60 characters max.
Between 700 to 2100 words.
If you're strapped for time, you can read the next three sections, and skip the rest of this document.
The most important bits to understand are the importance of admiring, starting a post (or talk!) by waking up the audience, and finishing posts with a call to action.
The best way to improve is to admire others. Who's writing and public facing communication do you like?
Priceonomics and FiveThirtyEight do great data-driven and informative pieces.
Underdog.io and Buffer do a great job of being transparent and vulnerable-but-likable.
Coding Horror and Etsy do great engineering or "Here's a problem we had, and how we approached it!" pieces.
Are there startups who's blogs you enjoy reading? Compile a list of your team's top three to five favorite blogs. Then, collectively agree to read them regularly. Encourage it with some kind of subscription (like feedly).
Why do this? Great writers read books. Great actors attend plays. Great sommeliers drink a lot of wine. The "Greats" become great by appreciating the thing they want to be great at.
Developing a good nose is the goal. When you consider writing a blog, you should get a whiff, and think "this smells right."
At the start of the post, assume your audience is asleep. How will you wake them up? A GIF? A story? A joke? Share something cool.
If you're bored, your audience is bored.
Every post should end with a call to action.
Where can the reader go to learn more? Are there related topics worth investigating? Can you send them to another blog post (even if it's not your own)?
Find popular topics and discussions you can contribute to, rather than making your own. Think, Quora, Reddit, Twitter, etc. What are people already discussing there?
A corollary is that it's easier to contribute to an ongoing conversation than get people to like or fave your new post.
Your first draft should be mental vomit. Dump everything possibly related onto the page. Don't organize, don't make sense. Give yourself material to work with.
The worst possible thing you can do while writing? Stop to look something up. Use gibberish the first time, or find whatever's important, and paste it into the top of the document before you begin writing.
The UNIX philosophy encourages programs that do one thing, and do it well. If you need to do something complex, chain the programs together in a series.
Writing is similar. Your post should be about one idea, and should explore that idea well. Other topics may be explored, so long as they point back to that one idea. Like the Highlander, there can only be one.
Similarly, for really complex topics, it's usually a good idea to write a series of blogs. Have a topic that's hard to boil down to just "one thing"? Do it as a series.
Writing a post on "How to run PostgreSQL well" is tough. There's too much for one post! So, Craig Kersteins writes many posts, each about a specific topic. He regularly collects these posts, and turns them into a book.
Publish consistently, first. Quantity always comes second.
Find a schedule that works (once a month is an easy mark to hit). Once you have that down, work from there to post more and more frequently.
Also keep in mind, posting every day of the week is probably too much. You will likely exhaust interested readers.
Every post should have some kind of lead-in image or graphic. They won't make the post any better, but they will make it that much more interesting on Twitter / Facebook / etc.
search.creativecommons.org is a great place to find pictures. You just need to include proper attribution.
Canva makes it easy to add well-designed text.
If you're running a blog, make sure it presents well when shared. Meta-data for Twitter Cards and Facebook Open Graph Tags are essential for making your post sharable. Adding this meta-data will pull in your image, and make your post that much more clickable.
Write any old thing for the title in your draft.
Just before you publish, spend some serious time on a better title. The title determines whether people will even click on your post.
Iris Shoor says she spends 50% of her writing time thinking about a title. Why? It's all most people see. The title is all most people see on Reddit, Hacker News, and other aggregators.
There's a lot of research to be done on good titles. A lot of "what we know" is likely to drift with time. The sections that follow are what I know about titles, right now.
"9 ways to improve your OSS project"
is better than
"10 ways to improve your OSS project"
9 items feels less contrived than 10 items. Agree?
One of my favorite titles ever is "Atom 1.0".
Simple, clean, and I know exactly what's inside. Woah, Atom went up a major version! I wonder what features they've added?
Titles only work if they give the reader a hint of what the topic is.
