[qxf2]

My company maintains a very popular blog on testing. It has helped us land mutliple clients. We get a few inbound enquiries every month - usually from really small startups and/or QA directors that are looking to quickly implement test automation. After my own personal network and past clients, my blog is the most reliable source of clients. The simplest post that resulted in a client was one we wrote on how to run a Selenium test on BrowserStack using Python. The most advanced post that generated a lead/inquiry (but I couldn't close) was one on testing a Natural Language Generator.

What we write: We mainly write to make a tester's life easier and interesting - so testing, automation, tech we use at our clients and the different tools we use to test. The one other rule of thumb is that if the engineer spent more than 2 hours Googling about a problem, they should write a post about it.

Background: I established the habit as soon as I had an employee on the bench. It took over a year and about 30 posts before we saw even a little (~1k pageviews a month) traffic. It was about 18-months of regular writing (~50 posts) before we got our first client through our blog.

Pros: The habit has been a good for both my employees as well as for my business. The posts are good references for new hires and easy to pass on to our clients too. My employees also credit writing blog posts with helping them think clearer and articulate their thoughts better. We also look smart when our clients Google for something and stumble into a solution one of our engineers wrote.

Cons: The start was a slog and demotivating. Writing is still hard and time-consuming. As we grow, it is harder to sell new employees on the habit. The articles we enjoy writing barely get any hits [1].

[1] I loved this piece of work that used color paper, an Arduino and a servo-motor to test the Fitbit heartrate monitor: https://qxf2.com/blog/testing-the-fitbit-heart-rate-monitori...

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

I haven't heard of your company or blog which is a shame since I specifically seek out material and partners in this space (see my profile, would be good to work with you).

The blog efforts at my company are admittedly poor. Without a dedicated writer the focus on resources invariably ends up directed towards new product features, fixes, customer care and on other types of marketing. Our blog has become the stereotypical 'new features' blobs that I have seen many others become. The truth is writing great content takes a huge amount of time. I do think it's worth making time to do it right if you can devote the attention and resource based on not only the significant traffic bump it can bring but also the higher quality of leads.