
What I learned in ten years of blogging - 0xferruccio
https://ferrucc.io/posts/starting-a-blog/
======
baby
I find this article meh. I've been blogging for something like 15 years so
here's my take:

* If you've been wanting to blog, stop pissing around, open a blog on wordpress.com and start writing. That's my first advice to anyone. Don't waste time on the technicalities, just write. You can move your blog to another platform later.

* Be regular. This is hard. I fail this rule most of the time. But a successful blog is a blog that's been going on for ages. I've posted 461 posts since 2013 on www.cryptologie.net and that's why it is working well.

* Do not look for perfect posts. You are not writing a book. A blog is to share knowledge in a quick way, or to share what's on your mind. No hesitation, once you have something, publish it. People might call you out for saying something wrong, fine, that's free publicity and you'll have learned something new.

* Mix short posts with long posts. It's impossible to keep writing high quality content and long blog posts. So write small ones from times to times to fill in between better blog posts. This is what make people keep going on your blog. It's like a facebook news feed, it needs to have something every time people check it.

* Write on trendy subjects. What did you learn recently that could be helpful to other people? What did you have trouble to learn because there was no good resource on the subject? You could be that resource. What is google trend saying? Are there any trendy topics in your field? What are people talking about recently?

~~~
SonicSoul
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 speaking from experience or is it just
something that makes sense to you? what exactly do you find _meh_ about his
advice and why?

~~~
iamthirsty
> 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.

~~~
SonicSoul
_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_

another generality (perhaps you're talking about survivor bias). in any case,
these are general statements that may be true statistically but unless you tie
them to the context of OP there is little relevance to this discussion

~~~
kortilla
>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.

------
SonicSoul
_One well researched article is better than a lot of mediocre content_

I remember similar advice on patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) blog that i really
took to heart. something along the lines of "it's better to have a few laser
polished articles, than a ton of content". so to this date i start writing
posts and quit half way through to keep only my favorite ideas up there..

there is another camp i.e. Seth Godin who write a short post every day, and
that could work too perhaps. but i think most people would be better off with
the advice in OPs post

~~~
DamnInteresting
I started a website in 2005 that is still in operation today. We started out
posting 1-2 articles per week, I had a lot of spare time then. But that rate
was unsustainable with our small team and small budget, and we reached a point
of burnout, and had to decide whether to slow down or shut down. After a
hiatus to mentally recuperate, we opted to continue writing, though publishing
less often and digging deeper into the stories.

The results of this change of format are mixed. On the one hand, it now feels
like quite an accomplishment when we wrap up research, writing, fact-checking,
recording (podcast version), sound design, illustrations, etc. And most
readers/listeners seem happier than ever with the quality of the content. But
on the other hand, our rankings in Google have fallen considerably to sites
that post frequent, low-effort content. The gatekeepers seem to prefer the
pap.

Additionally, there are a minority of readers/listeners who are outright
hostile about our reduced output. Just as an example, I received this via
email a few days ago:

 _You are the laziest website on the internet. If I was to succumb to your nag
messages and give you money, you would just waste it. This isn 't really a
real website, and it has no reason to exist. Give up and shut down. A website
isn't worth visiting if it looks the same every 6 months someone visits. Just
put a bullet it in already and end its pain. You failed. Just call time-of-
death, already. Or, whatever, die slowly of cancer... It's not like your life
amounts to anything..._

So, while I agree that deeper content is "better", it has its drawbacks.

~~~
startupdiscuss
Idea: a site that collects all the deep dive articles and groups them by
topics/tags.

Why? Because when you are out researching the next piece, someone else's
article is being read.

That way you build an audience.

Wait, you say. I don't want my content on someone else's platform?

That's okay, the "platform" just links back to the long form content. It can
even have ratings, which are even more important in long form content.

~~~
alpha_squared
The problems with rating systems for content is they can often lead to
brigading to suppress/promote content. At which point, you're on an infinite
whack-a-mole marathon to curb that sort of behavior.

