Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

I used to blog for several years, several years ago, and was able to build up a "large" following, for a small-timer at least (over 10K visitors/mo). In recent years, I've made two slightly niche-subject blogs but find it nearly impossible to get a following, even though I'm dealing in the same general subject matter, quality of posts, research, and media integration.

As of a few years ago it seems like to have a successful blog one must be cross-posting to 6-7 social networks at the same time (ie, for sharing to be frictionless). When I post my newer blog posts in relevant places online, people actually say they like the content, yet visitor numbers don't reflect such sentiment in a sustained manner. I have hundreds of posts, but retention is very low (1 visitor = 1 view, then they leave).

Is the only option these days to be cross-posting? It seems share buttons on each blog post aren't frictionless enough. Either I'm a bit delusional about the quality/interest level or blogging has become a lot harder in terms of audience capture.

My personal view is that people are not used to read blogs anymore, everything has moved to few big social networks. Medium is popular too, but it's more of a HN bubble thing.

People share and like things on social media for their headlines or agenda.

While I'm crying the blogs are dying out, I have noticed myself checking and finding new ones less and less too, despite having HN as my only social media.

Put your blog on on .onion address on the tor network. I get far more traffic from within tor to my hidden service than the exact same copy of the site on run on the clear web.

I don't really think there is any trick to it, but the maturity of a blog is what helps. Even after years of being exposed and publicizing your blog, most people still have no idea that you exist. Imagine all of the people who know that Facebook exist. 1 billion people, at least. Instagram has at least 100 million people. That is A LOT of people. Now how many people know you exist? Likely less than 1% of the Facebook OR the Internet. I always like to stare at this map: http://internet-map.net/

It reminds me of how vast the Internet is and how insignificant my website is. Kind of like looking at Earth, compared to the universe. Yet, the visitors I do get, that happen to come across my website? They were looking for me or accidentally discovered me and most of them are usually happy they found me. I get those emails that let me know they are grateful they are to have found my website, or some article that helped them get a job, or just reading an article made them want to write and submit their own article to my website.

I've been running a website (http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com) for several years now and I'd say its fairly popular. It is a niche which focuses on jobs, careers, and the workplace. In the beginning, I used to just post everything myself, but it became near impossible to keep coming up with topics, though the topics in this niche are so vast and cover just about anything and everything pertaining to a job.

I remember when my visitor base just consisted of my mom and my girlfriend. 35 visitors was the highlight of my day. Years later, the website is receiving about a thousand people a day and it varies, less or more, at times depending on the month, season, or trends of unemployment or if a certain article is just popular that month or a keyword or phrase just hits what people are looking for, or if Google just happens to change their algorithm to favor my website for that week or month. I have had a few companies submit articles and take out their own Facebook ads to drive traffic to it (their own article). Many factors can play a role in driving traffic to the website and other than what I can learn from the few analytics scripts I have installed, I just accept whatever traffic I get and I am grateful for any traffic. The website has been penalized at least twice, the latter just a few months ago, and without Google, traffic was cut in half (based on a 2-week penalty).

I think just a month after opening up the blog and welcoming posts by others, in essence, creating a community, and it grew in popularity, mostly because when you offer to publish articles for people, they tend to share it as well. Repeat visitors and new authors, the traffic just keeps coming. But it also technically remains as a steady flow. I don't have the resources or money to spend on social media interacting with fans, so I really just rely on my contributors and readers to do the work with a few automated scripts that randomly choose an article every couple of hours and post it to Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn.

I have learned over the years: just keep writing. Google will help you get found eventually. There are articles I wrote years ago that only received a few hundred visitors when first published, yet you can get one day where it happens to go viral. I went in for an interview once and it was so awful that I decided to write about it. It was just the way this woman shook my hand! I could not stop thinking about it that it probably ruined my own interview for me. ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/power-of-the-hand... ) In the beginning, it might have had only 300 visitors or so, but then one day, the article went viral! It was probably one person posting it on Reddit or something, and everyone who saw it was curious about it. At the moment, it has almost $10.5k views.

It is certainly easier when you do have a niche. I write tons of articles and I have tons of people contributing every week, every year -- always new names, but plenty of people I've been talking to for years who love to share their articles about investing or real estate or whatever the case may be, so I'm never without an article to publish.

I also stick to a schedule: Monday through Friday, 10 AM. Occasionally, I'll publish two articles in a day. I'm sure that publishing more articles per day will likely drive up traffic, but I feel this schedule just works for me. I write out infographics which take time and spend time ensuring articles are quality and unique. It also creates a queue which causes people to wait and see if their articles get published, which keeps them coming back to check to see when it got published. I also ask for donations which often help articles "jump the line" and get published earlier, though I think I have only had less than 10 contributors actually donate anything. Most people would just prefer to wait the 1-2 weeks that it takes to get published.

It definitely isn't a straightforward "if you build it, they will come." Worst advice that anyone could ever give you about starting a blog, imo. They can't come because they don't really know that you exist. Other bad advice is that you can build a blog and it will just make lots of money. Far from it. You need to have passion for blogging and your niche. Most of your website or your blog's existence means you are doing it for free.

Otherwise, and I am guilty of it: You lose interest. There have been times where I almost thought about giving up, but then I get emails from someone wanting to publish an article on the website or just thanking me for doing what I do, and it keeps me going and sparks that interest and passion all over again.

Don't get me wrong, there are some bloggers out there who have learned how to make blogging a living, upselling Amazon links, writing sponsored posts for companies, signing up for and posting affiliate links, or attracting mainstream companies who want to be mentioned on the blog with links back to their products or websites. It is all in finding the audience, the niche, the traffic, and appealing to those who will pay you to keep doing what you are doing.

You have to keep mentioning yourself and keep trying to show the world that you exist and you have a purpose. Well, not only you, but your website. I definitely don't take all the credit for where the website is today and what it has become, as it has hundreds of different personalities on it, but the website has become a community in which everyone is helping everyone else to gain some exposure. Every new post on the website is a new gateway and there will always be someone out there who is looking for exactly what you wrote: Whether it helps them or if they were just looking to read something entertaining, they will eventually find you.

My blog also doesn't get too much attention. And it was always like that. I was writing in a couple of places, a couple of my blogs, and on a corporate blog. My most successful blog post had about 10k of visitors across the first year.

I also noticed that the average session time is about 2 minutes, sometimes is just too short to read through a blog post. So I assume that people come there just to get a solution to a problem they have, not to read through all the text.

Another thing is that over 70% of my blog entries are from two posts, a tutorial like ones. And this is only because someone found them informative enough to place a link on stackoverflow, and some other places.

At the very beginning I wanted to earn on the blog enough to work only on the blog. In reality that's impossible for a technical blog, and instead I just treat it as an interesting part of my CV.