61–70 of 186 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading these comments makes me think of a crazy conspiracy theory: Google killed Reader to promote search.
The common theory is they did it to boosts Google plus. They wanted you to follow blogs interest on G+ rather than more directly via Reader/RSS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As silly as it may sound, my problem might be due to writing about my own interests. I'm not offering help or advice, I wouldn't even say I'm offering specific info (since what I do is more exploratory), and I generally leave opinions out of it. If I had to explain it, I'm like a somewhat randomized, editorialized Wikipedia for a specific topic. I want readers to click around as if on Wikipedia, so they can gather a…
First, OT, I'm unable to edit my comment so sorry for the typos, my spell-checker was apparently on holiday. Now, to address your reply, people _are_ opinion-forming beings, its our human nature. We do have opinions even if we try to convince our-selves we don't. Writing a blog without exposing your opinion just so you won't offend anyone is an intellectual humanity-denying crime. Its a form of self-castration in my…
I usually put my posts on various social media, but the only ones that really have an influence are Reddit, sometimes hacker news and Twitter.
I usually get around 5k pageviews a month. Around 2 visits per visitor (+ ~30% getting cached by CloudFlare). I have a stable rising tendency of visitors, even when I don't post new articles for a long time (month-two).
In my opinion it's really important to optimize for search engines. A huuuge part of my page visits come from google searches.
Here's their final analysis:
The experts have been telling us all along: focus on quality, promotion and measurement. And we finally seem to be listening. Quality beats quantity. Grow your email list, check your Analytics and promote your content on several channels. We are going in the right direction.
Here’s how bloggers break down:
The average blogger… spends 1-3 hours writing 500-1000 words weekly and usually checks Analytics. The average blogger with “strong results”… spends 2-3 hours writing 500-1500 words several times per week and always checks Analytics.
I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.
I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.
I've had a blog since 2009 ( https://www.thenaterhood.com/blog ). My personal network (classmates at the time) were, and still are, my biggest officially subscribed base as far as what I'm able to track with minimal effort. I've been posting much more regularly this year - once a week, versus periodically, as a way to vent some of my frustration with the current state of affairs. Otherwise, I've been doing pretty muc…
You could still track some of them using server logs, and a desktop log analysis tool (like Web Log Storming [1]). As long as they're downloading the HTML, their access will have to show up in the server log. Not as convenient as logging into Google Analytics, but with the amount of spamming of GA lately, I've been thinking more about going back to old desktop tools to solve some of my metrics questions.
These are just impressions though. I believe it is harder to attract returning readers now.
I've had a blog since 2009 ( https://www.thenaterhood.com/blog ). My personal network (classmates at the time) were, and still are, my biggest officially subscribed base as far as what I'm able to track with minimal effort. I've been posting much more regularly this year - once a week, versus periodically, as a way to vent some of my frustration with the current state of affairs. Otherwise, I've been doing pretty muc…
> they seem to be harder to track these days. Most of my personal network uses adblock, ghostery, or other similar extensions to stay off the radar, so their visits don't show up You could still track some of them using server logs, and a desktop log analysis tool (like Web Log Storming [1]). As long as they're downloading the HTML, their access will have to show up in the server log. Not as convenient as logging int…
It does make it a little harder to determine new vs returning visitors though. Not impossible, but harder. To me, knowing that is more important because that's how you know you have an audience, versus just a bunch of people visiting from HackerNews, for example.
No. 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…
Eg. Digital Foundry (tech related) gets on average anywhere between 30k and 140k views per post. The successful ones are over 100k. https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalFoundry