11–20 of 186 posts
As another commenter has said, people don't bother with blogs anymore. Seems that Facebook pages are the way to go for engagement. Instagram too, if your content works for the medium. I think Twitter is good for some niches, but its popularity wildly varies by country. Dramatically sad as you can't get more walled garden than that, but that is the future we built.
- social
- search
- newsletter
a) first you need to get one of them right
then b) "the strong feed the poor", convert them from one channel into the other. and yeah, if you do it baldy (i.e. newsletter popups, constant reminder to follow you on fb, ...) 99% will hate you, but you can iterate on the 1%.
the big questions: why do you need the quantity? if you do not have a quantity traffic dependent business case (i.e. adsense) then a few people who value your input can be more rewarding then 10 000 skimming over your content and clicking away the newsletter popups & follow me on fb call-to-actions. the strategy follows the goal, "lots of traffic" in itself is a poor goal.
Maybe it's the niches. What was your old blog about compared to the new ones? Also, the sheer amount of material you have to compete with for people's attention is insane these days. I also wonder if most people still read long articles. Do people prefer video or podcasts over lengthy articles?
I also wonder about the same things (re:last two lines you wrote). I'd love to make a podcast, like 99% Invisible, but who wouldn't?
It does depend on the sort of blog you're running, though. Information-heavy blogs addressing actual urgent needs still do OK if they're appropriately promoted. More opinion-focused blogs do much less well unless they're very unusual in some way.
(Sweeping statements, obviously.)
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've been wondering about this as well. I just started out blogging (just a personal blog with a ton of opinions and software stuff) and have no idea if it gets an audience or not . I don't really care if I do, besides the feeling that if I look at the stats, it equals talking to a wall sometimes.
Personally speaking I would be more likely to follow your technical vlog channel on YouTube rather than a text based blog. The problem for the blogger is the increased production value investment required compared with a text blog. Not only do you have to create the script, you must edit video and do other things that are probably not your primary interest. Code snippets become screen share videos etc. I think this can make video blogging highly time consuming but if done right it's probably easier to get views. Text blogs are appealing because it's all you need to do is write the content and put it up. We coders like the idea of writing code and putting it up and getting success but anyone who's started a startup and made something knows that never works, there's a whole bunch of other 'business stuff' that needs to be done in the same way a vlog requires more 'production stuff' to be done.
there are three pillars of "editorial content traffic generation" - social - search - newsletter it does not really matter which with one you start a) first you need to get one of them right then b) "the strong feed the poor", convert them from one channel into the other. and yeah, if you do it baldy (i.e. newsletter popups, constant reminder to follow you on fb, ...) 99% will hate you, but you can iterate on the 1%.…
With the former blog, I had the social part mostly down since I told every person I could about it, and sometimes wrote 4 posts per day, and this eventually helped with search. There was never a newsletter but many signed up to receive posts in their inbox.
The biggest problem is the age-old one: if the right people saw the blog(s) then it'd be more of a hit. Since I mostly write for pleasure, as I mentioned in another comment, I don't need huge quantities of people reading what I write, but it'd sure be nice to be appreciated (to go from 1-10 views per day up to 100). With the old blog, I'd be "disappointed" if I only got 500 views per day. Now I'd be happy with 75-100.
I'll look at how to reinforce the pillars you mention. Thanks
Have you considered video blogging instead of a text based blog? If you are anything like me you are reluctant to put yourself in front of a camera because let's face it, most of us visiting HN are probably not fashionistas with the best hairdos but I have considered it because I think this is increasingly a more popular way to blog. Video blogs offer greater accessibility and appeal to the laziness of human beings (…
Getting page views for well written and original content (especially tech topics) is not hard, in fact there is a severe dearth of good technical writing. How often you post, how many sharing options you provide should not be what you optimize for. Optimize for writing original, well informed content that shows domain expertise. Such content has no problem attracting an audience. But the problem with writing such content is that it's pretty time consuming.
Let me share my own anecdata. Three of my posts got significant attention when I posted them to my blog, around 30k pageviews and now I get a few thousand views every month from search engines and people sharing my posts on social networks. I don't spend any time promoting it, only post to a couple of subreddits initially, that's it, (and HN where my posts did not gain traction so far) .
Posts :
https://www.ploggingdev.com/2017/01/multiprocessing-and-mult...
https://www.ploggingdev.com/2016/12/performance-measurement-...
https://www.ploggingdev.com/2016/12/analyzing-programming-la...
Especially the first post linked above has gotten most of the attention and now ranks on Google for python multiprocessing and multithreading related keywords. My blog is clearly not very popular by HN standards, but it has given me a good understanding of what type of content has no issue attracting attention as explained above.
Edit : You might find the following post by Nate interesting, it talks about how to choose topics to write about (among other things) : https://www.nateberkopec.com/blog/2017/03/10/how-i-made-self...