
Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder? - personlurking
I used to blog for several years, several years ago, and was able to build up a &quot;large&quot; following, for a small-timer at least (over 10K visitors&#x2F;mo). In recent years, I&#x27;ve made two slightly niche-subject blogs but find it nearly impossible to get a following, even though I&#x27;m dealing in the same general subject matter, quality of posts, research, and media integration.<p>As of a few years ago it seems like to have a successful blog one must be cross-posting to 6-7 social networks at the same time (ie, for sharing to be frictionless). When I post my newer blog posts in relevant places online, people actually say they like the content, yet visitor numbers don&#x27;t reflect such sentiment in a sustained manner. I have hundreds of posts, but retention is very low (1 visitor = 1 view, then they leave).<p>Is the only option these days to be cross-posting? It seems share buttons on each blog post aren&#x27;t frictionless enough. Either I&#x27;m a bit delusional about the quality&#x2F;interest level or blogging has become a lot harder in terms of audience capture.
======
AndrewStephens
I've blogged ([https://sheep.horse/](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 because they sat unused. The only posts that go viral are the short, simple posts with inflammatory headlines. I don't want to go down that route.

* Occasionally a post will be linked on Reddit or Hacker News. Then the post will get thousands of hits but this tails off quickly. After a couple of days the traffic will go back to normal - I see almost no retention. It is actually quite hard to predict what will be take off and my attempts to promote my work to these sites myself have been completely unsuccessful.

* 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)

Blogging (and running a website in general) is not popular these days because
so much of the oxygen is taken up by social media or sites like Reddit where
people can make their points easily in a controlled environment. Time has
moved on and unless Facebook collapses I don't see blogging coming back in a
big way.

~~~
savanaly
>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?

~~~
AndrewStephens
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).

~~~
gist
> But some posters carry enough cred (or have enough friends)

Is that really true? Look at tptacek's submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tptacek](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tptacek)

~~~
angelbob
That's a very solid list of submissions. Every fourth-or-so submission has
hundreds or thousands of points. If you feel that's not great... Dunno. You're
using a different yardstick than I am. That looks a lot like people consider
his name to add credibility.

------
Udo
I closed my blog last year, after more than ten years of creating admittedly
uneven quality content. The impetus for me was that I was getting relatively
good traffic but engagement was non-existent. I came to the conclusion I
wasn't really getting anything out of it anymore, as far as I could tell
neither was anyone else, and general IT blogs are a dime a dozen.

Absolutely, attracting a blog audience has become harder. The collapse of
Google Reader, followed by the rise of Youtube and social media has caused
this. You just don't build an audience for a blog anymore. You build an
audience for your social media channels instead, and your blog becomes part of
the content you share. It's now a delivery platform only.

So the question becomes instead how to a) attract social subscribers and b)
get your content shared. Your content needs to cut through a _lot_ of noise to
get noticed. With very few exceptions I would say the answers for most blogs
would be

1) produce content regularly, like clockwork

2) specialize into something unique to attract core followers first, you can
always broaden later

3) compete with the big guys either in quality or in click-bait generation

I wouldn't branch too far out as far as cross-posting to different social
networks is concerned. Identify 1-3 platforms and really engage people on
those. Don't just spew links into the void.

~~~
inputcoffee
10! Years!

You kept it going for so long and shut it down.

I guess you grew the blog in a different era (internet time). Can you give
more info on how many people you had and how it tapered off?

If you wanted engagement, can you have added engagement features? (Q&A
section, call to action to ask questions, announcements of open chats etc)

~~~
Udo
_> You kept it going for so long and shut it down._

Sometimes it's just time to move on. In the early days things were different,
everybody had a blog, and you had no trouble making mutual connections. I met
interesting people, had interesting discussions, sometimes you'd meet fellow
bloggers at events and find out you're subscribed to each other. One time, I
spent a week of my holidays at a famous tech blogger's house, on a whim, even
though I had never met the guy before.

People moved on to other platforms, but I never built a social presence, nor
did I do anything to really grow my audience.

 _> Can you give more info on how many people you had and how it tapered off?_

Traffic wasn't that great by modern standards. According to Google Analytics,
a good post would generate maybe 10-20k within the first month, and then taper
off sharply. A bad post would not generate more than a few hundred eyeballs.
My stuff was never monetized, so I didn't track visitors that well. Sometimes
I saw there had been a crazy spike like months ago ;)

 _> If you wanted engagement, can you have added engagement features?_

It's a matter of commitment. If I ever start anything again, that would
definitely be a focus.

------
daliwali
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 currency, not as much anymore.
People are more inclined to use search engines or social media to find
content, which is kind of lame because recommendations via links from the
authors themselves are much more relevant than algorithms.

\- Social media and large corporations have made it much harder to get people
to leave their platforms. Instead of being an entry point, they want to be the
destination for content.

\- There is simply too much garbage out there, and curation/aggregation for
quality content is nearly non-existent unless you already know the right
places to look. Otherwise you get fed the same garbage as everyone else, or
trapped inside an algorithmic filter bubble.

~~~
justboxing
> or trapped inside an algorithmic filter bubble.

This is how I feel these days.

------
jo909
I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing
that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero
blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search
results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.

~~~
teh_klev
I used to have ~100 blogs I followed in Google Reader, then when Reader was
killed I drifted away from many of them. I wonder how many authors lost large
numbers of readers because of that sad event.

~~~
parhurs
Reading these comments makes me think of a crazy conspiracy theory: Google
killed Reader to promote search.

~~~
wodenokoto
The common theory is they did it to boosts Google plus. They wanted you to
follow blogs interest on G+ rather than more directly via Reader/RSS.

~~~
caminante
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...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-
cleaning.html)

~~~
mtone
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.

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

------
ploggingdev
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 content is that it's pretty time
consuming.

Let me share my own anecdata. Three of my posts got significant attention when
I posted them to my blog, around 30k pageviews and now I get a few thousand
views every month from search engines and people sharing my posts on social
networks. I don't spend any time promoting it, only post to a couple of
subreddits initially, that's it, (and HN where my posts did not gain traction
so far) .

Posts :

[https://www.ploggingdev.com/2017/01/multiprocessing-and-
mult...](https://www.ploggingdev.com/2017/01/multiprocessing-and-
multithreading-in-python-3/)

[https://www.ploggingdev.com/2016/12/performance-
measurement-...](https://www.ploggingdev.com/2016/12/performance-measurement-
in-python-3/)

[https://www.ploggingdev.com/2016/12/analyzing-programming-
la...](https://www.ploggingdev.com/2016/12/analyzing-programming-language-
statistics-of-100000-github-repositories/)

Especially the first post linked above has gotten most of the attention and
now ranks on Google for python multiprocessing and multithreading related
keywords. My blog is clearly not very popular by HN standards, but it has
given me a good understanding of what type of content has no issue attracting
attention as explained above.

