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What I learned in ten years of blogging

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Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#101

Post by rchaud »

dhimes wrote: post #88
AndrewStephens wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With video advertising, sites have started to optimize for length of stay on the page rather than hits and I hate it. The recipe format was perfected in the middle ages - a simple list of ingredients and a description of the steps required. But the sites that capture the first page of search results for even the simplest recipe are all designed to keep you on the page long enough for the video ads to play through. Li…

So, I have a question: I'm seeing lots of videos on social media that are very long. They're cute or funny or amazing or something, but they seem like they are artificially long, like they are trying to keep me in the act of viewing them. If they aren't an advertisement themselves, then why is this the trend? What is the reward for engaging a viewer in a sight gag for several minutes? Are they gaming the ad companies…

I don't know about FB, but Youtube videos can only be monetized if they're a minimum of 10 minutes long. That's why videos by 'Youtubers' can be so painful to watch; they are trying to stretch out 2 minutes of content into 10, and it's obvious.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#102

Post by rchaud »

cantthinkofone wrote: post #35
qwerty456127 wrote: post #2

> No one has time to read your article, write the first lines like they’re a TLDR. So true! > For SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words) So sad!

I'm conflicted about the notion that "no one has time to read your article." That says more about dilapidation of reading culture than the fact that length of a text is necessarily bad. I see it happening to me and I don't read something not because it is valueless on its own but because there is simply too much else outside of it drawing on my attention. If there's more and more pressure to say less, eventually you'…

Imagine that you're searching for a solution to a Javascript issue, and you see two search results. One has the answer and links to a working Codepen, and the other provides some conceptual information and links you to MDN documentation so you can figure the answer out for yourself.

Which one are you going to read first? If you picked the first one, does that indicate a dilapidation in reading ability, or that you needed an answer, and the first option provided the best one?

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#103

Post by veddox »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #97
asciimo wrote: post #94

What'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'.

Just out of interest, how active was your blog? (hits/day?)

I don't have a commenting feature on my blog - partly because I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet, partly because I'm worried about potential spam. But I would like to get some feedback from my readers, so that's a bit of a conundrum...

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#104

Post by SonicSoul »

iamthirsty wrote: post #90
SonicSoul wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm.. from OP: I’m 21, but I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years. I grew up doing this. What I’ve written on the internet has reached millions of people. Most of what I’ve written is in Italian, but I was also quite successful when writing in english. My Quora profile, reached 400k people in three months. i feel like these are reasonable qualifications to give blogging advice. Your advice sounds good, but are you sp…

> i feel like these are reasonable qualifications to give blogging advice. I don’t. As a 21 year old, 21 year olds are terrible at giving advice. There’s also the successful-bias problem, where you think you’re successful because of whatever you did, and that there aren’t other ways.

As a 21 year old, 21 year olds are terrible at giving advice

this is a generality. You omitted the next sentence where experience / results were presented. I would ignore most 21 year olds advice about snowboarding, but i would listen to everything Shaun White had to say at 15.

There’s also the successful-bias problem, where you think you’re successful because of whatever you did, and that there aren’t other ways

another generality (perhaps you're talking about survivor bias). in any case, these are general statements that may be true statistically but unless you tie them to the context of OP there is little relevance to this discussion

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#105

Post by ghaff »

rchaud wrote: post #100
Aardwolf wrote: post #87

"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.

Newsletters can work for a very targeted topic that has an audience that it equally targeted on that same topic, e.g. AWS.

But there's real email fatigue out there. I know some folks who are reasonably well-known in the tech space who have tried newsletters at various times but gave up (as did I) because people generally just don't want another weekly or biweekly email. (And even if they give up their email address, they mostly don't open or read.)

It's too bad in a way because a newsletter is a nice format for short form topical news and commentary on articles in a way that blog posts really aren't.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#106

Post by tomazio »

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…

Your comment on stapling their eyes shut made my day.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#107

Post by tomcam »

SonicSoul wrote: post #85
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…

hmm.. from OP: I’m 21, but I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years. I grew up doing this. What I’ve written on the internet has reached millions of people. Most of what I’ve written is in Italian, but I was also quite successful when writing in english. My Quora profile, reached 400k people in three months. i feel like these are reasonable qualifications to give blogging advice. Your advice sounds good, but are you sp…

I had the same impression as you, so I looked at the parent’s blog at www.cryptologie.net. It’s quite good, and in my mind does everything OP suggests!

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#108

Post by pbhjpbhj »

munchbunny wrote: post #83
DamnInteresting wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it worse is that the "nag" the sender refers to is our call for donations, which we use quite sparingly. It is only shown to readers after they have viewed 5 articles, and again at 10, 15, and so on....unless they click the "no" button, which mutes it for some time. So this is a person who has read at least 5 of our articles, and to me that means that they must be enjoying our work; why else would they kee…

I think it's the same entitlement mentality that leads to "I want to use my ad blocker but I also hate your paywall." Yeah, I get annoyed by ads too, which is why I pay a few subscriptions. The New York Times concluded years ago that those people would never pay you anyway, so why bother giving them access?

>so why bother giving them access? //

Doing things for "exposure" is somewhat of a meme nowadays, but it can work. That's why people let Google past their paywalls. Mileage varies a lot of course.

One issue for a large media outlet is maintaining standing, cutting off all access to those who won't/can't pay means you're no longer the go to place for news (or whatever), that can have wider consequences.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#109

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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.

One notable result is that content gets padded to extract the longest possible attention, so now that 10s fix for an issue takes 2 minutes to find.

Not a problem platforms care about, probably helps them, sucks for users though -- it becomes 'how bad can we make things and still have people use our service'.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#110

Post by [deleted] »

baby wrote: post #67
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…

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…

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