Blogging should be an important part of any startups marketing strategy. For a software services business it is indispensable.

What should you blog about?

• About your technology
• Interesting new work you are doing
• Case studies showing how you solved challenging problems for a client.
• New open source work you have done
• Interview prominent people from your technology

How often should you blog

• Not too often, surely not everyday. (You have a business to run)
• Not too rarely, you want to build a proof of your expertise.
• Once a month is probably the minimum, more than once a week is probably too much

How this helps you?

• People link to you helping you get found in search engines.
• When people come to your site they find your blog which proves your expertise with technology.
• When you are hiring it is much easier to hire if people have already heard of you via your blog.

So you have got your marketing plan working and a steady stream of leads coming in.

You dont have a business until you convert these leads to customers though. When a customer is evaluating vendors, they want to check

• You have the expertise in the technology.
• You have experience with the technology
• You have worked in similar settings before
• Your clients will give you testimonials and refer you.
• Your business will stay around for a long time and they wont have to switch vendors.

You have to work with the customers sales objection to explain your sales proposition so that they hire you.

• Explain you experience and expertise with the technology using the articles you have written and your blog
• Demo your open source work to further prove your skills
• Get permission from your clients to use their references
• Ask all your happy clients to give you an testimonial

One of the most under-utilized sources for marketing (for consulting businesses) is contributing to open source. Compared to Twitter and Facebook, where everyone and their granny is, code focussed social networks like Github and Bitbucket require more work. They also make it easier to gauge the expertise.

These code focussed social networks have a lot of high profile developers who can recommend you to their companies and colleagues. Most of the time your leads and decision makers to hire you would be CTO (not CEO), who are well equipped to judge your skills from your open source contributions.

There are two ways to get leads. Inbound and Outbound. In the long term you should be getting a large percentage of your leads via inbound channels. (People who find you in search results, our read your blog, or find you via github and twitter.) This takes time to build up so in the meanwhile you need to get leads via outbound channels. (Actively pursuing users who are looking for your services.)

Outbound Leads

• Setup a twitter search for “business term”. If you specialize in Asp.Net development look for twitter search terms “Asp developer”, “Asp development” and similar. If you find people who are looking for your services do a @reply to them, and tell them about your services.
• Look at your industry short term job portals. Send a mail to the advertisers.

Inbound leads

• Mention your specialities and skills in twitter and linkedin profile, so people who are looking for your skills can find you.
• Create a blog with useful content related to your niche. This lets people find you via search engines and makes you an authority.
• Create useful open source work related to your niche which will allow you to prove your expertise, and ensure people come to you.
• Speak at conferences. Most technologies have conferences focussed on the technology. Speaking at these will allow you to meet and build relationships with people in your industry and create mindshare about your company.

There are other channels such as Google Adwords and Facebook advertising, but I have never found them useful.

Once you have your business idea in place, you should decide the name of your business. I suggest you only choose a name which is not bought already and has a .com available.

1. See if a name is available. Go to who.is and enter your desired name. If its registered you may be able to buy the name, though it will probably cost a few thousands. If you have a few names in mind try them until you find one which is not taken.

2. Once you find a name which is free, go to name.com. There are other registars, but I recommend name.com for their ease of use.

3. Buy the domain. (Doh!)

4. Setup email for your new domain.

5. Buy a hosting package from webfaction.

6. Setup wordpress for your new domain on webfaction

7. Create pages for the homepage, about, what you do and a contact page.