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What I learned in ten years of blogging
91–100 of 168 posts
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#92Earlier 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…
Is anyone selling “hate mail as a service” yet? Because if there is a market for fake love (like-farms etc), surely there must be a market for fake hate. Maybe it’s just my misplaced faith in humanity, but couldn’t this sort of unreasonable hate be a product of dirty commercial tactics from your competitors?
The simpler explanation is the person is just in a bad mood. I know the internet can put me in a frustrated place where I get upset for silly reasons.
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#93Earlier 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…
Idea: a site that collects all the deep dive articles and groups them by topics/tags. Why? Because when you are out researching the next piece, someone else's article is being read. That way you build an audience. Wait, you say. I don't want my content on someone else's platform? That's okay, the "platform" just links back to the long form content. It can even have ratings, which are even more important in long form…
This already sort of happens. Many larger sites, places like HuffPo or TechCrunch, accept contributions from outside contributors. You get paid a tiny bit, and then you get to link back to your own site, so you get a little marketing juice too.
A platform would be interesting too, but it’d be hard to curate without all the standard race to the bottom tactics that people would use to exploit your page rank.
In some sense, you can’t avoid the need to commit to a brand and a voice. So the way to achieve what you want is by federating with other brands and voices, not dumping into an anonymous platform.
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#94What's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g. disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own feedback facility is risky.
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#95I 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…
I think it depends on the audience. Looking at your blog I can see how ads may not work as well. My blog is focused more on dining out, shopping etc where viewers think nothing of ads and I think they would even think it weird if there weren’t ads.
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#96One 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…
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…
I think you can still have a high-activity blog that publishes infrequently, if you're able to get them to sign up for email notifications.
I don't know if people really check blog websites daily anymore. Stuff like news, sports, Reddit/FB/IG are an exception; people expect there to be updated content daily.
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#97What's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g. disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own feedback facility is risky.
I turned off comments and allow people to contact me through Twitter or email.
That seems to be such a high barrier to entry that the contact I do receive is almost always because someone disagrees strongly or because they are very thankful for something they learned.
In either case, it stops pointless crap like 'first'.
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#98For 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
There are numerous factors that go into why or why not a page gets traffic. The ~2000 words is a rule of thumb, and not at all a decisive factor.
- Have any other websites linked back to your content? 'Backlink' volume is a quality signal for search engines.
- Is your blog about a specific topic, or does it cover multiple different topics? A niche-specific website will get better ranking than a website that covers multiple topics.
- Is you website mobile-friendly? I have seen dev blogs that area clearly not responsive. Search engines can detect that and will ding you accordingly.
- Have you tried to promote your content? On Twitter, on message boards, on HN, anything?
- Is your content structured to be search engine friendly? Some devs build blogs in React, or some other framework, where the HTML is dynamically generated, leaving your page source looking like a framework template, with no content shown. A search crawler won't know there's any content there.
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#99Some very useful tips in there. Especially the first one: "No one has time to read your article, write the first lines like they’re a TLDR." Not a good idea for fiction! but it's essential to save a reader's time. If the main topic is buried 3-4 paragraphs down, I've already left. Note that this one person is getting significant attention writing about a specialized topic (EDM). That probably characterizes most blogs…
There's also a technical reason for writing the TLDR up top. When a web crawler indexes a page for search results, they capture a snippet of the first
tags that follow the of the title. That snippet is what is shown on the results page, and really is what determines whether a user wants to click the link shown by the search engine.
Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging
#100"Start a Newsletter." why?
To promote new content to an already-converted audience.
Compare the site engagement of users who willingly gave you their email address, to a user who landed on your page from a search query, browsed it and left the site. What are the chances that that user will remember the name of the site and make a return visit? Your page could have been one of 10 he looked at to get an answer to his question.