This series of posts is excerpted from Mark Suster. Mark is a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner after selling his company to Salesforce.com. He focuses on early-stage technology companies. His website can be found at www.bothsidesofthetable.com
These posts are to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about.
1. Why
If you care about accessing customers, reaching an audience, communicating your vision, influencing people in your industry, marketing your services or just plain engaging in a dialog with others in your industry a blog is a great way to achieve this.
People often ask me why I started blogging. It really started simply enough. I was meeting regularly with entrepreneurs and offering (for better or for worse) advice on how to run a startup and how to raise venture capital from my experience in doing so at two companies. I was having the same conversations over-and-over again (JFDI, Don’t Roll Out the Red Carpet when Employees are on the Way Out the Door, Don’t Drink Your Own Kool Aid, etc) and I figured I might as well just write them up and make them available for future people who might be interested. I never really expected a big audience or ever thought about it.
I had been reading Brad Feld’s blog & Fred Wilson’s blog for a couple of years and found them very helpful to my thinking so I honestly just thought I was giving back to the community.
The results have been both unexpected and astounding. Within 2 years I was getting 400,000 views / month and had been voted the 2nd most respected VC in the country by an independent survey of entrepreneurs, The Funded and sentiment analysis. I know that I have not yet earned these kudos based on investment returns (although my partners have. GRP Partners last fund is the single best performing VC fund in the US (prequin data) for its vintage year). But it speaks volumes to what people want from our industry:
- transparency
- accessibility
- authenticity
- thought leadership
- advice
I’ll bet your customers, business partners or suppliers would love similar.
Next up – What Should I Blog ?
RJM Consulting Group, LLC Establishes CityGrid® Partnership
RJM Consulting Group, LLC Establishes Relationship with CityGrid®
Nationwide sales team members are now authorized CityGrid® network resellers.
Denver, Colorado March 28, 2011 — RJM Consulting Group, LLC is pleased to announce that their national sales force has achieved official status as CityGrid® authorized resellers. The largest content and advertising network for local, CityGrid® aggregates over 800 thousand paying advertisers and reaches over 140 million unique monthly users across hundreds of leading web sites and mobile apps.
“With our CityGrid® network partnership, we now have the capability to offer our customers unprecedented internet exposure at the local level,” according to Richard Motarjeme of RJM. “Once our customers establish a profile in the network, their content has the opportunity for distribution across over 200 well recognized web sites that focus on local search, like Citysearch, Urbanspoon, Insiderpages, Menupages, MerchantCircle, Superpages.com, and many more.” This includes exposure on major search engines as well, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Businesses can participate at almost any financial level, and their subscription fees are used to directly purchase click-through advertising for their online business profile. Customers have the ability to monitor their online reputation, and can also track their billable activity across the many different categories of online traffic.