Edit : You might find the following post by Nate interesting, it talks about
how to choose topics to write about (among other things) :
[https://www.nateberkopec.com/blog/2017/03/10/how-i-made-
self...](https://www.nateberkopec.com/blog/2017/03/10/how-i-made-self-
publishing-about-ruby-on-rails.html)

~~~
ardit33
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](https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalFoundry)

~~~
chrshawkes
He's right.

~~~
user5994461
It's decent. A great post will get 30k view the day it's published on HN and
goes on the top page.

A post that can't make the top page (too niche, not buzzwordy enough, not good
enough, etc) can still rank on Google and get 30k slowly over the year.

It's really about the topic. A classic "Another Uber Self Driving Car
Accident" is of interest to a population 1000 times bigger than python
multiprocessing.

------
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.

~~~
personlurking
> Keep improving them. Can you explain it better now? Are there typos you
> missed before?

Are you essentially saying to go back and rewrite/improve old blog posts? Just
for clarification.

~~~
xs
Yes. Example. I had a series of articles that I expected people to read in
order, but found that the 3rd one was getting more traffic than all the rest
combined. That's because people wanted to know something specific about that
subject and found my page through Google. Well that page acted as a very poor
entry point to the subject so I improved it by rewriting the article to look
better as a standalone article instead of just making sense in a series.

The goal is to give quality content and make your readers satisfied. If they
bounce off your page and go back to Google search results, Google takes note
of that and thinks your site isn't serving its purpose.

------
postit
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 were reading using delicious
and I could easily keep up with good content.

\- Lack of good content: Once delicious was losing interest, I started to rely
on Twitter to find good content, again unsuccessful. Thanks, today we have
Reddit/HN to filter this, but getting a click from HN won't make me
"subscribe."

\- Good alternatives for tech content. Today most conferences dump their
entire collection on YT; I'd rather watch a 45mn lecture on 2X on youtube or
listen to an excellent podcast than read a long blog post.

\- Audibooks =)

In the long run, it's almost impossible for individual text blogs to compete
with such social validated content and curated content.

edit: typos and grammar

~~~
dmix
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.

~~~
futuretro
Same, i recently decided to overhaul my RSS addiction. I did a ruthless
curation of my RSS feeds and picked only a select few that i truly enjoyed.
Then, i looked for the publication's Twitter and added the accounts to the
relevant list.

The upside is i no longer feel compelled to finish reading everything in
Feedly. Before, the unread markers was distracting.

------
HurrdurrHodor
Am I the only one who thinks it might have gotten harder simply because so
many more people are producing content these days?

That's why other commenters say they get their traffic from r/programming or
HN. You are a blog in a sea of blogs and other crap.

~~~
viraptor
I'd say more specifically - things that need explaining are created slower
than blogs explaining them. The are still great writeups about many things,
but unless you're writing about new web frameworks, it's just not that easy to
find a topic in a popular development area.

Of course you can still post about something you learned and bring some new
traffic, because you explain it in an accessible way. Or you may write about
something on a company blog. But if your aim is to create new, unique tech
content, the chances are there's already another blog post, 2 SO answers, and
a few relevant mailing list posts on the topic. We're constantly accumulating
tech knowledge and mostly we're running into the same problems.

------
mtw
I started blogging a few months ago
[https://dailyhealthpoints.wordpress.com/](https://dailyhealthpoints.wordpress.com/)
Each article requires me to read on average one science paper, and I spend
also quite some time on editing.

Now I have 300 subscribers but sadly it doesn't have the same success as a
blog I started ten years ago. That blog was focused on tech and startups. It
didn't require any research, every post was only 30mn to 1hr of work, and
generated a lot of views and comments.

My assessment is that people moved on. Instead of writing sharp comments on
blogs, they would write on Facebook or Twitter. They are attracted by shiny
Youtube videos. If they want to see nice pictures, they'd spend time on
Instagram instead of going through your gallery blog.

Even the fact that I write long comments here on YC, like many other users,
take time away from blogs.

I have changed my strategy and now instead of publishing often, I will only
publish twice a week. I will increase the quality and also spend much more
time in promoting these 2 articles. I can reformat them for Tumblr, Medium,
cross post on various other sites. Also I don't plan for a massive audience
anymore. Having ~1000 quality subscribers is more than enough!

~~~
futuretro
I actually see the rise of social media as a double edged sword when it comes
to blogging.

On one hand, you have people spending more time updating their feeds.

On the other hand, it also means people are less compelled to start a personal
blog describing their day to day lives (remember the days of livejournal?).

------
franze
there are three pillars of "editorial content traffic generation"

    
    
      - social
      - search
      - newsletter
    

it does not really matter which with one you start

a) first you need to get one of them right

then b) "the strong feed the poor", convert them from one channel into the
other. and yeah, if you do it baldy (i.e. newsletter popups, constant reminder
to follow you on fb, ...) 99% will hate you, but you can iterate on the 1%.

the big questions: why do you need the quantity? if you do not have a quantity
traffic dependent business case (i.e. adsense) then a few people who value
your input can be more rewarding then 10 000 skimming over your content and
clicking away the newsletter popups & follow me on fb call-to-actions. the
strategy follows the goal, "lots of traffic" in itself is a poor goal.

~~~
okket
I wonder, is "social" not practically equivalent to "Facebook" these days and
dwarfs all other (including search/newsletter)? Except for niche cases...

~~~
futuretro
I believe by social, he probably meant cross posting links to social media as
a form of marketing.

It's tricky though, because Twitter is a micro-blogging service, and Facebook
has Groups and Pages.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
Have you considered video blogging instead of a text based blog? If you are
anything like me you are reluctant to put yourself in front of a camera
because let's face it, most of us visiting HN are probably not fashionistas
with the best hairdos but I have considered it because I think this is
increasingly a more popular way to blog. Video blogs offer greater
accessibility and appeal to the laziness of human beings (including myself)
with respect to attention required.

Personally speaking I would be more likely to follow your technical vlog
channel on YouTube rather than a text based blog. The problem for the blogger
is the increased production value investment required compared with a text
blog. Not only do you have to create the script, you must edit video and do
other things that are probably not your primary interest. Code snippets become
screen share videos etc. I think this can make video blogging highly time
consuming but if done right it's probably easier to get views. Text blogs are
appealing because it's all you need to do is write the content and put it up.
We coders like the idea of writing code and putting it up and getting success
but anyone who's started a startup and made something knows that never works,
there's a whole bunch of other 'business stuff' that needs to be done in the
same way a vlog requires more 'production stuff' to be done.

~~~
lutorm
I find the vast majority video blogging long-winded and rambling. This isn't
particularly surprising, since it's _much_ more work to shoot and edit a video
to be short and to the point than it is a written work, but unless there's a
particular need for visuals and motion I really prefer reading.

------
Maarten88
Coincidentally, I recently felt the urge to do a braindump and write a few
blogposts. I had learned new things, and it was hard finding that knowlegde,
combining sources etc, so I thought I should share it. It is technical content
targeted at developers.

My last blogpost was four years old, I wrote it on my company's website, were
it got buried after a redesign.

So I opened an account on Medium and did my braindump there. I want to write
three posts, have published two now, the last one yesterday. I promoted each
one with a single tweet.

