Three Lessons from a Covid-era Blogging Novice: The benefit of existing platform communities over SEO

When Covid-19 and the ensuing shutdown started in earnest in March 2020, the internet seemed filled with people starting new hobbies: baking sourdough, taking at-home virtual yoga classes, planting basil, and learning new (off-the-wall) skills like hula-hooping and roller skating (see: Sasheer Zamata).  But some tried to expand further than just the casual exploration and personal-instagram-post brag - some tried to start their own following, their own blog, and their own community.  Yes, I was one of these people, and here are three key learnings I took from the experience:

First, differentiation.  As with traditional product strategy, an online blog must be value-add beyond what is available in the current landscape.  The internet is full of at-home bloggers talking about their personal lives, and the volume of content creators creates an unclear hierarchy of quality.  The marketing adage goes, "You've got to be someone's top choice:" if the product itself is merely a copycat of every other sourdough-starter-how-to, it's doomed before starting.  As an ex-consultant and an MBA candidate, I (obviously) created a 15-slide pitch deck, circulated it for feedback among peers, and settled on a name, a positioning statement, and an initial slate of posts.  Differentiation, done.

Second, content generation.  I then shifted my focus to actually creating posts, and needed to decide on where and what to post.  Video accounts for over 60% of downstream internet traffic (source: Cisco), and holds consumer engagement better than static imagery or text.  But, video is much more labor intensive, so in my extra-curricular experiment, I went with text and images.  I created a website on WordPress, and posted my *differentiated* content weekly for a few weeks.  Once I got Google Analytics up and running, I accessed my page's traffic stats and saw... nothing.  No traffic. Content, check.... but if someone writes a blog and no one is there to read it.... you get the point.

Third, earning a community (and the benefits of scaled platforms).  At this point, I saw two options: either lean into the independent website, and drive traffic through SEO (by registering keywords and building in links to other sites I referenced to boost page rank), or find an already-built platform to access consumers interested in my content.  Google / SEO would have been a necessary step if I were selling products, or needed traffic to my individual webpage to generate business, but since I was only focused on a blog (or the dissemination of information), I chose to pivot to an existing platform with existing users: Instagram.  I created a page, and started posting daily.  Though my posts were shorter and less sophisticated than what I could provide on WordPress, the content was surprisingly similar, and allowed me to post more frequently.  Instagram was built to refer connections and followers to one another, so its algorithms were surfacing my content to interested parties (outside of surfacing it to my existing network).  Similarly, the use of hashtags on Instagram function very similarly to SEO keywords, and are customizable per post.  The user-interface of Instagram, the access to my existing social network, and the ease of discoverability all made my choice to disseminate content primarily through the social platform much more successful.