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Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

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

#21

Post by bluehatbrit »

People will follow you if they find most of your content useful or interesting, and it's much easier to make your content useful initially and experiment to find the interesting stuff.

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.

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

#22

Post by sm_ts »

I write a blog that at its peak it had a not-huge-but-not-small-either userbase, and a massive TIL.

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.

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

#24

Post by drchiu »

I started a technical/tutorial Rails blog (codewithrails.com) about a month ago. I’ve mostly just shared links in places where Rubyists and Rails dev hang out.

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.

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

#25

Post by bityard »

My experience is if you write anything even semi-thoughtful, it usually shows up on HN eventually, through some invisible force that science has yet to identify. :)

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...

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

#26

Post by eismcc »

drchiu wrote: post #24

I started a technical/tutorial Rails blog (codewithrails.com) about a month ago. I’ve mostly just shared links in places where Rubyists and Rails dev hang out. 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 lear…

How do you share your links without looking like a spammer?

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

#29

Post by PaulHoule »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #7
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?

20 links is 4 links a day for 5 days a week, not quite a full time job.

It is more work that most people want to do.

I know somebody who was using Medium who was really impressed that he got 70 views on something he wroter. I found it hard to break it to him that I would have been impressed if I'd gotten got 70,000 views on a blog post -- and that's the difference between the easy way and the hard way.

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

#30

Post by drchiu »

eismcc wrote: post #26
drchiu wrote: post #24

I started a technical/tutorial Rails blog (codewithrails.com) about a month ago. I’ve mostly just shared links in places where Rubyists and Rails dev hang out. 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 lear…

How do you share your links without looking like a spammer?

I think you will need to apply an internal litmus test. For me, I ask myself whether what I’ve written and shared would be something I’d want to read myself.
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