I have been happy with the response: the first article got 1000 views, the one
posted yesterday already has 4000 views on the first day, probably because it
has a broader topic. I got many retweets and likes, and I'm an absolute n00b
on twitter. My first post got mentioned in a vlog.

I didn't really know what to expect, but the response seems very good to me.
So I do not really share your observation: It seems that there is demand for
good technical content. I did spend quite some time researching the topic and
trying to write it well, as a non-native english speaker.

I do think good content has to add something new and interesting, shallow or
promotional content will have a hard time attracting readership, as there is
too much of that.

p.s. last post is at [https://medium.com/@MaartenSikkema/using-react-redux-
and-web...](https://medium.com/@MaartenSikkema/using-react-redux-and-webpack-
with-dotnet-core-to-build-a-modern-web-frontend-7e2d091b3ba#.cdo1xwd9a)

------
thenomad
I've been blogging for a couple of decades at this point. Yes, it has
definitely gotten harder to attract an audience.

It does depend on the sort of blog you're running, though. Information-heavy
blogs addressing actual urgent needs still do OK if they're appropriately
promoted. More opinion-focused blogs do much less well unless they're very
unusual in some way.

(Sweeping statements, obviously.)

~~~
vidyesh
This is more or less correct now a days.

People don't want to read opinions anymore, they like to read information
unless they are looking for something specific.

But if they are looking for something specific they want opinions and in that
case their readership ends there.

For example :

If I want to know about how to setup a water sprinkler and make optimum use of
my gardening equipment, I would look for sites which provide that information
and stick with that site seeing it is providing me information on my gardening
needs. But if I want to buy a water sprinkler I might just google for people
who bought it or have reviewed it and once I am done buying I will forget
about that site.

------
cyberferret
I used to subscribe and ready many blogs about a decade ago - all in Google
Reader. When that died, so did my blog reading habits, and I never went back
to reading a specific blog on a regular basis.

Nowadays, I only visit blog site when they come up as a Google search result.
Even then, single visit to get the info I want (usually a programming or
business related thing) then I close the tab and never go back to that site. I
cannot remember ever bookmarking a blog home page for later reference in the
past few years.

No slight against those blogs - usually brilliant content written by smart
people. It is just that I don't have the time these days to stop and read
article after article on one particular site. We are just so flooded with
information these days that I see it akin to fishing in the ocean. It is no
longer worth spending the energy to just try and catch particular sort of fish
- I just throw the line in and see what comes up and make do with that.

As an aside, it will be interesting research to see if the death of Google
Reader had an impact on visitor stickiness to blog sites. I know in my case,
it completely changed the way I consume blog content altogether - I wonder if
it was the same to others?

------
rcarmo
Well, my blog ([http://taoofmac.com](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 :)

~~~
mackatsol
Keep writing for yourself, I certainly enjoy it ;-)

------
lutusp
> Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

I've been involved with the Internet virtually since it began, and we're now
in its third phase. The phases:

1\. Forum for technical discussions and data transfer.

2\. Soapbox for social communication.

3\. Virtual mall.

The "virtual mall" identity is now so strong and all-encompassing that if
you're not selling something, people begin to distrust you -- the opposite of
the instincts present in phases 1 and 2, where you were distrusted if you
_were_ selling something.

So my advice is to write blog posts that include links to relevant (or
irrelevant) products. This strategy assures that, regardless of the blog's
content, the fact that it links to products or services assures that someone,
somewhere will reciprocally link to it for purely commercial reasons.

I know this sounds cynical, but it's true -- nothing assures an audience as
reliably as linking to a product who cares about your link and who -- for
self-serving reasons -- is willing to link back.

I get appeals almost daily from commercial interests to include links on my
site to their products -- on a payment basis, of course -- or reciprocal
links, but I've always turned such requests down. Consequently, my website is
now located in a kind of purgatory reserved for sites that haven't caught a
train to the present or exploited their content (and their audience) to the
fullest.

The artifact under discussion: [https://arachnoid.com](https://arachnoid.com)

~~~
qznc
I just subscribed to your purgatory feed. :)

~~~
lutusp
Thanks! If you were to read only one article, read this one:

[https://arachnoid.com/psychology_and_alchemy/](https://arachnoid.com/psychology_and_alchemy/)

------
whatiftrue
I write for a very specific niche (psychology:
[https://mikolajczyz.com/news/](https://mikolajczyz.com/news/) or
[https://couplespsychology.com/](https://couplespsychology.com/)) and I guess
the blog posts have shorter "exposition times" lately. Years back it was the
context that seemed important - citations and general neighborhood, referrals
from other blogs, people emailing the links. And search engines that followed.
Nowadays it's more about the instant spikes of social media powered traffic
and then just Google. Even hugely popular content at a time eventually
receives almost no visitors from social media.

These are just impressions though. I believe it is harder to attract returning
readers now.

------
thisiscurio
It seems with the wealth of blogs out there people either gravitate to those
with the greatest quality or unfortunately, to those with the worst quality.
The former in order to learn from the best the internet has to offer and the
latter in order to just disconnect from this difficult world and embrace the
pleasures of dumbness and the absence of cognition. Those in the middle will
have difficulties and if one of them has mightier goals, he'll be sad seeing
the disconnect between his ideal and reality daily.

I used to create blogs with hopes of gaining 'financial independence' because
I idolise those many and reproducing gurus gallivanting around the net space,
those who told me it is possible despite the disclaimer "only if you work
under an unspecificied amount of hard work". But I'm tired of trying again and
it is probably my fault that things didn't pan put well. Right now, I try to
write like I used to; I write because I love writing even if my skills are
abysmal at best.

Though, aswering your question, it's indeed getting more difficult but
escalating difficulty is all that happens when the rack and pinion of progress
and keeps moving.

------
henrik_w
I've blogged for a bit over 5 years now about programming in general - 53
posts at irregular intervals
([https://henrikwarne.com/](https://henrikwarne.com/)). I get around 250 to
300 views per day on average, with 1.4 views per visitor (all stats from
Wordpress' standard stats).

Whenever I write something new, I submit it to Hacker News and Reddit. It's
pretty hard to get on the front page of HN, but a few of my posts have made it
there. That usually means a few thousand views. On Reddit (Programming) it is
easier to get on the front page, and once there the posts stay there longer
(around 24 hours). I also tweet the posts, but pretty much all traffic from
Twitter comes due to being on Hacker News or Reddit, not from my own tweets.

The traffic isn't evenly distributed. Most posts get almost no traffic, and
one gets maybe a third of all traffic (probably because it shows up in
searches a lot): "5 Reasons Why Software Developer is a Great Career Choice"
[https://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-
de...](https://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-developer-is-
a-great-career-choice/)

I think there are other valid reason for blogging apart from building a
following. It is a great why to organize your thoughts and "discover" what you
think about some issues. Also, hopefully some of what you write is helpful to
other people. Another reason is when looking for work - in my experience it
helps to be able to point to your blog and show what you think and what you
are interested in.

One more thing. I still enjoy blogging, but it takes me a lot of time to write
a post. I think some people underestimate the work it takes to write a post.

