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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?

#91

Post by dmix »

postit wrote: post #71

I can share my experience on why I stopped having an RSS reader and keeping track of blogs, it kind of summarizes also some opinions from old avid readers I know. TLTR: Lack of good content, and amazing alternatives. - Huge backlog: I used to track 2k+ blogs on Bloglines/Google Reader, it was nearly impossible to read everything, but the collective mind of the internet made easy to keep track of what my close friends…

I just use Twitter to find articles to read now instead of RSS.

That plus I check HN/a few specific subreddits/WSJ for articles I want to read, then I usually put them on Instapaper to read later on my phone/kindle.

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

#92

Post by sctb »

mosqutopi wrote: post #86
borplk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted that post not because of length but because it genuinely looked like it's auto-generated by a spam/content summary bot.

I find it surprising that a bot can create such a post!, anyway I use to change password randomly to create new account in HN, it seems a downvote move me to change my nick and start anew. Anyway I find the post of math and programming very interesting but you can always get better.

Please don't create throwaway accounts repeatedly—we ban those. Hacker News is a community site, and so relies on some amount of identity continuity in its membership.

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

#93

Post by savanaly »

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…

>The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff)

Eh? I have been reading HN for years and never once have I looked at the username of the person who posted a link, unless someone in the comments makes a reference to them. Do other people do that? What is the mechanism by which someone's star quality affects the number of people who click the links they post?

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

#94

Post by randlet »

mtone wrote: post #82
caminante wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The driver was financial. Google cited (03/2013) a user decline [0]. You don't need a conspiracy or more reasons to shutter the service. > "While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined." [0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-c...

They also killed iGoogle in the same year, and that's what I used as my daily RSS feed. From Wikipedia: due to "the unforeseen evolution of web and mobile apps and the erosion of the need for the site", whatever that means. While not exactly as strong as a conspiracy theory, I think they were well aware of what they were doing, and RSS was in the "best if absent" feature category.

Same scenario for me. FWIW I switched to using http://www.ighome.com/ which more or less replaces the functionality (not affiliated in any way, just a user).

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

#95

Post by jackschultz »

Yup for me, and since seems like everyone here is linking their own blogs as example, the one I'm talking about is Bigish Data [1].

As of now, I get about 50 views a day, but mostly because of google searching. I wrote an article about how to use Genius's API [2], posted it on Reddit, and at this point, searching "Genius API" on Google leads to that article. To me, that seems like the only way I've been able to get people looking at the site.

But frankly for me, I don't really care about getting having a specific blog audience. I'm totally fine with having people read the articles and hopefully help them with what they're doing. I've actually gotten comments and emails about helpfulness which is fun for me, but not important to have a bunch of.

Secondly, I like just writing when I have the idea for a new project or post rather than having to write very often with a subscribed audience.

Finally, this blog has also been used for me as a sort of resume for companies. So helpful for them to read the articles so they know what I've been doing and seeing results other than me having to just talk about my knowledge. On that note, I'm actually out here looking for a new job, so if people see this and like what you see, I'd be totally down to talk and see what you guys are building.

1 - https://bigishdata.com 2 - https://bigishdata.com/2016/09/27/getting-song-lyrics-from-g...

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

#97

Post by dceddia »

Posting to multiple relevant sites and social networks has helped my blog to grow. That, combined with a mailing list that I send each post to (weekly-ish), helps drive traffic. Some of the mailing list subscribers share it too. I usually submit new posts to places where I think people will find it useful -- Reddit (r/reactjs), the React FB group, and a couple frontend/JS-specific link aggregator sites. Sometimes HN.

My blog is on a technical topic (frontend development with JS + React), and my posts are all geared toward helping people learn about and solve specific problems. A handful of them do pretty well in Google, and all that in total brings in ~40k visitors/month.

I'm not sure how many people actually click those social sharing buttons. I think most people tune them out, but I keep them around as a measure of popularity/social proof.

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

#98

Post by AndrewStephens »

andreygrehov wrote: post #88
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…

What was the previous domain name? Why did you decide to change it to sheep.horse?

No big mystery - I used to own WordPress blog at sandfly.net.nz but when I moved countries I gave up blogging for so long that my domain lapsed.

Once I finally decided to start up again using my own platform I needed a catchy name that would be sure to draw traffic. Naturally I couldn't think of anything so ended up with sheep.horse because I think .horse domains are hilariously stupid.

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

#99

Post by AndrewStephens »

savanaly wrote: post #93
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…

>The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff) Eh? I have been reading HN for years and never once have I looked at the username of the person who posted a link, unless someone in the comments makes a reference to them. Do other people do that? Wh…

You don't notice the poster and neither do I. But some posters carry enough cred (or have enough friends) that anything they post immediately get a bump out of the incoming links slush pile.

That's not counting the people who use multiple accounts and bots to push up their content (probably not a problem on hacker news but rife on reddit).

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

#100

Post by kutkloon7 »

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 hold back readers from subscribing).

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