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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

#151

Post by polm23 »

toyg wrote: post #59
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the current trend of being able to support e.g. bloggers (or youtubers, or whoever) via Patreon; I do believe there should be multiple providers of the same service because right now Patreon has too much influence / mindspace, but it's a good alternative for advertisement - not as scummy, and much more reliable. $1 / month / fan is nice. I follow one youtuber (and not the annoying screamy meme type) who seems…

I wish there was a way to do it with microtransactions though. I am never going to commit to yet-another-sub-that-I-will-forget-to-cancel-for-months, but I’d like to throw a couple of £ towards an individual post that I randomly find on the web.

That's what Ko-fi is for.

https://ko-fi.com/

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#152

Post by ElijahLynn »

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.

Would you rather take advice from a 31 year old who has been blogging for 1 year? Or take advice from a 21 year old who has been blogging for 10 years?

Experience is experience.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#153

Post by toyg »

polm23 wrote: post #151
toyg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was a way to do it with microtransactions though. I am never going to commit to yet-another-sub-that-I-will-forget-to-cancel-for-months, but I’d like to throw a couple of £ towards an individual post that I randomly find on the web.

That's what Ko-fi is for. https://ko-fi.com/

Looks cool! I've joined and will keep an eye out for it in places I visit.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#154

Post by thanatropism »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #152
iamthirsty wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Would you rather take advice from a 31 year old who has been blogging for 1 year? Or take advice from a 21 year old who has been blogging for 10 years? Experience is experience.

That's a lopsided comparison but the thirtysomething is judged by the same ruler you are, while a teen has lots of space left to make horrible mistakes you wouldn't survive.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#155

Post by Brajeshwar »

I started writing (aka blogging) in 2002, on Blogger with a custom commenting plugin developed by an indie Russian developer. Movable Type was the in-thing before finally settling down on WordPress.

During the early hay-days, my site witnessed million visitors monthly and boasted of Google PageRank of 8. If I can recollect, I'm sure the Alexa Rank was also in one of the top 100 or 1000 for a pretty good amount of time. There were advertisers willing pay good dollars that the site easily earned few thousands each month. There was No YouTube, No Twitter, No Facebook, No Github. My free and open source "downloads" would choke the servers and (mt) would gladly host at a good discount to handle hundreds of GBs of download each month.

I used to write anything and everything that fancied me. Readers "Digg" it and many other aggregators love reposting the articles, and the site won enough awards that I stopped adding "badges" to my site.

But then, I learned more, realized that many of my articles are shallow and pretty much stopped writing. If I pick up a topic, I research and saw that many have written about it, then I just don't write. I write once a while, sometimes lengthy and personal opinions. Traffic has dropped so much that my current blog is grandfathered by WPEngine on a free tier, shielded by CloudFlare and is just surviving.

Here is what I believe one should do;

* Pick a niche but don't be afraid to go wide once a while.

* Ok to go short (Seth Godin style) or lengthy journalistic style writing.

* If it is a personal blog, be personal.

* Have a content strategy, plan and just write.

* Learn to re-purpose content. Your YouTube video can become a Podcast audio, the transcripts can become a blog post, interesting text/quotes from your post can be fodder for your social media.

* Keep Writing.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#156

Post by ta3216 »

ghaff wrote: post #56
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 really question that. I can't believe that in this day and age anyone thinks that having AdSense on a blog site is some indicator of superior quality. And affiliate links at least raise the possibility of conflicts of interest. Way back when I experimented with ads and links but I came to the conclusion that the money was pretty trivial in the scheme of things and it took away from the otherwise non-commercial natu…

Firstly my readers would have no idea what Adsense even is. But if they see accompanying ads like Swarovski, Nordstrom, local restaurant, then yes, I believe it would positively impact their impression on an intuitive level. If they actively thought about it then no. I can see how it wouldn’t appeal to other sites though.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#157

Post by ta3216 »

gwern wrote: post #122
ta3216 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My site is focused on shopping and dining out therefore I don’t think the conclusions in those papers apply in my case. The audio interruptions noted in the Pandora test are far more intrusive than in-page display ads. If I used interstitials then I would agree.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#158

Post by widforss »

mortivore wrote: post #68
justpassingby- wrote: post #22

Eh, none of this really matters unless you actually care whether or not anyone is reading your content. I've been blogging random thoughts and assorted happenings in my life since 2002, and it's all out there on the public interwebz, but I write for an audience of one - me. If any poor soul happens to stumble across it, then that's their bad luck.

This is interesting. If you're not writing for anyone except yourself, then why post it online? Why not just use a journal or an audio diary?

I just started writing a kind of emotional diary public on the web. I'm not linking to it anywhere (though it's not really hard to find), and I write it in my native language (not a good proposition if looking for exposure).

The simple explanation for this is that I'm more keen to keep stuff if they're on the internet. Otherwise, they will just rot in my home directory and get thrown out on next reinstall in a couple of years.

It's also a good emotional exercise. Am I really up to the task of releasing my inner thoughts publicly, even though nobody is likely to read it? The thing that made me start it was this challenge from Neil Gaiman.

>The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself...That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#159

Post by kortilla »

SonicSoul wrote: post #104
iamthirsty wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ano…

>year olds advice about snowboarding, but i would listen to everything Shaun White had to say at 15.

You missed the point. Young people, especially extremely talented ones, are terrible at giving advice. They don’t have nearly enough experience to recognize biases and will give out worthless platitudes like “always practice 6 hours a day” when the real key to their success is mastering some fundamental technique at a young age that they don’t even understand.

It’s like chefs that recite recipes with “a pinch of X”, “a splash of Y”, and “a sprinkling of Z”. This is completely useless to amateurs and is only marginally useful to professionals that might be able to deconstruct how the ingredients interact to get precise ratios.

Re: What I learned in ten years of blogging

#160

Post by iamthirsty »

0xferruccio wrote: post #138
iamthirsty wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Absolutely. I meant no disrespect — you’ve surely done more than I in this space. I just recognize, however generally, how terrible those in our age group are at looking at everything objectively, no matter how intelligent or successful. You may have incredible blogging experience, but life experience colors all subjects. A lot of advice you gave, from promoting, to design, and even the defining of an audience, is what worked for you and how you like to run your blog, not blogging as a whole.

An example: some people (like myself) really really care about blog design — it’s why I enjoyed looking at yours! I also like plaintext design and other stuff, but my point is I care. Your audience might not, considering how you defined it, but another audience might! Another example is the newsletter: you & your audience might like one, but Daring Fireball doesn’t have one and I like that aspect of the that blog.

So again, with all due respect, even your own points are contradictory. You didn’t look at blogging objectively — only what worked for you. Which is fine! Thanks for the advice. And please ignore mine — I’m 21. But hopefully you get my point.

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