How to Build and Monetize a Technology Entrepreneurship Blog: SEO Strategy

SEO Strategy: What are the Search Engine implications?

I don’t believe in a lot of artificial gymnastics around SEO.

I have always written from the heart, with sincerity, with authenticity, with courage.

How to Build and Monetize a Technology Entrepreneurship Blog: Content Strategy

Content Strategy: What should you write about?

If you look at my blog, I write about technology businesses. That is what I know about. That is what I care about. That is what I am passionate about.

How to Build and Monetize a Technology Entrepreneurship Blog: Platform Strategy

Platform Strategy: What platform should you write on?

When I started, most of us early bloggers were writing on WordPress.

I set up my own domain (sramanamitra.com) and built my site around WordPress.

Today, you have many more options.

How to Build and Monetize a Technology Entrepreneurship Blog: Mission and Positioning

Mission and Positioning: Why are you doing this?

I started blogging because I love to write, and I have a lot of opinions on all sorts of topics. I love entrepreneurship. I have always been passionate about entrepreneurship development, ecosystem building, entrepreneurship education, incubation, and acceleration. I have a love for Development Economics and have always viewed entrepreneurship as an important tool for economic development. 

How to Build and Monetize a Technology Entrepreneurship Blog: Introduction

I started blogging on Technology Entrepreneurship in April 2005. The Internet was different then. There was no Smartphone. Social Media was just starting. Facebook and LinkedIn were new concepts.

Today, in 2021, building and monetizing a Technology Entrepreneurship Blog requires a very different strategy than the one I started with.

In this multi-part series, I will lay out a fully fleshed out roadmap of how to do so with contemporary tools.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 7)

Joe Speiser: We spend a lot of time looking at, “How can we engage the user? What kind of content can we show them to keep them interested?” What does that [time spent] look like? Is it one minute, two minutes, or three minutes? What’s that number? Right now, we’re up to 3 minutes and 30 seconds, which we think is pretty great. Because of that, Facebook treats us well. They show our content more because the readers on Facebook enjoy it. It’s not just time on site. It’s also how many times is the post being shared, liked, or commented on.

Facebook also looks at the negatives. They follow and watch very closely how many times someone unfollows a post. If you hit a certain threshold there, Facebook will take action against your page – not manual, but automatic. They’re going to demote it in the news feed moving forward. That has negative points against your fan page. You accrue enough of those and your page gets buried. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the focus of the content? What is the editorial strategy of Little Things?

Joe Speiser: The whole goal for Little Things – and what we’ve stuck with since the beginning – has been uplifting content – the opposite of what the nightly news represents. Our goal was to stop this constant flow of negativity. Everyday there’s a robbery, kidnapping, or murder but who wants to be constantly bombarded with that? Even though murder is down significantly in the US, the amount of reported news of it has gone up in the opposite direction. We’re now bombarded with more negativity than we ever had before, just because of the way the Internet is set up. Everything is at your fingertips and the notification just keeps coming through.

Every media outlet makes a lot of money off negativity. We thought we’d try something different with this and it’s been working. We’re literally putting out as much positive news as we can and people are actually interested in spreading good news. I think when you watch or read something that makes you feel good inside, you want to share that feeling with the people closest to you. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understand what you’re saying. You had a large audience on Facebook and you wanted to do content marketing to that audience and drive the traffic towards a different site, which you would then monetize with Google AdSense. Is that what you’re saying?

Joe Speiser: Almost. Before we made the change, we would send traffic from Facebook to blogs at PetFlow. These blogs were mostly pet-related content but around that content were advertisements. Those advertisement were helping us pay the bills and get us to profitability.

Sramana Mitra: What is the scale of the Facebook traffic that allowed you to do this?

Joe Speiser: Over the four years that we built out the audience, I think we had a million fans on Facebook. We had a really strong following. >>>