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Why blog if nobody reads it?

andysblog.uk

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Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#3

Post by CharlieDigital » 

    > If I write it, they will come. They won’t. There are billions of blog posts out there. The internet is an infinite void, and your blog is a whisper in a hurricane.
This has not proven to be true over a long enough window.

I've kept a blog of some kind since 2005 and I'm always surprised looking at the traffic what posts get picked up by Google and end up driving traffic for one reason or another. One of my posts is prominent enough that I recently started to notice inbound traffic from ChatGPT (I assume it is being cited as authoritative on the subject).

A few years back, I started on Medium with 0 readers and just started writing. 100 ticked by and it was a small milestone. Then 500, then 1000. Just write in your authentic voice; don't think about an audience.

There are literally thousands of videos on recipes for omelettes (example) on YT, yet more are published every day. The thing is, there's a video and a voice for every audience.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#4

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Related:

Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685534

Why I still blog after 15 years

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646531

Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42872276

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#6

Post by ZeWaren »

I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it. But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#7

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

chistev wrote: post #2

Because writing is fun. Check out my personal blog https://rxjourney.com.ng If you like it and you're feeling extra generous, you can leave a donation.

Change that Twitter account. Do you have a RSS feed? How can I donate?

Last but not least, your blog is unusable without JS. The posts are not links for some reason, why would you make such a paywall?

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#8

Post by vallode »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #3

> If I write it, they will come. They won’t. There are billions of blog posts out there. The internet is an infinite void, and your blog is a whisper in a hurricane. This has not proven to be true over a long enough window. I've kept a blog of some kind since 2005 and I'm always surprised looking at the traffic what posts get picked up by Google and end up driving traffic for one reason or another. One of my posts is…

The market for TODO list apps is 1 for every person in the world, everyone has a slightly different subjectivity and therefore has a slightly different optimal experience when it comes to TODO lists. Subjectivity is formed over time and through the course of events, therefore the market for TODO list apps is 1 for every person in the world for a given timeframe.

It's an obvious hyperbole but I think it stands to show that, in a similiar fashion, there is a reader (and by some aggregation readers plural) for everything you might think of writing.

How to get started with web development in 2025? What is ray-casting? How to emulate a piece of hardware in ? What I had for dinner tonight!

It may not be that everything is viral or a hit but you should find that most of the content you right will resonate with _someone_ and potentially help multiple _someones_.

Sometimes being satisfied with that 10-100 readers is all there is to it.

Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?

#9

Post by spmcl »

Writing helps me think. Posting a thought in public forces me to commit to an idea and clean up how I communicate it. I learn more about the subject and myself along the way.

Henrik Karlsson has a good series of posts on this subject: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-to-think

I journal daily about a topic I pull off a backlog of ideas. After the end of my allotted journaling time, if I think “there are more threads here to uncover,” I spend more time on it. If I feel confident, I clean it up into a blog post.

Obligatory link to my own blog: https://www.seanmcloughl.in

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