------
WA
> _Is the only option these days to be cross-posting?_

No, it's SEO. For me at least. I don't follow blogs, but I find the same blogs
over and over again, when I search for specific keywords.

The thing with blogs is: Usually, I'm looking for specific information right
now. I need answers. I'd never sign up for a newsletter, because in a few
weeks, I might've grown beyond this already.

------
amerkhalid
I have been blogging for over 15 years on a same domain. I was getting about
1000 unique views a month and perhaps 1 cup of coffee in Adsense revenues. But
my blog had no focus, just random low quality posts with occasional decent
post.

Around 5 years ago, I decided to clean up my blog. I also decided to use a
different domain, and used "proper" 300 redirects, or so I thought.

Anyways my traffic dropped significantly, then I messed up even more up moving
my blog back to original domain.

Now I am getting around 50-60 unique sessions a month. I don't really share on
social media very often, and once again my blog is a sort of journal. I intend
to keep it that way for now.

------
wink
Maybe I'm decrying the old dying medium, but my experience matches many
sibling comments.

I started blogging over 15 years ago (when you didn't unanimously call them
blogs yet) and it was mostly a personal log. When I started studying I had a
more focused topic but still personal anecdotes (well, sometimes even both in
the same post, naturally) and it shifted more and more towards bigger, more
technical articles the more I transitioned into "proper" work experience. Then
at some point I decided to not post small oneliners anymore, only medium-
length pieces. But as much as I have stopped regularly posting daily (or even
weekly or monthly), at least 2/3 of all the blogs I've read have stopped as
well.

Links (sometimes with comment, often without) are shared via Twitter and
Facebook (and for a shrinking minority, G+), commenting and replying is a lot
easier there. This could all be my little filter bubble though (or my
interests have shifted that much, but I don't really think so) - so I think I
might be following more gaming blogs (that have frequent posts, averaging 1
per day) than my old mix of tech/PLT/Linux/personal aquaintances (those
especially have stopped blogging).

------
mjn
The only sub-area of blogging I know of that has reasonably healthy
communities of regular readers (vs. only people coming in from search or
Reddit) is for communities of bloggers based around some programming
languages. Language-specific aggregators like
[http://www.juliabloggers.com/](http://www.juliabloggers.com/),
[http://www.planet-rust.com/](http://www.planet-rust.com/), and
[http://planet.lisp.org/](http://planet.lisp.org/) have regular readers.
Unlike Reddit and HN they don't depend on getting upvoted; if you blog
regularly on the topic, you can ask for your blog to be included, and the
aggregator then pulls your posts via RSS (if you sometimes blog on the topic
and sometimes on others, you can make an RSS feed for just the on-topic tag,
and ask for that to be included).

It's possible something similar exists in other areas, but these PLs "planet"
aggregators are the only high-quality blogging communities of this type I know
of that still exists.

------
maxdemarzi
Anecdote agreeing with the OP. I used to get 10k visitors a month in 2015,
that dropped to 7.5k in 2016 and currently get about 5k a month even though
the niche I talk about has gotten more and more popular (Neo4j). Nearly all my
posts are technical and link to source code. Maybe there are just more
bloggers about Neo4j. [http://maxdemarzi.com](http://maxdemarzi.com)

~~~
verisimilidude
I remember reading your blog a few years ago when I started out with Neo4j.
Great stuff!

------
wanqu
I did some automation for my blog:
[https://medium.com/@wanquribao/wanqu-5-english-tech-
startup-...](https://medium.com/@wanquribao/wanqu-5-english-tech-startup-
articles-for-chinese-
everyday-b1af9934d2a2?source=linkShare-96be7574139a-1490639377)

Auto publishing to ~10 different channels, including weibo, twitter, fb, iOS
push notification, chrome push notif. ...

It works.

~~~
tmaly
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?

~~~
wanqu
You can start with Weibo. You can get a Weibo account with a phone number or
email address. Many famous US brands or celebrities have a Weibo account
nowadays. Some of them have more followers on Weibo than on Twitter :)

Some may argue that Wechat's official account is better than Weibo in terms of
reaching users & engagement, as every Chinese internet user is on Wechat now.
But it's tedious to get an Wechat official account:
[https://admin.wechat.com/](https://admin.wechat.com/)

Old school email newsletter may work for reaching well-educated Chinese
internet users. However, Chinese people don't use email much. Again,
everyone's on Wechat.

------
GuiA
As another commenter has said, people don't bother with blogs anymore. Seems
that Facebook pages are the way to go for engagement. Instagram too, if your
content works for the medium. I think Twitter is good for some niches, but its
popularity wildly varies by country.

Dramatically sad as you can't get more walled garden than that, but that is
the future we built.

~~~
cmahler7
Facebook is worthless, less than .1% reach in some cases unless you pay for
ads to reach your own audience

~~~
Applejinx
Exactly. They hold your stuff hostage: that is the future. Not exactly 'net
neutrality'!

------
jrochkind1
I think it has. But in contrast to some other people's reports, I continue to
get regular hits to many of my posts on my largely ruby-language focused blog.
Often (but I don't _think_ always) they come from links in Stack Overflow
answers.

I am not trying to 'monetize' it any way, so not paying attention to that, or
to 'engagement' or whatever. But happy my posts are helping people, and
effecting the dialog and shared understanding of rubyists.

I do think it's gotten harder to get blog attention, everyone just looks at
facebook pretty much.

The most popular posts on my blog, that continue to get ~10 hits a day,
include:

* ActiveRecord Concurrency in Rails4: Avoid leaked connections!

* Non-digested asset names in Rails 4: Your Options

* Struggling Towards Reliable Capybara Javascript Testing

* You never want to call html_safe in a Rails template

(I guess the popular ones are all Rails, not just ruby. I do sometimes write
about ruby not in the context of Rails).

------
superkuh
Put your blog on on .onion address on the tor network. I get far more traffic
from within tor to my hidden service than the exact same copy of the site on
run on the clear web.

~~~
adrianN
How much of that is humans? The Tor network is smaller, so I'd expect crawlers
to make more passes.

~~~
superkuh
Probably a fifth or so based on watching logs when I kept them (I do not keep
logs now for the hidden service). But even accounting for that I get more
human traffic to the tor hidden service. The list of public, interesting, tor
sites is low. So if you get your site included in any of the curated lists it
funnels a ton of both bot and human traffic your way from curious explorers.

Tor hidden service public websites are like how the web was in the mid 1990s.
Web rings, curated lists and indexes, and people literally surfing the web.
It's really refreshing and non-commercial.

------
pleasecalllater
My blog also doesn't get too much attention. And it was always like that. I
was writing in a couple of places, a couple of my blogs, and on a corporate
blog. My most successful blog post had about 10k of visitors across the first
year.

I also noticed that the average session time is about 2 minutes, sometimes is
just too short to read through a blog post. So I assume that people come there
just to get a solution to a problem they have, not to read through all the
text.

Another thing is that over 70% of my blog entries are from two posts, a
tutorial like ones. And this is only because someone found them informative
enough to place a link on stackoverflow, and some other places.

At the very beginning I wanted to earn on the blog enough to work only on the
blog. In reality that's impossible for a technical blog, and instead I just
treat it as an interesting part of my CV.

