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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

#131

Post by user5994461 »

hnauz wrote: post #115
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…

>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. Terrible advice. If your blog proves popular, it'll be impossible for you to move away without losing your position in search engines. Lock-in.

Not true. You just have to pay wordpress to get a custom domain. That will conserve all the links.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#132

Post by vaibhavsagar »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #42
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…

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…

You've perfectly described Reddit.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#133

Post by user5994461 »

hnauz wrote: post #118
gitgud wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's reasonable advice, it's one of the easiest platforms to get started on and to migrate off. Also Wordpress.com allows you to add a domain, meaning that if you change your blog platform, you have the same urls, and the same search engine links... Not locked in at all...

Their pricing is insane, if you want a custom theme or to install a plugin (which is something you will need) you're looking at 25€ per month and you have to pay year by year (300€ upfront). Starting with a cheap shared hosting is a no-brainer.

They have a truckload of great themes that are free and usable on the free plan.

It's true that plugins are not available except on the business plan, however the most common plugins are already embedded out of the box, you don't have to set them up. It's a great experience as far as not having to manage wordpress. An apprentice blogger absolutely does NOT need any additional plugin.

The pricing is both insane and cheap. I looked into upgrading and alternatives after my blog had above 100k visitors and almost 1 TB of traffic in a month. Believe it or not, there was nothing else cheaper.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#135

Post by r3bl »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #120
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…

I think your advice is great, but I also disagree that the article is meh. I've been blogging for about 10 years, and my blog won a Webby award and a W3 writing award. I don't say that to brag, just to add credibility that other people think my blog is worthwhile. Anyway, I agree with almost everything the article says, and there are some things in there that are not obvious to people who are just starting out, which…

You should totally link your blog. You can do so in your bio if want to avoid mentioning it here.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#136

Post by user5994461 »

mockingbirdy wrote: post #114
paulpauper wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are many things that still work. High DA and quality links are a necessity, but I have people in my network who make 100k profit per month with a lot of sites that have DA17-25 (pretty weak) and some backlinks (around 30 per site, although there are some strong ones). They usually analyze the content of their competitors and write articles that are simply +500 words longer. You wouldn't believe what's still pos…

That sounds like a full time job of finding, editing and optimizing niche content. I'd consider that a fair job.

It's very far from the practice a long time ago of creating hundreds of domains linking to each other to get the top page, filled with placeholders and tags.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#137

Post by KajMagnus »

veddox wrote: post #103
PuffinBlue wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I built a Disqus like commenting system, where you can configure manual review of [the first X posts a new person posts at your blog]. If they write say 5 make-sense interesting things, hopefully thereafter it's ok to auto approve their subsequent posts. — How does this affect (if at all) how you feel about spam? (Here it is: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments )

If you think someone might become a spammer, and is just posting "I like it" and "Wow great" comments to get past any first-comments manual reviews, then you can mark that user as a possible threat, and forever get notifieid about his/her posts (before they're made visible).

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#138

Post by 0xferruccio »

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.

So as you're 21 your advice on not listening 21 year olds is terrible. But then I'm 21 too, so this is recursively bad

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#139

Post by 0xferruccio »

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…

Agree on everything you said, except for two points, which imo are a personal choice.

Look at waitbutwhy.com and julian.com they don't write about stuff they find on google trends and don't post regularly, yet they're among the best blogs out there

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#140

Post by 0xferruccio »

paulpauper wrote: post #80
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 284…

The blue background is a big rip off from one of my favourite blogs: http://tonsky.me/
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