I've seen a few posts encouraging people to start blogging or collect their TILs in the form of a blog. I find this to be a great idea, but if it's meant to be public, how would you approach the sharing of this information?
I don't love the idea of spamming social media with links just to get people to discover your blog, but maybe that's the best approach.
The other option I guess is to just post and let it be discovered, but would that ever happen organically in today's internet?
From the other end, as a reader, how do you keep track of interesting blogs? Is RSS still being used? Personally I've realized I read blog posts shared on social media or here on HN, which comes back to as a blogger you might have to spam your links to get traffic.
Less tongue-in-cheek: the best blogs I read are those that the author just puts on the web with no expectation of "gaining an audience." They simply write about whatever resonates with them, things they want to share with the world. At the most, they _might_ link to their posts on social media.
Once you start doing SEO tricks, trying to sell people your newsletter, or start peddling an affiliate links program, my opinion is that you've crossed over into "content creator" territory, which is a derogatory slur in my book...
I use use the POSSE method: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (https://indieweb.org/POSSE). I typically republish my articles on HN, Reddit, DEV, Medium, HashNode, Twitter, SubStack and HackerNoon. I also have an RSS/XML feed.
85.5% of my traffic is through organic search, 10% is direct, the rest is referral/social/email.
I get the most engagement when sharing articles on Reddit for most of my posts since I can target specific communities where people might be interested to read what I write.
I also have a small MailChimp newsletter where I write occasional updates on what I'm working on and start campaigns for my latest blog posts (once a month, ideally).
The blog uses Nuxt and the Nuxt content module. I have Google Analytics, Adsense, Drift integration which has resulted in some good connections with people. I also use the Google Search Console to learn about what people are searching for when they click on my articles.
Over the last 7 days I have had a little over 400 visitors. Last year I got a $103 payment from Google for Adsense ads.
>How do people find your blog?
Mind you, I just write about things that tickle my fancy or which annoy me. So I've definitely not got a 'target demographic' --unless there's some othe poor sods out there with the same eclectic interest as me.
Mainly I just write my blog because I like writing and I like using language. So it's more just scratching a personal itch than anything intended to draw a lot of traffic. For me, writing occasional blog posts is the literary counterpart of doodling in my sketchbooks [which I've also been doing since forever].
I don't have any stats-gathering software running on my blog. So I don't even know how many visitors I get. The only way I can ascertain there are any at all is from occasional comments being posted. Ironically, jusdging by this metric, my most popular articles seem to be fairly run of the mill 'how-tos' rather than the ones I'm most pleased with, from a 'quality of my writing' point of view.
How do people find me? Search engines I think. Many times I have encountered an obscure error message, searched for it on the webs, and found it documented in my own blog post.
Write what you're doing and how you're doing. Document the errors and the solutions for that error. Don't restrict your blog post to a list of steps. Things can and will go wrong. Document them too.
I read the mailing lists looking for answers and from time to time I would see someone had asked a question which I knew the answer. I would post the link to my blog post.
Start off by documenting everything you do as you do it. When you're replacing old SSDs with new and faster SSDs, write about that. Document each step. Someone else will be grateful that you did. Likely, that person will be you when you do to do it again a few years later.
One of my most popular blog posts is how to untar a tarball.... Do not underestimate what others will find useful.
They don’t (:
I still find it useful to write. Helps me to improve my writing skills – or at least prevents my writing skills to deteriorate.
It's encouraged on
As for blogs I want to follow, I'm using inoreader, it's good at following RSS as well as regular blogs without syndication.
My most popular articles are very simple ones answering common questions. Those kind of posts are pretty easy to make and seem to have continued traffic with no effort. It's mostly search engine traffic and then a bunch of company wikis that must be linking to some of my guides.
If you want to go hard you on audience building you probably want a good 60-40% of your content to clearly deliver value to the reader. Large how-to guides are good here, especially if you focus on a specific technology set.
The rest of your posts can be the more opinion pieces that you experiment with over time and refine. That gives people an easy pathway into your blog via search engines and plenty of content to explore once they get there.
For content, I mainly blog because it’s a useful way for me to understand things. If I can explain it, I’ll have a better understanding.
