Picking the brains of top SaaS bloggers is a smart way to uncover the secrets to building a successful blog—so that’s just what we did. There are lots of blogging mistakes you can avoid when you implement the strategies of famous SaaS bloggers.
This guide is packed full of tips and nuggets of wisdom you can use to scale your SaaS blog. Read on!
From informative videos to in-depth blog posts, Neil Patel is a SaaS blogger who always shares valuable content irrespective of the costs.
Patel is a New York Times best-selling author, popular podcast co-host, co-founder of three successful SaaS companies (KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Hello Bar), and owner of the SEO keyword research tool Ubersuggest.
Patel believes businesses don’t need to spend money buying links (or building low-quality ones via blog comments and forums). Since Google hates this approach, he advises that businesses focus primarily on producing value-packed content and enjoy quality backlinks that will follow organically.
Do keyword research and discover common terms your target audience uses in their search queries. Next, create in-depth, actionable blog posts around these terms and promote them relentlessly.
Bloggers and reporters always search for actionable outbound posts to include within their content. Therefore, your blog will become a go-to source when you prioritize quality content creation.
Hiten Shah is a renowned SaaS blogger and co-founder of two popular SaaS brands (KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg). He blogs on Hitenism, where he shares his insights about the SaaS business and provides tips for SaaS founders.
Shah believes that social media plays an essential role in SaaS businesses' growth. He successfully grew the KISSmetrics blog by sharing curated content on Twitter to attract super-targeted followers and then sharing his blog posts—after building an audience—to drive referral traffic.
Content curation begins with identifying key subjects your target customers are interested in. You can use a tool like AnswerThePublic to discover questions your target customers are asking.
Next, find relevant, actionable posts on other blogs and share them on your social media pages. You can use hashtags for better reach.
Once your social media posts begin to gain traction, start sharing your blog posts too. You can use the 80/20 rule to balance things up (or set your own ratio).
Shah used this technique when the KISSmetrics blog was in its infancy, so this hack may be more effective for new SaaS blogs.
The founder of Close CRM, Steli Efti is a popular SaaS blogger who shares insightful content for SaaS business owners.
Efti says that the Close CRM blog is one of the company's most effective marketing channels and reveals that he’d keep the blog running even if he were to cut off all other marketing channels.
Since blogging is essential for growing SaaS brands, Efti advises SaaS companies to create evergreen blog posts that outshine their competitors' pieces and repurpose them for multiple platforms.
Evergreen blog posts—informative, long-form pieces that don’t go out of date—are a popular type of SaaS blog post. The process of creating these pieces begins with topic research.
First, head over to your competitors' blogs and make a list of some evergreen topics they've covered. You can use tools like BuzzSumo and Social Animal to find popular evergreen posts on their blogs.
Next, write a more in-depth and appealing piece, better than your competitors' posts. You can repurpose the post afterward—into podcasts, videos, infographics, social media posts, and more.
Alex Turnbull is a famous SaaS blogger and the CEO of Groove. He shares his thoughts and ideas about the SaaS business on the Groove blog.
One of Turnbull's secrets for building a successful SaaS blog is the UIU principle. He states that SaaS blogs should strive to create content that's unique (U), interesting (I), and useful (U).
The blogosphere is full of regurgitated content. So, instead of creating content that looks like your competitors’, spend some time brainstorming a unique add-on that'd make your piece pop. This could simply mean adding real-life examples or eye-catching graphics to your blog posts.
To prevent a spike in your SaaS website bounce rate, you could introduce humor and storytelling into your blog posts. Regardless of your approach, you should still always ensure you pack your posts with valuable, actionable information that will meet your target audience’s needs.
Rand Fishkin is well-known as the co-founder of Moz. But he’s also the co-founder of SparkToro and writes regularly about marketing, sales, SaaS, and other business-related topics.
Fishkin says that backlinks aren't dead. However, he condemns many businesses' link-building techniques and advises companies to focus more on creating link-worthy content and building relationships. He believes it's easy to reach out to people and request a link when you have a strong relationship with them (and have a premium-level blog post).
Get on social networking platforms and start building relationships. LinkedIn, for example, allows you to connect with like-minded professionals from around the web. You can jump on this platform (and other ones) and network with people who share your interests. Also, focus on producing informative blog posts. People won't hesitate to link to your content when it’s top-notch.
Take a close look at the tips above, and you'll see that they all revolve around producing top-notch content. That’s no coincidence!
If you want to build a successful SaaS blog that generates qualified leads for your business, you need to start creating super-relevant, high-quality blog posts.
Thankfully, you don’t need to stress about content creation if it’s not in your wheelhouse. Contact the SaaSpirin team to discuss outsourcing your content needs today.