B2B companies with blogs generate 67% more leads per month on average than non-blogging firms, according to Inside View. Publishing consistent, relevant content to your blog and social sites is expensive and time-consuming, especially for businesses who don’t want to commit to employing an in-house writing team. But if your business doesn’t have a content strategy, you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect and educate your customers about your services.
Thanks to a new crowdsourced blog writing service called Blogmutt, companies can purchase original blog posts for only $79 per month for one post per week.
Boulder, CO based Blogmutt was founded in 2011 by Wade Green and Scott Yates. The team had worked together successfully twice in the past. Yates and Green considered many ideas before they settled on crowdsourced blog posting. “We saw a real need for the one missing piece of the puzzle for a giant swath of businesses: regular blog posts. With my background in journalism and my familiarity with what makes writers tick, combined with my understanding of how hard writing is for most business people, I have a handle on the business end. Wade is a coder, and he also has a fantastic sense of how to make the site work at scale, and also how to make a business that can really scale.” Yates has a background in both startups and publishing, and has worked for Spy Magazine, New York Newsday, and Denver’s alternative weekly publication Westword.
While many startups sacrifice a clear business model in favor of hitting scale as fast as possible, Yates and Green are proud to stand apart from this trend. “Our name really sums up our core philosophy. We are not fancy dancy pedigree show dogs. We’re mutts. What that means for us is no ego.” Blogmutt makes money “the old fashioned way”, continues Yates. “We sell a service that people pay for! In the near future we will be adding other related services such as photos with the posts.” The company is working with 100 clients, all of whom have stuck with the service since signing up.
Although competitors like Contently have also jumped on the opportunity to provide high quality writing to content marketers, Blogmutt sets itself apart by catering specifically to small businesses. “At the high end there are really awesome services such as Contently, which we admire and refer customers to. As great as they are, they are just too pricey for most small businesses. At the other end of the spectrum you can get writers in India who will write posts for pennies, but those posts are unreadable and useless for a US audience. We fill a gap in the middle of those two ends of the spectrum.”
Blogmutt launched in closed beta last September, and by December the team opened the beta to the public. Green and Yates bootstrapped in the early stages of the company, then decided to raise a seed investment round led by Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid, and Jon Nordmark, CEO of Using Miles.
Blogmutt’s philosophy and dedication to build a real business by charging customers for a service that they need is refreshing. In an industry where hitting the 1 million user mark is praised more that hitting the $1 million revenue mark, Blogmutt may not be the sexiest startup, but they will be sticking around as long as their many satisfied customers continue to use the service.