Whether people find it useful, well that’s a personal question and point of view. But I’ll continue to share what I’ve learned myself both for the community and as notes for my future forgetful self.
So far, people have been discovering my blog through word of mouth and them sharing it to their friends.
Blog and TIL are two radically different things.
I write the TIL for myself, and it's open, but it's pretty much useless to anybody else. This is because TILs reflect the writer's mental structure, which is very individual; the topic has been discussed on HN before.
Regarding the blog, I didn't/don't publicize it at all, but it actually got noticed by some BigCo.
It's important to ask oneself what's the purpose of having it discovered. Fame and glory :)? Career? And/or just helping people?
In the case of my blog, I didn't care about it being discovered. However, it did help people; if one cares about writing quality posts, people will find it and use it as reference, in a virtuous cycle, although there is a limit - blog do "age" with time, even if some articles stay popular.
The discoverability will be based on the fact that the most popular (useful) posts will be used as reference over the web.
If the target is being popular for the sake of being popular... well, then one gets into the SEO topic. I don't personally advise this, but to each their own :)
Having a popular (or so) blog doesn't necessarily help with the career. It can help as part of a portfolio, but prospective employers will either ignore it, or take just a peek, unless they know it already - in that case, it's definitely a big help.
It is indexed by most search engines and alas by SEO companies. They sometimes index my site several times a day, yet there are only 200 to 500 real users per day (verified with Google, Apache's logs and Cloudflare). I use Google [2] and Bing console webmaster tools (which results sometimes in a lot of work because Google has weird requests). It is probably a waste of time for a low traffic blog but as I use my own code, I don't want to make mistakes. I have 500 to 900 clicks per month on Google.
The best thing I find for traffic is to insert my blog URL in my signature when I post on very specific websites. (see @dazc comment).
* One on my daughters has a small shop selling weighted blankets for France and possibly western Europe. She has also ~400 visitors per day, does not care of any form of SEO (even low hanging fruits), but once per week she makes a Twitter post [3] about her cat which is also her site's mascot.
[0] https://padiracinnovation.org/News/
[1] https://sistercatblankets.com
[2] https://search.google.com/search-console
[3] https://twitter.com/SCBlankets/status/1598316934528991233
1. Use a 10 to 1 ratio of producing good content and promoting your own (for example 10 good posts in the technology subreddit, and one which is an article from your technology blog)
2. Zero to One principle. Write thoughtful comments in areas were people who would be interested hang out. Subreddits, Twitter Circles, HN etc. People will click on your profile and see links to your other content and check it out. Commit to a few of these in the spaces you choose every day
3. Produce good quality content for a long time. If it's evergreen content, it will just become more valuable to people who discover you, and they will become more likely to stick
4. Utilize social media. But don't just spam a link to your blog post. Chop it up into chunks and syndicate it. If you wrote a long blog post summarize key points in a tweet. Highlight one aspect on Tik Tok or YouTube in a video or short
5. Ask yourself, "How am I different from other people who blog in this space?", "What is my value proposition
Point 3 and 5 are worth highlighting again. Produce good content consistently for a long time, and focus on why your readers will find the content you create valuable. In the beginning don't spread yourself too thin. Maybe just work on posting good blog posts. Once you get a good handle on that you can start branching out to other platforms. I've basically summarized the points in this^1 YouTube video, but it's still worth watching
The reason a lot of blogs don't surface much via organic search is because they don't focus on one single topic. It's hard to be an authority on random thoughts or ramblings unless you are already well known.
Start with a niche and then if/when you gain traction you can expand into other areas.
I did have one case where a job interview skipped a step because "we read your blog and it sounds like you know what you're talking about," so I guess it can kind of act like a portfolio if you link to it on your CV, but otherwise I can't be bothered to promote it.
As for finding content, generally my strategy is to follow hyperlinks on blog posts to other blog posts and bookmark things that interest me like it's still the 90's. Sometimes I don't remember a blog post's title, but I'll remember the title of the one three clicks ago that I bookmarked, and that's how I'll find it again. There's something oddly rewarding about rediscovering some far corner of the world wide web that you'd never get to otherwise, as if the amount of work it took to find is somehow proportional to the value you get from reading it.
