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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?

#161

Post by jszymborski »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #100
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…

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…

I'm sorry, but I heartily disagree re: style. I love it. I was just about to write a comment to commend it. Love the way you handle underlines, the font is pleasant, the sidenotes are awesome and I like your background color.

I do agree that the some structure would help with retention, if you're interested in that.

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

#162

Post by jldugger »

> 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.

Niche content is way more long tail than you imagine, and retention is near impossible. I usually don't add an RSS feed to my set until I notice I've read a couple of posts by the same author. That's a really leaky bucket, when you consider the ways an author can fall out of it:

- the content is not my niche - the headline isn't punchy enough to get the click - HN fails to notice your post amid the ever-growing din - HN notices, but I don't do any reading that day - I fail to notice the author has a pattern of quality worth subscribing to

Unless you're writing books, appearing on podcasts and giving keynotes, blogging may be more of a write only medium than a tool for self-promotion. Which can be fine; my personal blog is for two audiences: Google, and hiring companies. I don't track subscribers, but based on my own lax writing rate, I assume I have none =)

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

#163

Post by throwayedidqo »

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…

If most pages get single digit views you should look into your SEO. I wrote blog posts regularly for my last employer.

We didn't promote them at all, but they got 30-500 views a month just from Google search. A lot more when someone linked them.

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

#164

Post by gjstein »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #141
user5994461 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Be careful with font recommendations that aren't really geared for the web! Tufte is pretty particular about the fonts in his book, but they don't transfer well to the web. I also liked the tufts-css style, but ended up rolling my own, so that the widths worked out to be a bit more typographically "acceptable" (shameless plug for my blog layout: http://www.cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email-em...)

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

#165

Post by mygo »

schappim wrote: post #150
acoard wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

5 up votes is not enough vigor to trigger the rigger trigger

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

#166

Post by spo81rty »

ardit33 wrote: post #70
ploggingdev wrote: post #20

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…

30k for a successful blog post is not a lot though. Your average youtub-er personality considers anything less than 100k+ views per post not as a major success. 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

Development related blog posts never get super high traffic. You can't compare an article about some python topic to YouTube video about a mass market consumer tech product.

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

#167

Post by arca_vorago »

someguydave wrote: post #59
arca_vorago wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be on to something here. I bet it was a data based decision...

Yeah I wonder if Google realized that people were reading long form content (much of it hosted off Google) without ads. Thus their own audience was being shunted off-site without revenue. That interpretation only makes sense if you think Google would rather have more good little click monkeys than organizing good content...

From the lack of quality search results and the infestation of ads if you don't use an adblocker, I don't think that interpretation would be too far fetched.

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

#168

Post by xiaoma »

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…

>"Then there are publications about anything and everything. There is no topic."

It's a blog. In this case the topic is the author. That was really common in when that one was started and I enjoy that kind of blog over one designed around a very narrow interest any day. As Andrew pointed out, though, Facebook and others have captured a lot of people's attention and pushed personal blogs into the periphery.

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