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Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

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Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#141

Post by AndrewStephens »

user5994461 wrote: post #125
kutkloon7 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About your blog, IMHO a little re-styling would help a lot. I do like minimal layouts, but the serif font doesn't quite work for me. Also, maybe add some structure? Your blogs seem to cover a broad range of topics. I am mostly interested in technical articles, but I have to actively filter out the stuff that I'm interested in (by reading the titles and guessing the topic; this takes quite some mental energy and might…

Allow me to be mean for a minute: Agreed, the font on the homepage nearly killed my eyes. Then "Here you will find various projects and musings. No information about sheep or horses though - sorry about that." Why is it called sheep.horse then? I am not even getting into how that seems like a spam domain to sell viagra or whatever. Then there are publications about anything and everything. There is no topic. And when…

Thanks for your comments, I understand what you are saying about the font - I am experimenting with Tufte-style layouts and that is the font they recommend. I've noticed that it looks much better on MacOSX than on Windows based browsers.

I also know what you are talking about with the related articles. I have not yet implemented such a feature in the software that builds the pages but it is on the to-do list. However, on my old blog I did have such a feature and it was rarely used.

Part of the ethos of my site is to make the article text king and minimize everything else. That is why the header is so small and I haven't prioritized a bunch of internal links on each page. I have no ads and have nothing to sell so there is no monetary incentive to capture readers.

I have noticed that the header is stupidly small on mobile - I'll get around to reworking this one day.

I do get a kick out of knowing people read my stuff, but I am usually irritated by the stupid tricks other sites use to squeeze one more page-view out of you so I refuse to follow the same dark path.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#142

Post by AndrewStephens »

dorianm wrote: post #132
AndrewStephens wrote: post #77

I've blogged ( https://sheep.horse/ ) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt: * Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing. * I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site…

BTW, the font looks huge on smaller desktop browser windows: http://i.imgur.com/08ntU0K.png (Most of the time, I use half my screen for the browser and half for my terminal)

Yeah, the style is a little weird on smaller screen sizes - this is not intentional. Another thing to fix.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#143

Post by puranjay »

xs wrote: post #128

I get 3,000 visitors a day to my blog. Here are some of my tips: * The more content, the more opportunities people will have to find you * Quality content builds brand. When people search google and remember they got something good from your site last time, they may be happy to find you can help them again * Tons of optimization should be considered such as: Clean URLs, fast page load times, canonical URLs, A+ on you…

Essentially, blogging should be a part-time job if you want to get any real traffic to it. The old days of "blog and they will come" are far behind us.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#144

Post by codazoda »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #77

I've blogged ( https://sheep.horse/ ) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt: * Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing. * I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site…

I don't see the same result on my own blog (actually a wiki).

I've posted hundreds of how-to type topics over the years. I started simply recording instructions for myself that I didn't want to forget. Most of those posts get single digit traffic, some of them get an early boost on Reddit, but a few of them gain popularity via search and those ones stay popular (a couple of them has been popular for a decade).

I can never predict which will gain popularity and I often don't know why they stay popular. I hear odd stories on some of them such as an associate at a store sharing it with a customer.

I often look at my site stats and try to monetize the pages that are getting a lot of organic traffic. I've had mild success with that. Most of those pages get their traffic from Google but a recent article (which got a bump from Reddit) is getting 16% direct traffic. It's hard to tell why. I highly doubt people are typing in my very long URL.

I've never figured it out so I write to help people and some of that becomes popular.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#145

Post by wanqu »

tmaly wrote: post #126
wanqu wrote: post #123

I did some automation for my blog: https://medium.com/@wanquribao/wanqu-5-english-tech-startup-... Auto publishing to ~10 different channels, including weibo, twitter, fb, iOS push notification, chrome push notif. ... It works.

I really liked your write up on indiehackers. I am not Chinese, but I can use google translate. If I wanted to use some of the Chinese based channels you use, what would be your recommendation?

You can start with Weibo. You can get a Weibo account with a phone number or email address. Many famous US brands or celebrities have a Weibo account nowadays. Some of them have more followers on Weibo than on Twitter :)

Some may argue that Wechat's official account is better than Weibo in terms of reaching users & engagement, as every Chinese internet user is on Wechat now. But it's tedious to get an Wechat official account: https://admin.wechat.com/

Old school email newsletter may work for reaching well-educated Chinese internet users. However, Chinese people don't use email much. Again, everyone's on Wechat.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#146

Post by personlurking »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #77

I've blogged ( https://sheep.horse/ ) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt: * Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing. * I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site…

Thanks. Rentention is the big one. It's the problem - the lack of it - I notice the most. But I tend to agree with your assessment as a whole. Of all my blogs, past and present, and the thousands of posts on them, one single post got real traction. The reason? It got reblogged a dozen times, always with a link back to my blog as the source. Obviously none of that was in my control.

But I'm not after traction like that (although it'd be nice). I just want to reach an audience that cares.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#147

Post by personlurking »

xs wrote: post #128

I get 3,000 visitors a day to my blog. Here are some of my tips: * The more content, the more opportunities people will have to find you * Quality content builds brand. When people search google and remember they got something good from your site last time, they may be happy to find you can help them again * Tons of optimization should be considered such as: Clean URLs, fast page load times, canonical URLs, A+ on you…

> Keep improving them. Can you explain it better now? Are there typos you missed before?

Are you essentially saying to go back and rewrite/improve old blog posts? Just for clarification.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#148

Post by personlurking »

Udo wrote: post #72

I closed my blog last year, after more than ten years of creating admittedly uneven quality content. The impetus for me was that I was getting relatively good traffic but engagement was non-existent. I came to the conclusion I wasn't really getting anything out of it anymore, as far as I could tell neither was anyone else, and general IT blogs are a dime a dozen. Absolutely, attracting a blog audience has become hard…

I wish your post weren't true, but it hits the nail on the head on all fronts.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#149

Post by qznc »

lutusp wrote: post #110

> Has attracting a blog audience become harder? I've been involved with the Internet virtually since it began, and we're now in its third phase. The phases: 1. Forum for technical discussions and data transfer. 2. Soapbox for social communication. 3. Virtual mall. The "virtual mall" identity is now so strong and all-encompassing that if you're not selling something, people begin to distrust you -- the opposite of the…

I just subscribed to your purgatory feed. :)

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#150

Post by schappim »

acoard wrote: post #133
savanaly wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff) Eh? I have been reading HN for years and never once have I looked at the username of the person who posted a link, unless someone in the comments makes a reference to them. Do other people do that? Wh…

I absolutely know of at least one group of friends/colleagues who are all active on HN and whenever they see each other's posts will upvote them. I've stayed away from them (other reasons) since before I found out, but when I heard it explained why I'd seen them frontpaged a few times.

Interesting that they are not triggering the voter ring detection.
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