Then, after answering this question, ask yourself - is blogging the best way to achieve the goal? This is what led me to delete the small blog I had and concentrate on better things.
With regards to how you find other interesting things to read - nowadays mostly by marginalia search [1]. I've found that I rarely want to read more than one or few posts from a specific blog. Most blogs are not narrow enough and you find a lot of different subjects covered. So it might be better to specifically look for things you are interested in, rather than follow all articles in a blog by a concrete author.
As a reader, I continue to use RSS (self-hosted FreshRSS instance), which is great for tracking other blogs as well as Mastodon feeds. This has been great over the past week, since so many interesting folks are joining Mastodon.
EDIT: To your last point, anything I write that shows up submitted on social media (including HN) is posted by others...I don't tend to post stuff myself.
Nobody cares about Powerbank 2021 reviews or yet another "how to flash a raspi os image on an sd card" - except it contains something new or something not everybody does.
Examples:
- Not interesting (old content): The Top 5 Powerbanks 2021
- Interesting: Building a DIY 100W PD Powerbank[2]
- Not interesting (everybody does it): Copy raspi os to micro SD cards with dd
- Interesting: Copy raspi os to micro SD cards with cp and how Linux deals with files[3]
[1]: https://pilabor.com
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WI9Nwqvplo
[3]: `sudo cp raspi-os.img /dev/sda`
A realistic plan for writing is to write an article a week for 52 weeks.
You can outsource the technical bit to medium or silverback, or you can hack together a static site generator, or install Wordpress or write your own blog software and no matter what have a fight with comment spammers, troubles with indexing, etc.
A book or movie or music publisher spends a lot in marketing to promote its product and you need to also for the same reasons. This could be paid marketing but it's hard for that to be cost effective for a blog. You need to create about 20-50 links for each new blog post, the power of blogs for SEO is that each blog post is a new page that can accumulate links. Posts to social media, comments on blogs, a synopsis of your blog post on LinkedIn, posts on web forums, wikis, etc.
My RSS feed is most of my egress bandwidth to the point that I'm considering putting my RSS feed into my CDN to speed things up.
And my personal answer is: I blog for myself, and knowing that things will be public forever force myself focusing more.
I write mainly about technical stuff that annoys me, or solution to problems I faced and didn't find a solution on the internet.
Sometimes people write me an email asking for some clarification, and my supposition is that people find my blog 'cause they have the same niche problem.
About following other blogs: RSS or mailing list subscriptions. I use hacker news to find interesting blogs.
My blog gets posted to HN sometimes by people who aren't me, and sometimes by me (when I post something I think is important for HN to read in a timely fashion). I also have a mailing list that people sign up for on my website, and I mail it a few times per year (although I hate taking up people's time so right now I usually mail about 0.5 times per year).
Also, why worry about "getting traffic"? Just write; let readers worry about discoverability. If it's good, people will find it.
I agree with your estimation that you need to share links as a blogger to get traffic, but I don’t think it’s necessarily spamming unless (1) you’re intentionally putting out blogspam, or (2) you’re spamming sites/forums that you know aren’t appropriate venues but will read your posts anyways (e.g., flamebait).
As a reader, I mostly rely on Planet aggregators. I am thinking about starting to use Elfeed on Emacs to track blogs. But a large number of them do not include full articles in feeds, which is quite annoying.
Spamming social media is a waste of time, unless you become an expert in social media - and in that case your content will be on social media and not on your blog.
Why do you want many people to read your blog?
Best thing is to write for your own satisfaction, share links to HN now and then if you write something you think is interesting - you'll pick up a few readers and get some interesting interactions.
I am also curious. I've enjoyed Outlook 365 RSS reader for a long time but I just cancelled my subscription. Currently navigating through Thunderbird.
Related: [Ask HN: Do you maintain a list of RSS links of GOAT blogs?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140)
I also find feeds on social media.
You can get a pretty good set of feeds by searching HN for stuff like "ask hn" "favorite blogs"
Too much saturation nowadays, not to mention LLM content generation.