~~~
Freak_NL
> I also noticed that the average session time is about 2 minutes, sometimes
> is just too short to read through a blog post. So I assume that people come
> there just to get a solution to a problem they have, not to read through all
> the text.

Does your website actively ping back to the server to determine how long a
visitor remains on a page?

~~~
pleasecalllater
I use the simplest thing like Google Analytics

~~~
beejiu
Google Analytics 'session duration' is not what you expect it to be.

~~~
inancgumus
Yeah. When a visitor goes from Page-A to Page-B, only then, GA counts it.

If the visitor gets to Page-A and gets out, GA doesn't count it.

------
RikNieu
Maybe it's the niches. What was your old blog about compared to the new ones?

Also, the sheer amount of material you have to compete with for people's
attention is insane these days.

I also wonder if most people still read long articles. Do people prefer video
or podcasts over lengthy articles?

~~~
personlurking
The old one and the newer two are about understanding foreign cultures. The
old one was about a particular country while the newer ones are focused on
vibrant major cities. I know if I focused on tourism, I'd get more of an
audience but since I blog for pleasure (and like digging into national
identity, urban planning, historical changes and the arts), I prefer to
produce content that interests me rather than write for clicks.

I also wonder about the same things (re:last two lines you wrote). I'd love to
make a podcast, like 99% Invisible, but who wouldn't?

------
cube2222
I haven't encountered this. I've got a blog ( jacobmartins.com ), mainly
writing about Go and sometimes distributed systems.

I usually put my posts on various social media, but the only ones that really
have an influence are Reddit, sometimes hacker news and Twitter.

I usually get around 5k pageviews a month. Around 2 visits per visitor (+ ~30%
getting cached by CloudFlare). I have a stable rising tendency of visitors,
even when I don't post new articles for a long time (month-two).

In my opinion it's really important to optimize for search engines. A huuuge
part of my page visits come from google searches.

------
KCFforecast
I have just posted a long post that probably will be located near the bottom
because is lengthy. So here is a short one with my 2 cents: 1) I like to read
quality post, I think quality is the main source to sustain a post. 2) Don't
shallow your post if you want to have an open road for future success. 3) Your
post is a drop in an ocean of knowledge in which content is interrelated.
Perhaps you can be successful posting in a niche but I think that niche won't
last. 4) I think that in the future quality post will get more recognition.

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

~~~
mosqutopi
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.

~~~
sctb
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.

------
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](https://bigishdata.com) 2 -
[https://bigishdata.com/2016/09/27/getting-song-lyrics-
from-g...](https://bigishdata.com/2016/09/27/getting-song-lyrics-from-geniuss-
api-scraping)

------
jldugger
> When I post my newer blog posts in relevant places online, people actually
> say they like the content, yet visitor numbers don't reflect such sentiment
> in a sustained manner.

Niche content is way more long tail than you imagine, and retention is near
impossible. I usually don't add an RSS feed to my set until I notice I've read
a couple of posts by the same author. That's a really leaky bucket, when you
consider the ways an author can fall out of it:

\- the content is not my niche \- the headline isn't punchy enough to get the
click \- HN fails to notice your post amid the ever-growing din \- HN notices,
but I don't do any reading that day \- I fail to notice the author has a
pattern of quality worth subscribing to

Unless you're writing books, appearing on podcasts and giving keynotes,
blogging may be more of a write only medium than a tool for self-promotion.
Which can be fine; my personal blog is for two audiences: Google, and hiring
companies. I don't track subscribers, but based on my own lax writing rate, I
assume I have none =)

------
thenaterhood
I've had a blog since 2009
([https://www.thenaterhood.com/blog](https://www.thenaterhood.com/blog)). My
personal network (classmates at the time) were, and still are, my biggest
officially subscribed base as far as what I'm able to track with minimal
effort.

I've been posting much more regularly this year - once a week, versus
periodically, as a way to vent some of my frustration with the current state
of affairs. Otherwise, I've been doing pretty much the same - post it then
tweet it, Facebook it, and LinkedIn it. Being regular I've seen has drawn more
attention than anything in the past. With a once a week post, I have more re-
shares and more clicks than I have before. Part of it may also be that I'm
doing less of just spouting things into posts, but doing a lot of research and
linking out to my sources.

What's interesting about having an audience though, is that they seem to be
harder to track these days. Most of my personal network uses adblock,
ghostery, or other similar extensions to stay off the radar, so their visits
don't show up. I know they're happening since I use trackable links when I
share and the number of clicks is far and away higher than the number of
visits Google Analytics logs. It also seems people are less likely to give out
an email address or subscribe to a blog feed since it pops up on social media.
I used to get the periodic new email subscriber, but I haven't had a new
signup in years now.

Even for myself, I don't "subscribe" to blogs anymore. I hate seeing an unread
count and all that which most feed readers provide because it feels too much
like an inbox. Give me a list of headlines and let me decide what I'm going to
read. In light of that, I periodically check in with blogs I read by directly
visiting the site.

~~~
SyneRyder
> _they seem to be harder to track these days. Most of my personal network
> uses adblock, ghostery, or other similar extensions to stay off the radar,
> so their visits don 't show up_

You could still track some of them using server logs, and a desktop log
analysis tool (like Web Log Storming [1]). As long as they're downloading the
HTML, their access will have to show up in the server log. Not as convenient
as logging into Google Analytics, but with the amount of spamming of GA
lately, I've been thinking more about going back to old desktop tools to solve
some of my metrics questions.

[1] [http://www.weblogstorming.com/](http://www.weblogstorming.com/)

~~~
thenaterhood
True. I'm running off Gitlab pages right now so I don't control the webserver,
although I could drop a tracking pixel in that loads off a server I do
control.

It does make it a little harder to determine new vs returning visitors though.
Not impossible, but harder. To me, knowing that is more important because
that's how you know you have an audience, versus just a bunch of people
visiting from HackerNews, for example.

------
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.

------
lutorm
My question would be: why do you want a following? Personally, I have
practically zero views on my blog, but that's OK. I'm writing about niche
things that I hope will help anyone who finds themselves in the same situation
in the future, and to organize my own thoughts. I'm perfectly happy to have
people find occasional posts through Google.

------
mattferderer
I read this survey results post a few months ago that might help answer your
questions. It touches on time, effort, length, format, and frequency of posts.
It also discusses content promotion & measurement of results.

Here's their final analysis:

The experts have been telling us all along: focus on quality, promotion and
measurement. And we finally seem to be listening. Quality beats quantity. Grow
your email list, check your Analytics and promote your content on several
channels. We are going in the right direction.

Here’s how bloggers break down:

The average blogger… spends 1-3 hours writing 500-1000 words weekly and
usually checks Analytics. The average blogger with “strong results”… spends
2-3 hours writing 500-1500 words several times per week and always checks
Analytics.

[https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogger-
trends](https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogger-trends)

------
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.