~~~
mortivore
That's a good point, but what about a rating system that isn't directly user
generated? Imagine that information on the number of times an article/content
is viewed, and the length of time that content is viewed was used to generate
a rating for that piece of content. There could probably be other indirect
factors for "content weight" that could go into the rating.

~~~
reificator
You've invented the "YouTube Algorithm". (because it's one monolithic thing,
right?)

No one has ever taken issue with the YouTube Algorithm before.

------
andy_wrote
> Spend 50% of the writing time actually writing, the rest tweaking, reading
> and illustrating. Details are important.

I find this true not just of blog posts, but any time I've done formal writing
at all. There is an immense gulf in quality between writing that has gone
through even just one heavy edit/revision process and writing that never has.

I've recently been encouraging my technical co-workers to expend more time on
not-code, such as documentation, tutorials, plans, postmortems, internal RFCs,
carefully worded PR/commit comments, etc. One challenge is that people
sometimes think that when they "finish" a piece of writing, they're done.
Unless you've been iteratively revising pieces of it in smaller chunks, I
think you're really only halfway there.

------
AndrewStephens
This is good stuff. I blog for fun and I agree with almost everything here,
especially the stuff about advertising. I am not against advertising in
general but putting ads on your page is an acknowledgment that you care more
about money than writing what you want. There is nothing morally wrong with
this, but it turns a hobby into a job.

Lastly, I encourage everyone to publish blogs or articles. Each blog post on
an independent site is a blow against the content farms and social media
giants that control so much of the discourse these days.

~~~
rchaud
I agree with your last sentence about "each independent blog post". But you
must realize that hosting content isn't free. If you want a blog that doesn't
end with _.wordpress.com or_ blogspot.com, you'll have to pay.

Otherwise, you publish on Medium, which IMO is just as bad in terms of handing
over your IP to content farms.

~~~
AndrewStephens
Medium is only marginally better than Facebook but there is little wrong with
a wordpress or blogspot blog so long as you are prepared to accept their
limitations and the fact you are giving up some control over how your content
is used.

I host my blog on a Digital Ocean droplet with a total cost of $90 spread out
over 12 months. I realize that not everyone has disposable income or the time
but this is a very cheap hobby even with the massive overkill of a whole
droplet. And this is not even the cheapest way to host, you can get much
cheaper shared hosting for almost free for smaller static sites.

------
justpassingby-
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.

~~~
mortivore
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?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Not OP: I tend to blog tech fixes I found to make them more visible, I'm not
really writing for an audience, but just recognising that there _may_ be value
in it and so ensuring that such value can be extracted. As much as anything
it's a journal for me.

~~~
robocat
I document my fixes on Stack Overflow, then put a comment with a link to the
answer in the code.

It is remarkably convenient, high Google ranking, with zero technical
maintenance and seemingly permanent.

Sometimes better solutions are given by other people.

I have even found my own past comments when googling for solutions!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Yes, I've found I use StackOverflow sites mostly now rather than blogging
things.

------
paulpauper
_For SEO don’t write short articles ( >2000 words)_

Just more vague tips that maybe worked for him and won't for most. i have
several articles on my own blog/website that are over 4000 words and all
original content. Want to guess how much search engine traffic they get? Z-e-
r-o

~~~
toyg
I have the opposite “problem”: my posts get weird traffic because of higher
rankings than they would deserve. One thing I noticed is that titles matter: a
“how to do X” is more likely to emerge than clever puns or artistic sentences
- which is typically what one tends to use after writing longer essays.

~~~
ghaff
Yeah. People here like to complain about "clickbait" but that's what headlines
are--and they were long before there was such a thing as a click. I write for
a number of different websites and headlines (which the editor often writes or
changes) are pretty much always very direct and self-explanatory. By and
large, headlines (especially online) aren't the place for clever but obscure
literary references.

~~~
Konnstann
"Clickbait" headlines are those that misrepresent the content, not just things
that catch your eye. Headlines are designed to get you to read the content,
but when the headlines are misleading the content is a waste of time to read,
similar to a fish biting a worm only to get caught, hence "bait".

------
maddening
Personally, I think giving numbers (like 0-12k/month in 7 months) is useless
if it is not put in some context.

Several times I googled what should be expected amount of visits to see if I
am doing ok or not. Result? It is kinda disheartening to see that after
pouring a lot of love, getting rather nice feedback about articles etc, you
see that you are getting e.g. 2k visits a month, while someone states that is
"should be about 1k visits... a day". And you put some effort into marketing
your content!