Lastly, there are an exaggerated number of thieves. It's just not worth it to post publicly right now if your intention is to make money from blogging.
As a reader, I use NetNewsWire and RSS.
2. Share on a subreddit that doesn’t mind getting link posts to useful stuff.
So be careful.
- Write THE authoritative post on a subject you are deeply passionate about. For me, this is "tiny machine learning," especially computer vision for single-board computers. A few of my posts are keyword-authoritative for "Raspberry Pi TensorFlow."
patio11's salary negotiation post is a great example of an authoritative post. I've been linking my team-mates to this blog post 2x times a year since it was published, during raise/perf seasons. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
- Publish on a consistent schedule. I struggle with this one, but every successful blog I know posts at least weekly. You'll have more hits the more times you step up to the plate.
- Publish via multiple channels. I run a self-hosted Ghost blog & newsletter, and use Zapier to cross-post to medium.com. Make sure you provide a canonical URL, which tells search engines that your blog is the original source.
- Submit guest posts to a popular publication (again, use a canonical link back to your primary domain)
Example: https://medium.com/towards-data-science/3-ways-to-install-te...
If you inspect the HTML source, you'll see a rel="canonical" link element with href="https://www.bitsy.ai/3-ways-to-install-tensorflow-on-raspber..." telling search engines to index my original post.
- Social media audience. I only have around 2k followers on Twitter, but that generates around 90k impressions each month. My 2023 goal is to write for my LinkedIn network too, which has grown to 1k+ connections.
Posting articles on your main social feed can be effective, but what's more effective is to reply to other people's Twitter threads. Build a library of authoritative posts about something specific, like how to write a Gstreamer plugin in Rust. When you can genuinely add value to a conversation, I think it's ok to mention that you wrote about ____ in Twitter replies. If you don't have a blog post already written, you can write an outline on the spot using Twitter. If the cliff notes version gets positive feedback, you can write the full thing.
I started with something simple - entirely preloaded (all howtos) and static:
1. http://www.strony.toya.net.pl/~vermaden/links.htm
I assume no one ever entered it ... besides me of course.
Then some time later - I though that having that 'static' links site is pointless - lets start 'proper' blog this time. I have chosen Gogle Blogspot this time.
2. https://vermaden.blogspot.com/
... and after several posts I generally abandoned it.
Several years later I made a decision to make another blog ... but this time with some strategy behind.
3. https://vermaden.wordpress.com/
This (3rd) attempt was 'successful' and people sometimes actually visit my blog - sometimes even comment. In March of 2023 I will 'celebrate' the 5th year of that blog. I have made about 100 posts there and I made about 100,000+ views per year:
- https://i.imgur.com/raWvrZj.png
What is the secret of [3.] being successful and [1.] and [2.] definitely not? Sharing.
I do not know what blog (subject matter) you are trying to share - but for IT/UNIX/BSD/Linux related blogs (as mine) you need to share each post on these mediums:
- mastodon
- lobsters
- hacker news
- FreeBSD forums
- reddit (r/BSD)
- reddit (r/FreeBSD)
- reddit (r/unix)
- reddit (r/linux)
Not sure about Facebook/Meta as their 'ecosystem' definitely does not suit my needs.
You need to ask yourself where and how people would try to find your content. They would definitely not browse a catalog of blogs. Maybe they wil ltry the search engine ... but search engines only pick up sites that are somewhat popular. They omit pages/blogs that are 'unknown'. How blogs are known? By many links pointing to them.
In other words - if you do not share your work/posts on all 'relevant' platforms - then you will 'die' in a 'non-known' hell.
If you believe your work - and it is work, you 'waste' your time to write/share these things you do - is valuable - then share them in all possible mediums/medias. If your content is good - you have to do nothing else. If your content is crap - You will immediately get feedback about it :D
One of the things that I really appreciate was the feedback I got. I often assumed that I know a lot about 'X' topic - just to change my mind after several comments later and providing and UPDATE to my blog post :)
I do not know what should I add here more so I will end my comment - but feel free to ask if You have any questions.
Regards, vermaden
My blog is lirorc.github.io :)