------
guycastell
I've been wondering about this as well. I just started out blogging (just a
personal blog with a ton of opinions and software stuff) and have no idea if
it gets an audience or not . I don't really care if I do, besides the feeling
that if I look at the stats, it equals talking to a wall sometimes.

~~~
onli
But if I see that right, your Blog doesn't have comments (the one linked in
your profile). How is that supposed to feel otherwise if those are not
enabled?

~~~
guycastell
Perhaps my "talking to a wall" metaphor was stupid. What I meant was that I'd
like to see that people actually read whatever I have to say, instead of,
well, not reading - in a way that a wall can't hear you - an actual response
however isn't needed. It may also be because I don't have one exact subject,
but regardless, too early to tell just yet.

~~~
onli
Add them. I'm blogging since 9 years now, and I find comments to be incredibly
important. If you are doing a private tech blog, the people you want to reach
are people that want to follow you personally. With those you really want to
talk, and an occasional comment helps a lot against that impression that no
one is reading it. Even if it is just once a month.

Though the most helpful thing for a blog such as this is to write it for
yourself. But even then, some external feedback helps.

------
0xCMP
Yes, for personal blogs it's much easier to write on Medium or Tumblr then
running your own thing if only for the network effects but also the required
costs (domain + hosting). Or if it's shorter posts/ideas use Twitter, maybe
with screenshots of text in iOS notes for longer ideas.

Unless there is a product I find there is no real reason to do what is needed
which is hustling. I find hustling to push your own brand is weird. Most of us
are developers. I myself am not trying to "become famous" or anything I just
want to share my knowledge and experience the way others have before me.

How do you hustle a product? "Growth hack", post on all channels, target your
messages, build a newsletter, etc.

~~~
tmaly
I use Medium as another channel. I usually post a brief summary and then post
a link to the full article on my blog.

------
Huhty
Yes, because it's now a lot harder to compete with so much noise and more
advanced social media. We're actually out trying to solve this problem for
bloggers.

Here's a snippet from our "Manifesto" that we wrote a few months ago and use
for our "Blog Enhancement Suite"
([http://blogenhancement.com](http://blogenhancement.com) if you are curious).
It's a freemium SaaS that we actually just launched last week.

 _Your blog deserves more. Modern social media has forever changed the way
content is consumed as readers gravitate towards services that create engaging
and interactive posts which offer more than the old fashioned “read, comment,
repeat” experience. Today your readers expect more, and rightfully so._

 _Several years ago we found ourselves working with regular everyday bloggers
to help them tackle many important challenges that typically go vastly
underestimated, including the seemingly impossible tasks of generating
content, building audience and increasing revenue. The big revelation came
upon our realization that adding a community aspect not only made a standard
blog remarkably more lively and engaging, it also gained several other key
advantages in the currently outdated blogging landscape._

 _We 've since developed a deep understanding of online communities; how they
come together, how they interact with each other, and most importantly, how
invaluable they are to any blog. We are putting this knowledge into action on
a wider scale by building something that can help bloggers help themselves, in
a way previously only reserved for the few established blogs with big
budgets._

 _We are Snapzu — a small scrappy team made up of developers, designers,
engineers, and you guessed it, bloggers, working towards one clear and unified
vision — to expand on and improve the blogging experience. We 've already
created the most robust social sharing and discussion platform, and with our
upcoming Blog Enhancement Suite, we strive to make this incredible software
available to anyone, anywhere. The time to level the playing field could not
come soon enough._

------
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
I think people are conditioned to view content and return to the origin of the
link, e.g. Facebook, Reddit, News Hacker, because these are the modern feed
readers. (The feed is typically dictated by others posting to these sites.)

------
davidgerard
I do [https://rocknerd.co.uk](https://rocknerd.co.uk) . I post every day or
two. (Used to be every day, I have a book I'm trying to finish.) It gets about
100 hits/day total. Most posts, approximately nobody cares about. Every month
or two I write a popular hit that gets a lot of attention, then it goes back
to the mean. I slowly build up an audience of regulars.

But basically it's for my own amusement and that of my friends.

I would say: if you're doing it for the hits, you're doing it wrong. There is
no money in blogging. There may be reputation.

------
z3t4
Who are getting value from the articles, you, or the readers ?

Getting visitors is like the chicken or the egg causality dilemma, you need to
be on the first page of Google. And you can't get there unless you already are
there ...

So before you write an article, make sure there are absolute no article on
Google, even slightly relevant to the one you plan to write, so you are
guaranteed to get onto the first page. Then when you start to get traffic, you
have an entrance, where you can put more interesting and relevant content. It
will also boost page rank for _all_ other pages on your domain!!

------
DrNuke
Generalist audience maybe is vanishing but I can see more and more domain
niches attracting interest for relevant content like a widespread academia,
this being open courses legacy imho. Sure, many blogs would not survive a peer
review, but there are more manners to publishing than academic papers only:
industrial papers, letters to the community, tutorials, reviews of literature,
industry news and conferences, etc. So the point is: find your industry for
applications, grow a reputation and you will attract a like-minded audience.

------
CapitalistCartr
Kate Wagner started "Mcmansion Hell" last year, and it flat exploded. I think
that subject matter is the biggest reason blogs take off, and many good
subjects are already well covered.

------
mattbgates
I don't really think there is any trick to it, but the maturity of a blog is
what helps. Even after years of being exposed and publicizing your blog, most
people still have no idea that you exist. Imagine all of the people who know
that Facebook exist. 1 billion people, at least. Instagram has at least 100
million people. That is A LOT of people. Now how many people know you exist?
Likely less than 1% of the Facebook OR the Internet. I always like to stare at
this map: [http://internet-map.net/](http://internet-map.net/)

It reminds me of how vast the Internet is and how insignificant my website is.
Kind of like looking at Earth, compared to the universe. Yet, the visitors I
do get, that happen to come across my website? They were looking for me or
accidentally discovered me and most of them are usually happy they found me. I
get those emails that let me know they are grateful they are to have found my
website, or some article that helped them get a job, or just reading an
article made them want to write and submit their own article to my website.

I've been running a website
([http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com))
for several years now and I'd say its fairly popular. It is a niche which
focuses on jobs, careers, and the workplace. In the beginning, I used to just
post everything myself, but it became near impossible to keep coming up with
topics, though the topics in this niche are so vast and cover just about
anything and everything pertaining to a job.

I remember when my visitor base just consisted of my mom and my girlfriend. 35
visitors was the highlight of my day. Years later, the website is receiving
about a thousand people a day and it varies, less or more, at times depending
on the month, season, or trends of unemployment or if a certain article is
just popular that month or a keyword or phrase just hits what people are
looking for, or if Google just happens to change their algorithm to favor my
website for that week or month. I have had a few companies submit articles and
take out their own Facebook ads to drive traffic to it (their own article).
Many factors can play a role in driving traffic to the website and other than
what I can learn from the few analytics scripts I have installed, I just
accept whatever traffic I get and I am grateful for any traffic. The website
has been penalized at least twice, the latter just a few months ago, and
without Google, traffic was cut in half (based on a 2-week penalty).