Thing is, if you look at the amount of searches of the topics you cover, you
might find that the person who posted such advice caters to 20x as large
audience as you, so that 2k/month might be a really good result! But to see
that, you have to put the numbers in some context instead of looking at the
absolute numbers. If we applied this to e.g. youtubers we could conclude, that
random gameplay streamer does a several times better job than a science
channel author.

~~~
freehunter
100% agree. I run a network of very focused blogs with small but targeted
audiences. Each blog may only have 3,000 views per month, but it's serving a
city with 10,000 people, so we've captured 1/3 of the market for the entire
city. And everyone who views the site is local. But I still hear companies
balking at our advertising rates complaining that the CPM (cost per thousand
views) is way too high.

At the average $2.80 CPM, we'd make $9 per month. In a city of 10,000 people,
what would get more attention: a cheap Google ad, or your name sitting at the
top of the only digital media outlet in the city? That's worth a $10 CPM, I
think.

It's about the percentage of the market captured, not raw view numbers.

------
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.

------
nyc111
> The design of your site is irrelevant.

But it helps if the font is legible in all media.

Good, straightforward advice, better than many similar articles.

Personally, in my blog, I only write what I like.

I also do what he says about editing and linking old articles.

~~~
cantthinkofone
Any blog IMO should have a minimalist design. You want to draw attention to
the content and present it as plainly and with as little visual clutter as
possible.

Some people want to use their blog as a kind of interactive CV but that should
be treated as a separate project, as it will just introduce more clutter.

~~~
cf498
> Any blog IMO should have a minimalist design. You want to draw attention to
> the content and present it as plainly and with as little visual clutter as
> possible.

There is a German blog who hit "minimalist" rather well.
[http://blog.fefe.de/](http://blog.fefe.de/)

Tbh, I prefer this kind of representation not just when it comes to blogs.
Hackernews is another great example for "less is more".

------
asciimo
What's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g.
disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own
feedback facility is risky.

~~~
PuffinBlue
I turned off comments and allow people to contact me through Twitter or email.

That seems to be such a high barrier to entry that the contact I do receive is
almost always because someone disagrees strongly or because they are very
thankful for something they learned.

In either case, it stops pointless crap like 'first'.

~~~
veddox
Just out of interest, how active was your blog? (hits/day?)

I don't have a commenting feature on my blog - partly because I haven't gotten
around to setting it up yet, partly because I'm worried about potential spam.
But I would like to get some feedback from my readers, so that's a bit of a
conundrum...

~~~
KajMagnus
I built a Disqus like commenting system, where you can configure manual review
of [the first X posts a new person posts at your blog]. If they write say 5
make-sense interesting things, hopefully thereafter it's ok to auto approve
their subsequent posts. — How does this affect (if at all) how you feel about
spam? (Here it is: [https://www.talkyard.io/blog-
comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments) )

If you think someone might become a spammer, and is just posting "I like it"
and "Wow great" comments to get past any first-comments manual reviews, then
you can mark that user as a possible threat, and forever get notifieid about
his/her posts (before they're made visible).

~~~
veddox
That looks good! However, I already had my sights set on Isso
([https://posativ.org/isso/](https://posativ.org/isso/)). My static site
generator coleslaw
([https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw](https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw))
already offers a plugin for this, so it is a more natural choice...

~~~
KajMagnus
Coleslaw seems to have many nice features. Hadn't heard about it before

------
jamietanna
Alternatively [I blog as a form of self-documenting, under the term
blogumentation]([https://www.jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/](https://www.jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/)).
My audience is me. Sometimes my audience will be my colleagues, or strangers
on the Internet, but it's always written for me first!

------
ta3216
I thought I read somewhere that ads make a blog seem more authoritative so I
disagree about not having ads.

~~~
gwern
I don't know about 'authoritative', but ads do seem to hurt. The existing
experimental and quasi-experimental literature shows very bad effects on user
behavior:

1\. "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment
on Pandora Internet Radio", Huang et al 2018:
[https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd...](https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pdf)
[experimental]

2."The Effect of Ad Blocking on [Firefox] User Engagement with the Web",
Miroglio et al 2018: [https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-
of-Ad-...](https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-
Blocking-on-User-Engagement-with-the-Web.pdf) [quasi]

3\. and my own A/B test:
[https://www.gwern.net/Ads](https://www.gwern.net/Ads) [experimental]

~~~
ta3216
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.

~~~
gwern
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.

