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Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

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Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#121

Post by justboxing »

daliwali wrote: post #27

There are a variety of reasons why I think blogging is no longer as visible as it used to: - People don't read long form as much as they used to. Especially considering the content that gets popular on the Internet are now images, videos, short messages, there is less of an audience for long form writing and content producers are more focused on the lowest common denominator. - Hyperlinks used to be a valuable social…

> or trapped inside an algorithmic filter bubble.

This is how I feel these days.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#122

Post by chrshawkes »

ardit33 wrote: post #70
ploggingdev wrote: post #20

No. Getting page views for well written and original content (especially tech topics) is not hard, in fact there is a severe dearth of good technical writing. How often you post, how many sharing options you provide should not be what you optimize for. Optimize for writing original, well informed content that shows domain expertise. Such content has no problem attracting an audience. But the problem with writing such…

30k for a successful blog post is not a lot though. Your average youtub-er personality considers anything less than 100k+ views per post not as a major success. Eg. Digital Foundry (tech related) gets on average anywhere between 30k and 140k views per post. The successful ones are over 100k. https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalFoundry

He's right.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#124

Post by tmaly »

I started blogging on my own site back in 2003. Many of the topics that I wrote about at the time were on the front page of Google. I took the blog down after I switched the CMS system.

Eventually in 2012 I brought the blog back, but I had lost out on all that time.

When I post something now, it is usually some long tail content that answers a problem people have. I cross post to different social media etc, and I do notice the initial bump in traffic, but it dies off. After a while Google picks it up and I start to get trickles to that post. Over time all of the posts give me several hundred visits a week.

I think its gotten much harder as everyone wants to make a buck doing affiliate marketing. If your intent on making money with affiliate marketing, I think the best way to go is to build what I call a niche engine. If you want a good example of this search for SEIKO 5 Finder. Note, this is not my site, I just came across it from another HN poster a few years back. It has been an inspiration to me.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#125

Post by user5994461 »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #100
AndrewStephens wrote: post #77

I've blogged ( https://sheep.horse/ ) for about 10 years now in a minor way and monitor my logs pretty carefully. This is what I have learnt: * Most of my post get single digit views - not daily, in total. Posting on Twitter or Facebook only helps a little. You can't force people to follow your writing. * I publish RSS and Atom feeds but almost nobody uses them. I ended up removing the social media buttons on my site…

About your blog, IMHO a little re-styling would help a lot. I do like minimal layouts, but the serif font doesn't quite work for me. Also, maybe add some structure? Your blogs seem to cover a broad range of topics. I am mostly interested in technical articles, but I have to actively filter out the stuff that I'm interested in (by reading the titles and guessing the topic; this takes quite some mental energy and might…

Allow me to be mean for a minute:

Agreed, the font on the homepage nearly killed my eyes.

Then "Here you will find various projects and musings. No information about sheep or horses though - sorry about that."

Why is it called sheep.horse then? I am not even getting into how that seems like a spam domain to sell viagra or whatever.

Then there are publications about anything and everything. There is no topic.

And when I am reading an article. There isn't ANY link to other articles. You should have "most viewed" or "related" articles. People can only close your blog, there is nothing else to do on that page. No wonder they bounce.

To conclude, the headers on top are barely readable.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#126

Post by tmaly »

wanqu wrote: post #123

I did some automation for my blog: https://medium.com/@wanquribao/wanqu-5-english-tech-startup-... Auto publishing to ~10 different channels, including weibo, twitter, fb, iOS push notification, chrome push notif. ... It works.

I really liked your write up on indiehackers.

I am not Chinese, but I can use google translate.

If I wanted to use some of the Chinese based channels you use, what would be your recommendation?

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#128

Post by xs »

I get 3,000 visitors a day to my blog. Here are some of my tips:

* The more content, the more opportunities people will have to find you

* Quality content builds brand. When people search google and remember they got something good from your site last time, they may be happy to find you can help them again

* Tons of optimization should be considered such as: Clean URLs, fast page load times, canonical URLs, A+ on your TLS score, mobile friendly, zero http errors, user friendly, only 1 h1 tag per page, number of keywords per page, no broken links, readable fonts, colors easy on the eyes, no flash, etc.

* Building your brand or blog's brand is important to spend time on. Make guest posts on other blogger's blogs, be active on social media, get other bloggers to give you quotes or stories, give talks at events, etc.

* Watch your analytics. Your most viewed blog posts should be your best blog posts. Keep improving them. Can you explain it better now? Are there typos you missed before? If your traffic is coming from specific keyword searches, does your post satisfy them?

* Spend a considerable amount of time on your title. When you look at impressions vs clicks, you'll see far more people see only the title of your page and not the actual page at all. In fact, if your page is trending on social media, many people will just share the article with ONLY looking at the title.

* I focus on long-tail or niche Google searches as the primary way to drive traffic. I write about adventures in IT type of stuff. Almost all of my content can be consumed, now or later, or years later. If you're blogging about current events, you have a small window of time where your blog post is relevant, then you shouldn't really expect traffic after that window closes.

Re: Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

#129

Post by rcarmo »

Well, my blog (http://taoofmac.com) has been around for 15 years now, and like many people have pointed out in other comments, people get their news and opinion pieces by social media these days -- so I've long had RSS-to-social services relaying new posts (sometimes with the odd glitch) and made an effort to add more images now and then.

In the end, though, I'm doing it for myself. Readership and viewers tanked when Google Reader went away and never really recovered, but I've had quite a few popular items that reached the homepage here, plus a steady set of "popular" items (usually some of my link lists for Python or visualization libraries, or some especially pointed, timeless piece).

I don't think blogs can get much traction these days by themselves, on Medium/LinkedIn or not. But I also have long since stopped caring about having an audience in the hundreds of thousands :)

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