While taking an evening walk on the beach (part of my work includes taking long walks on the beach, in woods, on mountains and city streets, and think about everything!), I was asking a question to self, what should we write on the Shimbi Labs blog?
Write about -
1. Shimbi Labs Product and Service release.
2. Informative blogs on our topics of expertise.
3. Life at Shimbi Labs and our experiments and experiences.
4. Be opinionated about what we think about humanity and technology.
Except for no. 2 rest of the options feels original.
To me, at the end of the walk, being opinionated and write our experience at Shimbi Labs feels natural choices than teaching people. "how to do." Google already have that, and people know where to search.
For example - recently, we published a blog 10 common web design mistakes that can kill your website, I quickly Googled it and found about 67,600,000 results (0.63 seconds)! I am not sure how much value we are adding by publishing one more blog on the same topic.
Should we altogether stop writing them?
I am undecided, but I guess for now we will post them less in frequency, but we will make sure they are more in terms of detailing and quality. They must content our story of experiments (successful or failed, both should be included), they must be our real experiences and not just hypothetical unverified list of things TO DO, and DON'T DO. So at least they will serve as a reference for some.
Do you also think so?
Product and service release blog posts will only make more sense when we talk and write more about them. Our product users must know how some of the most successful products of Shimbi Labs like Budo, Mikan, Invoice and MyProject was initially developed for self-use to run the successful business. Inside stories, should be written and spread more, they have a sense of authenticity and heart in it.
Does it make sense to you?
We are a small business, and we build software for small businesses. So our success stories may motivate some of you, and our failures may be lessons for you to avoid the same mistakes.
Isn't it?
Lastly, we must stop thinking about content strategy. We must stop treating the blog as a marketing tool. It may sound weird, but it makes more sense to me to tell the real stories, express our feelings and opinions than, writing useless blogs with SEO strategies and keyword-oriented writeups, which makes hardly any sense to anyone.
If we build a good product, if we ourself use them and fill confident to recommend them to others, people will at least give a try than creating marketing trap to force them to use our products.
Honesty, transparency and empathy are our keywords.
Over to you, I am curious to know -
- What do you think?
- What is your opinion?
- What do you wish to read?