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Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

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Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

#1

Post by bumblewax »

Hi HN,

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

#2

Post by 32gbsd »

Blog traffic is pretty hard to get in the modern internet. Even popular blogs have stagnated to posting only on insta/yt becausee of the instant eyeballs and revenue. In the end it all comes down to how many other sites link to your content.

Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

#3

Post by dazc »

'The other option I guess is to just post and let it be discovered, but would that ever happen organically in today's internet?'

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

#4

Post by JPLeRouzic »

* I have a (very) low traffic blog [0]

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

Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

#6

Post by PaulHoule »

The 3 elements of a successful blog are writing, technical and marketing: to first order they are the same amount of work.

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

#7

Post by JPLeRouzic »

PaulHoule wrote: post #6

The 3 elements of a successful blog are writing, technical and marketing: to first order they are the same amount of work. 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, troub…

> * You need to create about 20-50 links for each new blog post*

It looks like a full time job, doesn't this kill the pleasure to create something very personal?

Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

#8

Post by galdor »

As a writer, I have feeds for my Common Lisp and Emacs posts on Planet Lisp and Planet Emacs respectively. I'm hoping to improve visibility on Twitter, which I started using recently.

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

#9

Post by mobilene »

I've blogged for going on 16 years. I seek an audience, people who want to keep reading what I wrote, rather than virality. I write about a couple of niche topics plus personal essays and stories. The long tail of the Internet brings a fair number of readers and a small number of them stay. Sharing on social media brings most readers, and a larger percentage of them stay. It's really very much bringing on one new audience member at a time. I'm on track for 280,000 pageviews this year. My blog gets good engagement from readers with a fair number of comments on each post, which is what makes it rewarding and worth keeping going. blog.jimgrey.net if you're curious.
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