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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?

#181
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the simplest thing like Google Analytics

Google Analytics 'session duration' is not what you expect it to be.

Yeah. When a visitor goes from Page-A to Page-B, only then, GA counts it.

If the visitor gets to Page-A and gets out, GA doesn't count it.

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

#182

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…

You article about hiring a C++ developer made me chuckle on the interviewees' answers; apart from the "virus" one I've also heard all the others - and had the same thoughts. You'd think that one would prepare a bit more before being interviewed, but I guess that's more common that I expected.

By the way, I really liked your interview questions; very straightfoward and to the point.

Something I usually ask when interviewing is the difference from C and C++ - specially if the résumé lists "C/C++" instead of separating both - as many people view C++ as a "C with classes".. which is not a fifth of what modern C++ really is.

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

#183
post #91
post #71

I can share my experience on why I stopped having an RSS reader and keeping track of blogs, it kind of summarizes also some opinions from old avid readers I know. TLTR: Lack of good content, and amazing alternatives. - Huge backlog: I used to track 2k+ blogs on Bloglines/Google Reader, it was nearly impossible to read everything, but the collective mind of the internet made easy to keep track of what my close friends…

I just use Twitter to find articles to read now instead of RSS. That plus I check HN/a few specific subreddits/WSJ for articles I want to read, then I usually put them on Instapaper to read later on my phone/kindle.

Same, i recently decided to overhaul my RSS addiction. I did a ruthless curation of my RSS feeds and picked only a select few that i truly enjoyed. Then, i looked for the publication's Twitter and added the accounts to the relevant list.

The upside is i no longer feel compelled to finish reading everything in Feedly. Before, the unread markers was distracting.

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

#184
post #115

I started blogging a few months ago https://dailyhealthpoints.wordpress.com/ Each article requires me to read on average one science paper, and I spend also quite some time on editing. Now I have 300 subscribers but sadly it doesn't have the same success as a blog I started ten years ago. That blog was focused on tech and startups. It didn't require any research, every post was only 30mn to 1hr of work, and generated…

I actually see the rise of social media as a double edged sword when it comes to blogging.

On one hand, you have people spending more time updating their feeds.

On the other hand, it also means people are less compelled to start a personal blog describing their day to day lives (remember the days of livejournal?).

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

#185
post #29
post #12

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%.…

I wonder, is "social" not practically equivalent to "Facebook" these days and dwarfs all other (including search/newsletter)? Except for niche cases...

I believe by social, he probably meant cross posting links to social media as a form of marketing.

It's tricky though, because Twitter is a micro-blogging service, and Facebook has Groups and Pages.

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

#186

Fans of long-form content won't agree, but if you want to be heard, try to engage at Twitter and Facebook. Most of the web readers in this day and age have very little engagement spans, and use diversified channels to consume content. So, in order to attract engaged audience to your blog - you either have to spend lots of efforts of content marketing, or you can simply shift to the medium of popular choice. When I ha…

I feel Twitter as a microblog works for short updates (really short, 140 char!)

Longer ones can fit in a tweetstorm.

But I think 1,000 word posts deserve a proper blog post of its own. Correct me if i'm wrong, but wasn't that Medium's initial objective?

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