~~~
ta3216
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.

------
8bitsrule
Some very useful tips in there. Especially the first one: "No one has time to
read your article, write the first lines like they’re a TLDR." Not a good idea
for fiction! but it's essential to save a reader's time. If the main topic is
buried 3-4 paragraphs down, I've already left.

Note that this one person is getting significant attention writing about a
specialized topic (EDM). That probably characterizes most blogs that attract
much attention.

A few people managed to be 'generalists' in the early days (e.g. Kottke), but
you're probably better off trying to find a congregation that feels under-
represented online and is looking for a home. (It's not a blog, but, e.g.,
deviantart.)

~~~
rchaud
There's also a technical reason for writing the TLDR up top. When a web
crawler indexes a page for search results, they capture a snippet of the first
<p> tags that follow the <h1> of the title. That snippet is what is shown on
the results page, and really is what determines whether a user wants to click
the link shown by the search engine.

~~~
CM30
Don't meta descriptions usually do this? I've never seen people use the post
content as their meta description, at least not when they've got access to
something like Yoast or the SEO Framework or what not.

------
qwerty456127
> No one has time to read your article, write the first lines like they’re a
> TLDR.

So true!

> For SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words)

So sad!

~~~
andrenth
Sad and annoying. Top Google results are very likely to include long articles
that ramble on and on and never get to the point, in the name of
"optimization". Search Engine Optimization is Reader Experience Pessimization.

~~~
martimatix
I look forward to the day that a recipe doesn't come with a life story
prepended to it.

~~~
AndrewStephens
With video advertising, sites have started to optimize for length of stay on
the page rather than hits and I hate it.

The recipe format was perfected in the middle ages - a simple list of
ingredients and a description of the steps required. But the sites that
capture the first page of search results for even the simplest recipe are all
designed to keep you on the page long enough for the video ads to play
through.

Listen up idiots, if I like your recipe I will be on your page for minutes
figuring out how to follow it and will return every time I want to make the
meal. Your stats will be favorable - no need to bother me with how your dead
granny used to make roast beef sandwiches or whatever.

Just another way that advertising kills everything it touches.

~~~
dhimes
So, I have a question: I'm seeing lots of videos on social media that are
_very_ long. They're cute or funny or amazing or something, but they seem like
they are artificially long, like they are trying to keep me in the act of
viewing them. If they aren't an advertisement themselves, then why is this the
trend? What is the reward for engaging a viewer in a sight gag for several
minutes? Are they gaming the ad companies by padding some "average view time"
or something?

It sure smells like shenanigans, I'm just not sure why.

~~~
rchaud
I don't know about FB, but Youtube videos can only be monetized if they're a
minimum of 10 minutes long. That's why videos by 'Youtubers' can be so painful
to watch; they are trying to stretch out 2 minutes of content into 10, and
it's obvious.

------
Aardwolf
"Start a Newsletter."

why?

~~~
rchaud
To promote new content to an already-converted audience.

Compare the site engagement of users who willingly gave you their email
address, to a user who landed on your page from a search query, browsed it and
left the site. What are the chances that that user will remember the name of
the site and make a return visit? Your page could have been one of 10 he
looked at to get an answer to his question.

~~~
ghaff
Newsletters can work for a very targeted topic that has an audience that it
equally targeted on that same topic, e.g. AWS.

But there's real email fatigue out there. I know some folks who are reasonably
well-known in the tech space who have tried newsletters at various times but
gave up (as did I) because people generally just don't want another weekly or
biweekly email. (And even if they give up their email address, they mostly
don't open or read.)

It's too bad in a way because a newsletter is a nice format for short form
topical news and commentary on articles in a way that blog posts really
aren't.

------
paulpauper
_I’m 21, but I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years._

wtf..mindblown.. His IQ must be off the charts. no wonder he is so successful.

~~~
rchaud
I wrote short stories and video game reviews for the kids section of my local
newspaper when I was 10-12yo. When I was older (13-18) I switched to writing
about music. My IQ, not that I've tried to measure it, is probably very
average. I was a kid and I just wanted to write.

