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Sunday, 17 January 2016

How to get inspirations from Startups in Blog writing

As blog writers, we are always under pressure to write more blog posts but with quality.

There are always pressures from content managers or blog owners on you to bring fresh and engaging content.

So, how can we get inspiration to write more blog posts?

Blog writers like you and I can learn lots of things from modern age startups. We have various similarities, by which we can take inspiration and enhance our blog writing.


Let’s explore it  :)

How to get inspirations from Startups in Blog writing


Startup – This is a big buzzword in business world nowadays, especially in the US, India, and China. These three countries are top 3 places in the world for startup activities. 

“Startup” word was 1st used by Forbes magazine in 1976. According to Wikipedia,

“Startup is an entrepreneurial venture or a new business in the form of a company, a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”

Let’s explore; how startups work. Here we will not go in details, why some startups grow or why some startups fail. We will only seek inspiration from their best practices.

Generally, startups focus on following practices –
  1. Solution of a specific problem
  2. Cost Effectiveness 
  3. Target a Niche Market 
  4. Scalability






Let’s discuss; what you can learn from this.


1. Solution of a specific problem -   Most of the successful startups in the world are focusing on a specific problem of our day to day life activities like Shopping (Amazon, E-bay, Alibaba, Flipkart, Snapdeal etc) or Commuting within city (Uber, Ola) or Hotels (Oyo rooms) and more like this.

Blog writers too can focus on a specific problem in their blog writing about their target audience or industry. You can bring those problems in light and can suggest solutions & best practices based on your experience or industry research data.

Do some research, on topics before you start writing blog posts. If you are facing or have faced similar problems of that particular industry, you are the best person to write on that particular topic.



2. Cost Effectiveness – Startups are always trying to bring down the costs of their products/services to achieve cost effectiveness and to make it affordable to the consumers.

What is the significance of this in blog writing?

Good question; let’s try to find the answer.

As a blog writer, you know, we all need several tools to do topic research, video/photo editing, writing & publishing tools and many more.

Whether you are a freelance blog writer or works for a big brand or agency, you don’t want to exhaust your content marketing budget on blog publishing only. You all want to save money, so how to bring cost effectiveness in your blog writing.The solution is at your fingertips, just search the web and you will get lots of free and affordable tools to help in your blog writing or content production. You can outsource some of your projects on sites like freelance or Fiverr for as low as $5 to save some time and big money on costly tools (if you can’t afford these tools or you required them for one-time use only). Try them!



3. Target a Niche Market – Most of the startups even the Unicorns (startups having a market valuation of at least $1 billion) started their journey by targeting a Niche customer segment of a particular industry.

So, what does ‘Niche’ means! According to Wikipedia, “Niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product/service is focused. The Niche market is highly specialized, and aiming to survive among the competition from numerous super companies.”


What this means to you as a blog writer.


Choose your blog’s topic by selecting a particular segment of an industry. Let’s say, you have a marketing background and you write marketing industry-related blogs. But, you know the marketing industry is a very big field having several segments like Advertising, Branding, Digital Marketing, Rural Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Influencer Marketing and so on and even these segments consist of various sub-segments individually.


So choose your sub-segment or your niche segment and become an expert writer of that field, to gain authority and make an impact among your blog writers.


 As you may remember Alibaba’s founder and chairman Jack Ma once said to Forbes magazine,

“EBay may be a Shark in the ocean, but I’m a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose, but if we fight in the river, we win.”


So it’s better to cater a niche market rather than fight in the bigger market and lost in the deep ocean.



4. Scalability – This is one of the best things, we can learn from startups. Every startup starts its journey by focusing on a niche market segment and later scales their products/services to the bigger market to tap bigger opportunities.


As a blog writer, what you can do to scale or expand your blog writing skills to other segments. If you carefully analyze, most of the industry have some common problems like talent management, financing, sustainability, cost management, better allocation of resources, and so on. Can you relate some similar problems in the other niche markets with your market, if yes, research and co-relate and write on that particular topic. This will bring new light on that topic from an industry outsider.


“Don’t think about failures, you know how to swim in the river, now it’s time to explore the ocean.”



Conclusion – We all have hidden talent and resources to expand and grow like startups to produce a quality blog posts.

Just Inspire yourself by Nike’ tagline –


“Just Do It.”














Thursday, 14 January 2016

5 ways to creating engaging social media post



We all want to create engaging social media posts to get more likes, shares, comments and a close sale (many times). But, how often fail to do that effectively.

There are many ways to create engaging social media post; here are 5 ways to do that.

Let's explore it :)

5 ways to creating engaging social 

1. Shorter Post length - This is one of the most important factors to get more likes, shares/retweets, comments.
  • Twitter:  Use 100 - 120 characters in your tweets to get re-tweets and quoted by others.
  • Facebook: Use 120 - 140 characters in your posts to make it shorter and crisp to read and get more engagement.
  • Linkedin: Try to be short and concise (approx 200 - 250 characters)

2. Use Images/Videos/Gifs -  "An image is worth of 1000's of words", you may have heard this 1000's of time earlier. Nothing new in this, at the same time it is proven psychologically our brain is attracted towards visual. So, take the advantage of this and share your social media post with beautiful images. You can click images yourself or can use stock images available freely on the web.

You can use some easy tools/website to make beautiful images, videos, gifs even infographics.

Here is a small list to help you all:
Use images/videos/gifs to make engaging social media posts 

3. Use Hashtags/Keywords - Almost every measure social media platform including facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr Google plus supports Hashtags. 

But what is "Hashtag" - it is a simple keyword, which is written after "#" sign, for example- "#Socialmedia" is a hashtag.

Hashtags or keywords in your social media post help to reach more people and increases the life of your social media post.

Here are some tools, which will help you to find relevant hashtag for you -





4. Use Humor - We all are humans and we all love some humor and fun side. Social media is for making connections and igniting conversations. It is not like your official website or office workspace. Have some fun in your social media post. You can present boring messages into a funny image tweet or a shorter video.

Some brands even NGOs are doing it to raise awareness and making more connections.

for example -  A Govt agency tweeting in a humorous way! Try it!




5. Humanize your Brand on social media - Show your Brand's human side on social media.

Reply and thanks to those people, who likes, comments and share your social media post. This way you will provide a good incentive to the people to share your post and making it more engaging.


Now you have some cool ways to create engaging social media post. Use it in your next social media post and tell me your experience.

If you have some other cool tips, do share it in the comment.

If you like it.

Share it with your friends.