ISV’s Cultivate Your Audience
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.I think I may have been doing some other ISV's a disservice over the past year. I've preached a lot about having to have a blog and how much blogging has done for my business. Unfortunately, I've left off a big piece of the advice and it's getting some of you into trouble (not that you're only listening to me, but I should have been giving proper advice all along).
See the thing is having a blog isn't enough. Having readers isn't enough. You have to cultivate your readers and a large part of that is responding to their comments. Over the past few months I've begun to notice a trend. I'm leaving comments on blogs and never getting a response from the blog owner. I'm not talking about blogs with tons of readers and 40 comments on every post. I'm talking about blogs that have just started and blogs where most posts have 0 comments.
I check back and check back, but nothing. That of course is discouraging and makes me less likely to read, comment or link over. If you don't have time to respond to a comment when you have only a few comments a week then you're not doing it right. You need to rethink if you want a blog. If you don't cultivate your audience, if you don't participate with them then I think it's unlikely your blog will be successful at driving your other goal.
So if you're going to do it then do it right otherwise you're just wasting time which could be devoted to other matters.
Discussion
I agree 100% about replying to blog comments, but what is far worse and leaves me gobsmacked is when companies that run support forums don't reply to posts. This is a great way NOT to impress potential customers.
Created by Neville Franks on 01.24.2006 9:01 pm
Your comments on my weblog quickly after I started blogging were really encouraging for me. I recently wrote a post about encouragement as a result of the positive and welcoming attitude in the mISV community. Keep up the good work Ian, the time you are devoting to this is really making a difference !
Created by Erik on 01.24.2006 9:01 pm
Thanks Erik!
Created by Ian on 01.24.2006 9:01 pm
[...] Ian over at Userscape, made an interesting post the other day regarding the importance of cultivating readers by responding to their comments. Oops! This is such an obviously important thing that I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before (and respond to the comment that Ian left on one of my own previous posts). “So if you’re going to do it then do it right otherwise you’re just wasting time which could be devoted to other matters.” [...]
Created by BackupBrain » Blog Archive » Failure t on 01.24.2006 9:01 pm
I totally agree with your philosophy Ian, I answer every comment or batch of comments on my blog with at least a thank you, it just seems rude not to!
I get a real buzz from comments on my site, when I actually get the time to blog (yeah, I know, I should blog more), it helps to know that there are others out there actually reading my posts and thinking about them enough to bother posting with messages of support or encouragement. This little MicroISV community we have going on here is very nice, it's great that we all support each other and help each other out.
Created by Ian M. Jones on 01.24.2006 9:01 pm
Yeah, I always make sure to say at least thanks, even if I don't have anything else to say.
The community has really blossomed in the past year since I got involved. I'm pretty excited to see how things progress as (hopefully) our businesses grow.
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Created by Ian on 01.24.2006 9:01 pm