Sure, nobody may be reading it today, but eventually something you wrote becomes essential to someone else. Document what works and what doesn't. That helps us all learn.
Why blog if nobody reads it?
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Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#32Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past. Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it. Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who yo…
Many people wrote about why it is important to blog, but I never heard of what you just stated about credibility. That's the best and most convincing thing I ever heard. Thank you very much for having shared it here.
It's just self-marketing. Nothing new.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#33There's a point to writing, but is there a point to publishing your diary on the internet? You could just keep it under your pillow, or on your own computer. I blog so that other people read my writing, and fortunately they do, at least sometimes. I don't think I'd continue if there was no public interest.
I disagree. I write differently when I anticipate an audience (even if they never come).
Maybe parallel: I notice when, for example, I edit videos in my own world I have a very different take on the edit when I am showing it to someone for the first time.
Thinking to myself: "Now as I watch someone else watching it, I am become aware that this scene goes on a bit too long. This cut is a little abrupt, disorienting."
I didn't "see" those until I had an audience.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#34This is all true. The only part that is potentially misleading is that the target doesn't need to be a blog. A blog is a fine target, however. The key activity is spending time to articulate a message with enough clarity that another person will understand what you meant and that they will conclude there is some value in it. There are lots of avenues for this.
It's not limited to this, but in the workplace I think of this as "write it down culture". People who write things down often have the most tested and credible ideas, with the first and most important judge being themselves.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#35Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past. Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it. Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who yo…
I regularly have conversations with people that end up with some form of "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."
Blogging has internal benefits of organizing thoughts or even just being a fun hobby. But it's external validation as well. Sure, writing a book is even more but that's probably 100s of times more work.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#36One important aspect I learned about blogging is that a post effectively "ships" a side project, deeming it complete. A blog post allows me to move onto the next thing. It is closure of sorts (glouw.com if anyone is interested in the style).
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#37Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com), and even that is going down year-over-year.
However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so it's not a waste of time or a mistake even if no one reads it.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#38Writing is incredibly fun and rewarding for me. It also makes you think harder about things that you’re generally already interested in. And it gives you huge leverage: instead of trying to explain your thoughts to one or two people at a time, you do it once and potentially many thousands of people can read it. It’s also a useful resource years later to look back on, like an intellectual history of your own interests. And the more you do it, the better you get at it.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#39I 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).
Same. I keep a couple of blogs on different topics and try to write up any challenge I come across. Not only does it help to cement ideas in my head and expose areas I'm foggy about, but I've referred back to my previous experience this way countless times.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#40> "If it’s finished, the applause, the thanks, the gratitude are something else. Something extra and not part of what you created. If you play a beautiful song for two people or a thousand, it’s the same song, and the amount of thanks you receive isn’t part of that song." (Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?)