Featuring Glipho - An Easy-to-use Blog Platform With the Approach of a Social Network

Who are we?

As a social blogging network, Glipho is a massive next step for the blogging world. While traditional blogging places the burden of promotion and SEO on the blogger, Glipho combines its easy-to-use blog platform with the approach of a social network, which enables its writers to reach a wider audience effortlessly.

Whom do we cater to?

Glipho caters to anyone who likes writing or reading. We’re very accessible to first-time bloggers but we also enable imports from the other major platforms (Blogger, Tumblr, and Wordpress) so that established bloggers can use Glipho to give their old content a second life and a fresh audience.

What do we offer to our consumers?

First and foremost, writers can focus entirely on their writing. There’s not the hassle of fiddling around for hours with designs, templates, and plug-ins before you can even start writing – Glipho handles that. And once you’ve started writing, you don’t have to stress about finding an audience for your content – Glipho handles that too.

We also have a minimum wordcount of 150 words, so unlike other platforms, Glipho is a quality text-based website. We really do focus on the writing.

Maintaining a social presence can feel overwhelming sometimes. Glipho deeply integrates all major social networks and social media platforms so that you can connect your accounts across them to your Glipho profile, which becomes a comprehensive hub for your online presence. This connectivity also makes it easy for you and others to promote your content across the internet.

Another problem commonly faced by bloggers is the mastering of SEO skills. With Glipho, you no longer have to worry about that. The Glipho platform has powerful SEO tools and a significant quantity of our content appears on the first page of Google for relevant search queries.

In addition to this, there are strong promotional tools within the network itself. Writers have the opportunity to become Trending Writers or to have popular posts of theirs appear as a Trending Gliph on the main page, and recent writers will also show up as Active Writers for relevant topics. Aside from Glipho’s own promotional features, the Glipho Team also actively publicise content on the platform and regularly interview key writers on the site for the company blog.

And finally, the Glipho community is friendly, active, and responsive. The internet can be both isolating and hostile, but on Glipho, you become part of a group of writers who support and encourage each other in their endeavours. Our writers interview each other, inspire each other to set up international food swaps, support each other’s businesses, and encourage each other on the road to professional publication.

What motivated us to start up?

We had been using several different blogs and had found the experience frustrating and time-consuming. It took a lot of fiddling with design to get something we were happy with before we could even start writing and then, once we started writing, it felt like no one was reading anything we published. And we weren’t the only ones feeling that way – the internet is full of blogs and bloggers who go largely unappreciated and unread.

Glipho was born out of that frustration.

We thought it was silly that the way we use the internet has changed so much in the past ten years, especially with the rise of social media and social networking, and yet the way we blog hadn’t really changed at all. So we decided to create a blog platform which harnessed the power of social networking so that writers could go back to focusing on their writing while the Glipho platform handled everything else.

We knew we wanted to change the way that people write online and so that’s what we’re doing.

What's in a name?

“Glipho” derives from “glyph” and “hieroglyph”. We wanted something that referred back to one of the earliest forms of writing, as Glipho is centred on writers and writing.

How do we see Social Media?

Social media has changed the world.

For the first time, people from all around the world can connect effortlessly with each other to share their experiences without the need for a middleman. We are able to discover and talk to people and to form direct and personal connections with them in a way that we would not have had the chance to do before.

Social media is all about personal connections. Even if you have never met someone in person, through social media, you can form a strong relationship with them.

Glipho embraces this social concept. We enable bloggers to connect with other like-minded bloggers, creating a supportive and interactive community that would not be possible without the power of social networking.

Currently we are....

When we first launched our private beta in October, we were a team of four based in London, UK. Two people in the development team and two in the social media team. Since then, we’ve moved office twice within London and opened a second office in Boston, US. Our team has expanded to six in the UK and three in the US. We have writers and traffic from over 140 countries and are receiving global press coverage.

And we continue to grow. We are running our first Social Blogging workshop in September as part of the Social Media Week in London and attending Web Summit in Dublin in October.

Our biggest challenge was..

Our biggest challenge by far has been getting the exposure we need for the site. Unfortunately, no matter how innovative your idea, a lot of influential names don’t really have much time for you until you hit your first million users. But word of mouth and exposure is essential for actually reaching that million.

We’ve been lucky so far. BBC Click featured us around the time we opened our public beta earlier this year. We’ve had quite a few very positive pieces about us on blogs external to Glipho, which is fantastic for word of mouth, and the global press has also responded very well to Glipho. But we can always do with more exposure, more people talking about Glipho, more people trying out what we have to offer. There’s no such thing as enough.

We want to dominate the world by…

Offering a space where people can write anything and everything. As time goes on, user-generated content and social networking will only be increasing.

We are creating a site that can host millions of articles written by normal people like you or me. It’s something that has never been done before.

We’re making moolah by...

We’re currently funded by private investment. Later this year, we will be looking to raise a series of funding to develop Glipho even more.

Our What The **** Moment

I remember the day Glipho went live as though it were yesterday. We were so excited.

But what we had planned as taking just 2 hours ended up taking us 14, and by the time we finished at 4am, we were too tired to celebrate.

I learned a lot that day.

The most important lesson was realizing that things would never be as easy as I thought. We had tested and re-tested the site in our test stack, but once it was time for Glipho to go live, we made the stupid mistake of using a different stack for production. What happened? A lot of things that worked in our test infrastructure failed in production. The biggest failure being that people weren’t able to sign up – pretty problematic on the first day of our site going live!

Industry as we foresee

The Indian social media scene has changed significantly in recent years, with smartphones playing a major role in this change. India has become increasingly involved with the internet community and the Indian market is usually very open to new kinds of social network. I think that the industry is only going to get bigger and better as so many people engage and communicate through social networks.

Lastly, Are you hiring?

Not at the moment.