While "Atom 1.0" is powerful, a title like "Vue 1.0" is not. Vue does not have the exposure Atom does. Readers need to be informed what VueJS is before clicking.
Negative or destructive words seem to perform the best.
Hence, the litany of "____ is dead" posts that seem to float to the top of HN.
Dead, exploded, burning, plague, disease, war, crippled, crushed, destroyed, etc. All of these words work wonderfully in a title.
"If you make a great product, but no one knows about it ..." is the startup equivalent of, "If a tree falls in the woods, but nobody is around to hear it ...".
That is to say, you can have the best product in the world. It won't matter if you don't tell people about it. When you first start, this can feel weird and dishonest.
Why? Taken to an extreme, advertising can sell snake oil. That is, a product of zero-substance. That doesn't mean all advertising is bad, though. Vitamins are good for you, but too many vitamins will also poison you.
Similar to vitamins and nutrients, just the right amount of advertising can be good. It can help good ideas that otherwise wouldn't get attention. Look at the #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign.
The Fool's Wager is a great decision making hack.
I can't remember where I first learned about the Fool's Wager, and sadly, it seems there's not many resources online about it. It works something like this:
Imagine you have two stocks you want to invest in, but you're unsure which is the better bet.
How much should you invest in each stock?
You could say, "invest 100% in the better one!" But, that requires you to have good information about which is better. Chaos Theory says that you can never gather enough information to predict the future. Like the classic, "the beating of a butterflies wings eventually produces a hurricane," small fluctuations often have big consequences in outcomes.
Hence the Fool's Wager!
Invest 50% in one stock, and 50% in the other. No matter what the "correct" amount would've been, you will always be the closest you can be to the best outcome. This is a naive strategy. That is, a strategy to minimize risk, NOT maximize profit. It turns out naive strategies are pretty useful in the real world. We often won't have anywhere near enough information about a decision to make the "Correct" choice.
Back to startups. Not sure whether to invest in blogging, or public speaking? Invest 50% in both. Whatever the correct answer is, you're the close to the right answer. Additionally, it helps down the road. Let's say blogging is the right answer. After running your test, you invest 100% in blogging. Later, when you need to start public speaking, you'll have a much smaller learning curve. You've already sort of practiced for it.
Jason Lemkin discusses another advantage to the Fool's Wager: easy comparison. In the linked talk, he suggests hiring Sales people in twos. This is good advice for a lot of roles, beyond Sales.
Why? If you hire one Sales person, and they underperform, you'll always wonder whether it's the Sales person you hired or a failing of the product. If one rep succeeds, and the other doesn't, it says the product is definitely sellable.
Additionally, two Sales reps help each other cooperatively and competitively. They cooperate by sharing learning, being a sympathetic ear, and collaborating on projects. They compete by trying to be as good, or better than the other one. It's naturally motivating to work on a team.
This is also true of distribution channels. Blogging might be good. Blogging might be amazing when paired with Google Ads. You can't know until you try them together.
Conversely, the choice between speaking at conferences, or doing traditional PR is a tough one. Invest in both for a short time, and if one succeeds while the other flops, great! Your decision of which to invest in is easy. Without running that "two at once" experiment, it's easy to wonder, "What if we put this money into something else? Could we do better?"
Low or no confidence in decisions often leads half-hearted implementation. Lack of confidences leads to a lot of wasted time wondering, "what if?" The Fool's Wager largely quells this tendency. You forget about "What if?" and focus your energies confidently on your best prospect.
Viral Marketing (what makes people want to share?)
Public Relations (PR) + Unconventional PR
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Social and Display Ads
Offline or Meatspace Ads
Search Engine Optimization
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Target Market Blogs (other's blogs)
Business Development (BD, aka partnerships or reseller type programs)
Affiliate Programs (think: Amazon's affiliate network)
Existing Platforms
Trade Shows
Offline Events (meetups, etc)
Online Community Building