I think just a month after opening up the blog and welcoming posts by others,
in essence, creating a community, and it grew in popularity, mostly because
when you offer to publish articles for people, they tend to share it as well.
Repeat visitors and new authors, the traffic just keeps coming. But it also
technically remains as a steady flow. I don't have the resources or money to
spend on social media interacting with fans, so I really just rely on my
contributors and readers to do the work with a few automated scripts that
randomly choose an article every couple of hours and post it to Twitter or
Facebook or LinkedIn.

I have learned over the years: just keep writing. Google will help you get
found eventually. There are articles I wrote years ago that only received a
few hundred visitors when first published, yet you can get one day where it
happens to go viral. I went in for an interview once and it was so awful that
I decided to write about it. It was just the way this woman shook my hand! I
could not stop thinking about it that it probably ruined my own interview for
me. ( [http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/power-of-the-
hand...](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/power-of-the-handshake/) )
In the beginning, it might have had only 300 visitors or so, but then one day,
the article went viral! It was probably one person posting it on Reddit or
something, and everyone who saw it was curious about it. At the moment, it has
almost $10.5k views.

It is certainly easier when you do have a niche. I write tons of articles and
I have tons of people contributing every week, every year -- always new names,
but plenty of people I've been talking to for years who love to share their
articles about investing or real estate or whatever the case may be, so I'm
never without an article to publish.

I also stick to a schedule: Monday through Friday, 10 AM. Occasionally, I'll
publish two articles in a day. I'm sure that publishing more articles per day
will likely drive up traffic, but I feel this schedule just works for me. I
write out infographics which take time and spend time ensuring articles are
quality and unique. It also creates a queue which causes people to wait and
see if their articles get published, which keeps them coming back to check to
see when it got published. I also ask for donations which often help articles
"jump the line" and get published earlier, though I think I have only had less
than 10 contributors actually donate anything. Most people would just prefer
to wait the 1-2 weeks that it takes to get published.

It definitely isn't a straightforward "if you build it, they will come." Worst
advice that anyone could ever give you about starting a blog, imo. They can't
come because they don't really know that you exist. Other bad advice is that
you can build a blog and it will just make lots of money. Far from it. You
need to have passion for blogging and your niche. Most of your website or your
blog's existence means you are doing it for free.

Otherwise, and I am guilty of it: You lose interest. There have been times
where I almost thought about giving up, but then I get emails from someone
wanting to publish an article on the website or just thanking me for doing
what I do, and it keeps me going and sparks that interest and passion all over
again.

Don't get me wrong, there are some bloggers out there who have learned how to
make blogging a living, upselling Amazon links, writing sponsored posts for
companies, signing up for and posting affiliate links, or attracting
mainstream companies who want to be mentioned on the blog with links back to
their products or websites. It is all in finding the audience, the niche, the
traffic, and appealing to those who will pay you to keep doing what you are
doing.

You have to keep mentioning yourself and keep trying to show the world that
you exist and you have a purpose. Well, not only you, but your website. I
definitely don't take all the credit for where the website is today and what
it has become, as it has hundreds of different personalities on it, but the
website has become a community in which everyone is helping everyone else to
gain some exposure. Every new post on the website is a new gateway and there
will always be someone out there who is looking for exactly what you wrote:
Whether it helps them or if they were just looking to read something
entertaining, they will eventually find you.

------
dorfsmay
At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself why you blog?

For me it is to make the information available, mainly for me, and hoping it
can help somebody else out there.

Interestingly, my blog is dead right now for technical reasons, I was looking
on how to do something specific a few weeks ago, something that I hag blogged
about. Google wasn't helping (my blog has been down long enough that it's no
longer in google cache), so I ended up going to archive.org looking for my old
blog and found what I needed right away!

------
DDerTyp
I am reading a few blogs. Mainly tech and cs stuff. I started my own blog
recently, also about tech stuff, but only with some problems I faced during my
work. My site is not getting a lot of hits, but I noticed that most clicks
come from google. Share buttons, email, ... does not work for me. Google is my
friend! :)

In case somebody want's to give me feedback on my little blog, please do so:
[https://blog.jdstaerk.de](https://blog.jdstaerk.de)

~~~
detaro
I'll try my hand at some feedback.

Your content is the kind of thing I'd search for using a search engine (and
for those where I can judge the quality, it seems completely fine), but I
don't see a reason to subscribe to your blog in some way. This kind of content
(let's call it "tutorials") is only interesting to me if I currently face an
issue, it's not something I read for fun or abstract learning. I subscribe to
some blogs that have many tutorials, but their content is about a lot of
varied things, and the value I get from these posts is discovery of new
software or possibilities, not the tutorial aspect. Your blog is in a way more
of a Knowledge Base than a blog to me, if that makes sense?

~~~
DDerTyp
Hey, thanks for your response! :) Yes, you are completely right, it is not a
blog by definition. I haven't started it with the intention to be a blog like
the OP's one. It is a "google-your-question-and-find-the-answer-on-my-
blog"-blog. Thank you for your feedback, it confirmed my "blog-project"-idea
:)

And yeah, probably it isn't a blog as per definition, but a Wordpress blog
seems like an easy and fast way to setup a little website w/ tutorials :)

------
wordpressdev
Fans of long-form content won't agree, but if you want to be heard, try to
engage at Twitter and Facebook. Most of the web readers in this day and age
have very little engagement spans, and use diversified channels to consume
content. So, in order to attract engaged audience to your blog - you either
have to spend lots of efforts of content marketing, or you can simply shift to
the medium of popular choice.

