Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

For me, the answer is: years after I wrote it, and they will comment or email me and ask for help on something I wrote once for fun then discarded :) I try to help, but it's often hard.

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.

Devon Nash has great videos on YouTube that go in depth into this.

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

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CECW-nko-gY

>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.

It's encouraged on

* https://searchmysite.net/

* https://wiby.me/

* https://feedle.world/

  >How do people find your blog?

Generally soeaking, they don't. I've just checked and my blog has been running since 2004 and I still get very little traffic.

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.

- Identify your goals. Are you blogging for extra income? Do you want to connect with a specific kind of reader, and grow a like-minded community? Do you want to be the best resource on the internet for a subject you love? Are you trying to get a new job? Will you write a book about this subject someday? Your goals inform how you'll promote your content.

- 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.