If your goal is to build an audience: focus on individual posts, not the blog as a whole. You don't need to spam links to your blog to drive traffic: I've written some blog posts that I have never shared anywhere but get a continual stream of traffic because they answer questions that people google. If you write a post that you think will be valuable to a specific audience (e.g: HN readers) then you can share it with confidence (you do not need to feel like you're spamming) but sharing every post you write just for the sake of it is pointless: focus instead on writing valuable things. After you've got a bunch of posts that are regularly being read you'll have the information you need to convert them into readers of your blog, e.g: if your most popular posts about AWS, you'll know that there's an opportunity there to produce more of those type of posts and build an audience.
Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#12[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#13> Is RSS still being used?
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)
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#14Link aggregation and social media, followed by RSS, followed by word of mouth, followed by search engine results. At least, that’s my rough impression based on my request log and the number of people who recognize my blog when I meet them IRL.
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).
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#15Here's my blog: https://briancaffey.github.io/
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#16Hopefully they don't, good things must be hidden in this era of ours.
Aaaand here's the one person on this thread who's blog I might actually want to read ;)
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#17Google, Hacker News (https://seliger.com/blog), Twitter, people emailing each other, etc.
As a reader, I use NetNewsWire and RSS.
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#18I mostly write for myself, but occasionally a discussion with a friend or colleague will come up and I'll say "hey, I wrote a blog post about this" and share the link with them.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#19People generally discover my blog via LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, Lobsters and Hacker News. I personally have no idea how big the following for my blog is and I really don't care to know. If you keep writing consistently you end up getting more domain authority and people will find you more easily on search engines. If your only goal is to make number go up, then you will have to chain-spam things. I think I have found a way to avoid having to do that by having my blog automatically post to Mastodon when I make a new post.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
#20I only write for myself, so I've got nothing in the way of efforts to be found.
As for blogs I want to follow, I'm using inoreader, it's good at following RSS as well as regular blogs without syndication.