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Today’s interview is our second interview with Hiten Shah, co-founder of KISSmetrics, a customer analytics platform. Last week, Hiten talked about testing topic headlines in Twitter by driving traffic to other people’s blog posts. From that, they figured out what to blog about. This week, we’ll talk about how their blog strategy.

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The Interview

What do you write about on your blog?

We are trying to attract marketers and people interested in web analytics and web design. So, we think pretty diligently about what they care about and what they actually want. We think a lot about educating on measurement, marketing, analytics, and even web design and A/B testing.

Do you hire bloggers? Where do you find good bloggers?

Yeah, we usually just do guest posts. If you have a good handle on good content, then you can always find people who can write good content because you already read their work on other blogs. It’s a process, but an important one to be dedicated to, of understanding what relevant content exists out there and who’s writing it. Then, it’s relatively easy to find guest bloggers. We also have some of our customers do blog posts for us from time to time.

And then do you pay them by the hour or per post?

It depends. People have written posts on KISSmetrics for free, and we also have worked with professional writers, who are paid. For the latter, we usually pay by the blog post and the quality of the post.

What do you think are common mistakes people make when first blogging?

I think they make it too much about their product and themselves. I don’t think bloggers educate their audience as much as they could. In almost any category, educating your audience is very useful and usually leads to more success and more traffic. For us, we are always first thinking about what is it that the user or the customer can learn.

Ok, so growing a blog is really hard to do. How did you do it?

Sure, so a lot of issues relate to the frequency of blogging. I think you have to make it a group effort or have a very diligent process of saying, “Look, every Monday or Tuesday or whenever, we are going to put out a blog post no matter what.” I think it’s important to have the discipline to get regular with it. That’s probably the hardest thing.

Illustration by Orissa Jenkins