most effective: relevant content updated frequently.
I’m interested in your thoughts.. Does 37signals or E-myth have the right philosophy for online business today? http://www.purlem.com/blog/?p=38
@Josh – Absolutely, I struggle to keep up with it myself sometimes, but it has huge benefits. If I didn’t blog and tweet, by business would be dead. Every single one of my strongest business relationships this year has come through either my blog, or through twitter!
I think it’s really worthwhile, and when it comes to Magento, there’s actually a huge gap in the blogging market. There’s no one on the Magento scene making as much noise as the hundreds of people running really amazing blogs about WordPress.