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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

#121

Post by matwood »

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…

There is something to be said about writing begets writing. Long thoughtful posts are great, but those take time and often do not get finished. The more someone posts, the easier it gets to post. Then the more they'll post, and so on.

I think John Gruber does a pretty good job at https://daringfireball.net where he posts shorter stuff mixed in with longer out articles. I think I heard him say once his goal was to get someone to check his site once or twice/week.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#122

Post by gwern »

ta3216 wrote: post #95
gwern wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could say that about both Pandora (radio is expected to have ads) and Mozilla's general Internet sampling frame (the Internet is expected to have ads), but they still find a large average harm.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#123

Post by CM30 »

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…

Google definitely prefers regular content over high depth, lengthier stuff. Honestly, I suspect all sites and services with algorithms do, there's a reason popular YouTube channels tend to have a very consistent schedule.

But hey, if you're writing more detailed content, then that's something I'm happy to see as a reader. The constant push for speed above everything else is exactly why so much content online is poorly researched and barely fact checked, and Google favouring quickly written stuff is likely a good reason why the media has fallen so far recently; everything's about trying to beat the curve on search engine results and social media sites.

Kudos for not going the same way.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#124

Post by Ibethewalrus »

toyg wrote: post #55
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…

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?

there are some dirty tricks like creating link-farms that link to a competitors’ website to hurt their rankings

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#125

Post by CM30 »

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.

Both?

Most successful blogs and news sites I've seen tend to have multiple ways for their audience to contact them. Usually comments for posts plus accounts on various major social media sites and some sort of chat feature (for gaming sites nowadays it's often Discord, though it could be a forum, or Slack or IRC).

Of course, you then have to strike a balance between getting setup on every platform under the sun (and spreading yourself too thin) or putting all your eggs in basket (and depending too heavily on traffic from a single source or platform). But yeah, there are usually multiple ways for people to contact successful blog authors.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#126

Post by CM30 »

rchaud wrote: post #99
8bitsrule wrote: post #84

Some 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.

Don't meta descriptions usually do this? I've never seen people use the post content as their meta description, at least not when they've got access to something like Yoast or the SEO Framework or what not.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#127

Post by Konnstann »

ghaff wrote: post #76
toyg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Clickbait" headlines are those that misrepresent the content, not just things that catch your eye. Headlines are designed to get you to read the content, but when the headlines are misleading the content is a waste of time to read, similar to a fish biting a worm only to get caught, hence "bait".

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#128

Post by CM30 »

rchaud wrote: post #102
cantthinkofone wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

Honestly, if you've written a coding article which doesn't have any code in it, you've probably messed up somewhere along the line. Generally, I'd say it's expected that anything programming related likely has at least a few code samples and a few demos to test out, otherwise its usefulness is rather limited.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#129

Post by qwerty456127 »

rchaud wrote: post #39
exoducks wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was just a "natural" trend for advertising or something, I didn't realize it was a SEO thing. I've been noticing more and more that every time I'm looking for a recipe, I end up with a blog post the size of a novella as the first few results.

Recipe pages are long because Google penalizes sites with "high bounce rate", i.e. where the user opened the page, didn't interact with it (clicked a link, scrolled x% of the screen) and left, or clicked Back. A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade. That's why so much of the Internet feels so 'corporate' or make so many seemingly 'WTF' cho…

> Recipe pages are long because Google penalizes sites with "high bounce rate", i.e. where the user opened the page, didn't interact with it (clicked a link, scrolled x% of the screen) and left, or clicked Back. A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade.

Do many people actually copy-paste recipes? I usually open a recipe page and keep it open until I'm done with the dish). If I like the result I may copy the recipe.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#130

Post by user5994461 »

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…

It's fairly basic qualifications. It's not difficult to reach millions of reads over 10 years, that should take less than a hundred questions or articles. Possibly a lot less back then when commercial content was less prevalent and Facebook/Quora/StackOverflow were in their infancy.

If you have a stackoverflow account with at least 500 points, click your user profile and check out the "people reached" metric in the top right corner. Prepare to be amazed.

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