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What I learned in ten years of blogging

ferrucc.io

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Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#71

Post by reificator »

mortivore wrote: post #65
alpha_squared wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems with rating systems for content is they can often lead to brigading to suppress/promote content. At which point, you're on an infinite whack-a-mole marathon to curb that sort of behavior.

That's a good point, but what about a rating system that isn't directly user generated? Imagine that information on the number of times an article/content is viewed, and the length of time that content is viewed was used to generate a rating for that piece of content. There could probably be other indirect factors for "content weight" that could go into the rating.

You've invented the "YouTube Algorithm". (because it's one monolithic thing, right?)

No one has ever taken issue with the YouTube Algorithm before.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#72

Post by chubot »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #31
SonicSoul wrote: post #17

One well researched article is better than a lot of mediocre content I remember similar advice on patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) blog that i really took to heart. something along the lines of "it's better to have a few laser polished articles, than a ton of content". so to this date i start writing posts and quit half way through to keep only my favorite ideas up there.. there is another camp i.e. Seth Godin who write a…

I started a website in 2005 that is still in operation today. We started out posting 1-2 articles per week, I had a lot of spare time then. But that rate was unsustainable with our small team and small budget, and we reached a point of burnout, and had to decide whether to slow down or shut down. After a hiatus to mentally recuperate, we opted to continue writing, though publishing less often and digging deeper into…

I know it's hard, but I wouldn't worry about such comments. Those are clearly not about you, and about some other suffering that person is going through. It doesn't relate to your site at all.

I've gotten some angry comments on my blog but I've ignored them, and they go away. When you reach a large audience, there's always going to be some portion that is disturbed. That's just how the world is.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#73

Post by gwern »

ta3216 wrote: post #30

I thought I read somewhere that ads make a blog seem more authoritative so I disagree about not having ads.

I don't know about 'authoritative', but ads do seem to hurt. The existing experimental and quasi-experimental literature shows very bad effects on user behavior:

1. "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio", Huang et al 2018: https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... [experimental]

2."The Effect of Ad Blocking on [Firefox] User Engagement with the Web", Miroglio et al 2018: https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-... [quasi]

3. and my own A/B test: https://www.gwern.net/Ads [experimental]

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#74

Post by coldtea »

heavyset_go wrote: post #69
baby wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how you get a successful blog. Look at popular blogs, and when I say popular blogs I mean blogs where people keep on checking your posts, participate regularly in conversations, etc. They are all highly active. On the other side, blogs that post rarely AND that are famous are very rare. People tend to forget about them. Note that a post that buzzes thanks to a link on HN or reddit doesn't make it a popula…

This is true. If you run your blog like a business, as in you have a real need for growth and to turn a profit, you will need to pump out content on a regular basis.

Well, Daring Fireball hardly writes 1-2 posts a month (and usually small), and yet..

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#75

Post by ghaff »

heavyset_go wrote: post #69
baby wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how you get a successful blog. Look at popular blogs, and when I say popular blogs I mean blogs where people keep on checking your posts, participate regularly in conversations, etc. They are all highly active. On the other side, blogs that post rarely AND that are famous are very rare. People tend to forget about them. Note that a post that buzzes thanks to a link on HN or reddit doesn't make it a popula…

This is true. If you run your blog like a business, as in you have a real need for growth and to turn a profit, you will need to pump out content on a regular basis.

>If you run your blog like a business

That is a big "if" though. A lot of blogs don't try to be businesses. Personally, I use my personal blog to write about things I'm interested in writing about whether it's hobby-related stuff or technology. About a year ago I was thinking about starting a separate travel and food blog I was going to be more serious about and quickly realized I really couldn't be bothered.

If you're going to run a blog as a business, you also probably need to have a clear area of focus and I'm just not interested in doing that. A lot of my tech stuff also ends up running in other places these days where it gets better readership anyway.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#76

Post by ghaff »

toyg wrote: post #57
paulpauper wrote: post #29

For SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words) Just more vague tips that maybe worked for him and won't for most. i have several articles on my own blog/website that are over 4000 words and all original content. Want to guess how much search engine traffic they get? Z-e-r-o

I have the opposite “problem”: my posts get weird traffic because of higher rankings than they would deserve. One thing I noticed is that titles matter: a “how to do X” is more likely to emerge than clever puns or artistic sentences - which is typically what one tends to use after writing longer essays.

Yeah. People here like to complain about "clickbait" but that's what headlines are--and they were long before there was such a thing as a click. I write for a number of different websites and headlines (which the editor often writes or changes) are pretty much always very direct and self-explanatory. By and large, headlines (especially online) aren't the place for clever but obscure literary references.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#77

Post by heavyset_go »

coldtea wrote: post #74
heavyset_go wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. If you run your blog like a business, as in you have a real need for growth and to turn a profit, you will need to pump out content on a regular basis.

Well, Daring Fireball hardly writes 1-2 posts a month (and usually small), and yet..

Daring Fireball is an outlier and a holdover from another era.

For every Daring Fireball, there are 100 blogs neither you nor I have probably heard of that are profitable businesses.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#78

Post by paulpauper »

mockingbirdy wrote: post #58
paulpauper wrote: post #29

For SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words) Just more vague tips that maybe worked for him and won't for most. i have several articles on my own blog/website that are over 4000 words and all original content. Want to guess how much search engine traffic they get? Z-e-r-o

It works. The content should be SEO-optimized, though (it isn't "normal" content, it targets certain keywords). Your domain ranking, on-page SEO, link structure, even title formatting and other stuff is also relevant. As someone who has 50k+ views per month on one site I know a thing or two about this. I also write a personal blog where I don't do SEO and only get around 300 views per month. I could optimize that, bu…

This is not 2001. On-page optimization does not work that well anymore. I know how to rank pages but the problem is it is too expensive and time consuming to be worthwhile. You need a lot of quality links and high domain name authority.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#79

Post by JustSomeNobody »

wtracy wrote: post #64
DamnInteresting wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started a website in 2005 that is still in operation today. We started out posting 1-2 articles per week, I had a lot of spare time then. But that rate was unsustainable with our small team and small budget, and we reached a point of burnout, and had to decide whether to slow down or shut down. After a hiatus to mentally recuperate, we opted to continue writing, though publishing less often and digging deeper into…

I would be so tempted to write back something like, "You deserve to live free of that kind of anger. If my website makes you that upset, please stop looking at it. I suggest incinerating your computer and stapling your eyes shut to ensure that it never happens again. Life is too short for anything else." That would probably only bait the troll into doing something worse, though. I wonder if it would be helpful/cathar…

You cannot rationalize with someone who is irrational.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#80

Post by paulpauper »

baby wrote: post #63

I find this article meh. I've been blogging for something like 15 years so here's my take: * If you've been wanting to blog, stop pissing around, open a blog on wordpress.com and start writing. That's my first advice to anyone. Don't waste time on the technicalities, just write. You can move your blog to another platform later. * Be regular. This is hard. I fail this rule most of the time. But a successful blog is a…

Yeah and the blue background and font also annoying. But he is not American, so maybe it works better for him and his readers.

TBH, there are few tips or rules. I have seen successful blogs that employ virtually every kind of format and style. Some that follow all the rules an others that break them all. First-mover advantage seems to be important. I'm sure the first person to blog about Bitcoin did well, but the 284th guy? Probably not so much.

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