When I have to say something long enough to be a blog post, I do a Twitter
thread.

~~~
futuretro
I feel Twitter as a microblog works for short updates (really short, 140
char!)

Longer ones can fit in a tweetstorm.

But I think 1,000 word posts deserve a proper blog post of its own. Correct me
if i'm wrong, but wasn't that Medium's initial objective?

------
JeremyMorgan
I've been hosting a blog for around 10 years that has some pretty decent
success (in spite of my really infrequent posting). Yes, it is getting harder
though I'm not really trying.

The game has changed, and as so many others have posted the heyday of blogs is
over. Only certain types of people really care about long form stuff anymore.
Those people are hard to reach. So you have to define what success is for you.

Is "success" for you:

1\. A big audience? This will be a ton of work and is largely outside of your
control. You'll have to be different from everyone else out there and get
attention. Not impossible but it's a long uphill road.

2\. A dedicated, loyal audience? This is something you can control. If you
decide you want a smaller, but happy and loyal following, then start creating
quality content specific to a niche group. When people find your site and find
this treasure trove of articles they'll bookmark you.

3\. Lots of money? If your goal is to make large profits you've got the
biggest climb yet. Of course it's not impossible to build a blog in 2017 and
make a lot of profit from it, but I personally wouldn't waste my time on such
an endeavor.

Anecdotal: at one time I made around $1000 a month from my blog, just from
ads. Algorithms changed, the world changed, and in 2012 or so I was super
steady at 1k per month. By 2015 I cut it off because I was making around $20
per month with the same ad networks, and... MORE traffic. Things change and
you have to be ready for that.

Finally here's something I've been telling bloggers for years. Spend the time
on your content instead of spamming. The hours you spent posting links on
social media, posting to Reddit, HN,lobste.rs etc is all time you could have
spent creating more content.

"Build it and they will come" is still valid in blogging. If you keep creating
and pumping out quality content it will be hard to ignore it for long. But
it's harder than ever.

------
matthewwarren
In my (limited) experience, I've found that I get the majority of my traffic
from aggregation sites such as HN and /r/programming.

So writing posts that appeal to these audiences is one way to get engagement.

But I've only been blogging for <2 years, so I can't comment on whether it's
harder than it once was.

------
vpslab_sk
Well, here is my take on this topic, as a non-blogger(iow, consumer of sorts).
Please excuse this not-that-well-written rant in advance.

What do people - in my opinion - search for:

#1 Help & advice on a specific topic (like, how to disassemble a vw golf 1.3
'87 petrol engine)

#2 Specific information (list of vw engines)

#9 Opinions (compatible with their views / controversial, ideally from people
they like or hate, but most importantly, already know >> my-favorite-auto-blog
: why vw golf I was the best golf ever manufactured || that-fiat-loving-morron
: why vw golf I should be banned from the streets)

#999 Random opinions from people they never heard of (some-guy-on-the-internet
: 10 best things about the vw golf I generation || some-other-random-guy : 10
most beutiful wordpress themes of 2017)

\--

When you start your blog, you are that random person. I red many great, well
researched, well written articles but honestly, I have no idea where I found
them nor by whom they were written. Two reasons why:

a) Subscribing to someone I don't know is a risk I'm unwilling to take. I hate
spam as much as averyone else. I don't know what you'll do with my email
address. I don't want to get notifications about your new cat. I don't want to
participate in any of your surveys and I don't want to help you make your blog
better. Sorry, a day has only 24h, every minute wasted is a minute of your
life you _won't_ get back.

b) I have no easy way to find out if your blog is any good in the first place.

The problem with blogs as a format(incl. video blogs) is that you effectively
surrended all the contextual synapses your information is generating - to a
search engine. Context has sometimes more value than the actual information.
If I red your well-written article about linux kernel hardening, I _do_ want
to know your opinion about different security subsystems for example. But what
does your blog provide to make this task easier - a calendar? That primitive,
useless junk called a "tag cloud"? A href link to an "older" post? Most of you
don't even include a list of the most popular or recent articles. You want us
- consumers - in this day an age, to actually click through some calendars on
your blog an spend - no, waste - our valuable time to search for contextualy
related topics? Who else is better at deciding about the context of your
information than you - the bloke who is writing it? Can't you be a little more
creative and write a system that would actually present all the information
you have published since 1985 in a natural, contextual way?

People produce valuable content daily, but they somehow forgot to care about
the context. If your blog is unable to set your article into a braoder body of
knowledge and relies solely on a search engine/social media, well, then you
get what you ordered. Good luck paying for all kinds of trickery to get your
page visits.

~~~
personlurking
As silly as it may sound, my problem might be due to writing about my own
interests. I'm not offering help or advice, I wouldn't even say I'm offering
specific info (since what I do is more exploratory), and I generally leave
opinions out of it.

If I had to explain it, I'm like a somewhat randomized, editorialized
Wikipedia for a specific topic. I want readers to click around as if on
Wikipedia, so they can gather a wide-ranging, hopefully in-depth view of the
topic (in this case, a major city and its cultural/historical context).

~~~
vpslab_sk
First, OT, I'm unable to edit my comment so sorry for the typos, my spell-
checker was apparently on holiday. Now, to address your reply, people _are_
opinion-forming beings, its our human nature. We do have opinions even if we
try to convince our-selves we don't. Writing a _blog_ without exposing your
opinion just so you won't offend anyone is an intellectual humanity-denying
crime. Its a form of self-castration in my eyes. If you insist on writing dry,
soul-less pieces of wikipedia-like information, maybe blogging is not the
right format for you. Opinions are the "sauce" of an article. We are all
humans, no-one remembers that colleague who never had an argument about
anything, but you do remember that one a _hole who always meant trouble, his
opinions and world views. You may even miss that a_ _hole once in a while (
"yeah, I'm sure _ would have said something to that manager")

~~~
personlurking
Well, I did write 'editorialized', meaning they aren't 'dry, soul-less pieces
of wikipedia-like information'.

~~~
vpslab_sk
Well, no reason to take my comment personally, I don't know your work. I was
merely taking advantage of your reply to take a punch at the current wave of
political correctness and a special form of auto-censorship disguised as
politeness, that's crawling into the blogosphere like a drunken monkey into a
liquor factory.. + this sub-thread is OT anyway

------
aangjie
For cross-posting you can try ifttt. I'll refrain from the main question, as
I'm not qualified to answer it.

------
jayhuang
This is merely my opinion: but yes, and no.

It HAS gotten harder to gain the same amount of traffic you've gotten years
ago. No doubt. Back when I ran Windows7Center and Windows8Center (now
defunct), we were able to serve 50 million pageviews, gain an Alexa traffic
ranking around ~2000 while sustaining a decent passive income from
(eventually) doing next to nothing aside from staffing/occasional
maintenance/UI updates. Yes, there was luck involved, but there was also much
less noise in the whole ecosystem. Less blog-spam, less "Top 7 reasons", less
social media presence, etc. However, many of the same issues back then are
still relevant now, and the formula for attracting any audience is still
largely unchanged.

You'll often hear people say "write original/novel content". But what does
that really mean? And is everyone capable of creating such content?

Here are a few things that has always worked quite naturally for me (in the
format of "top 4 tips" because why not?):

1) Share something that interests you. Similar to work, side projects, and
other ventures, if something truly interests you, you will always do a better
job communicating it, have the drive to do it well, and to continue working on
it

2) Identify and establish a relation to an experience you have. Tell a story.
Humans are largely social creatures, and storytelling has been a part of our
history for ages. Stories and experiences are more relatable, not mere fact-
dropping.

3) Use your own voice (yes, yes, I know, cliche). I've found what works for me
is writing as if I'm speaking directly to my audience. If you were at a dinner
table chatting with friends, would you constantly be using arcane, seldom
used/big words? Probably not. So what makes blogging any different?

4) Be genuine. Similar to the point above, so much of what we see now is
sensationalized, exaggerated to the point where it's so hard to find any
truth. Personally, I appreciate honesty, and there are so many people with so
many stories to tell, that if people actually spoke up and shared fearlessly,
we wouldn't need to have all this BS to keep us "entertained". So I try to
share things I wish someone else would have shared to me, things that I'd
appreciate.

I've taken a break from running online communities, and been on a 2-year
hiatus from blogging on my own blog, which I've never monetized in any way. My
last post was October 4, 2014, but I have visitors in the low hundreds,
everyday. The total pageviews on this blog has exceeded the low hundred
thousands. I do not engage in crossposting, and never on social media, except
posting twice or so here on HN, no one in my friend circles or colleagues know
I blog except those who actively sought out information on me. I still get
very kind and heartwarming emails from all sorts of people for content I put
out that I didn't think would help anyone in particular. I still get people
who reach out to me and ask about some of the experiences I've shared.
Pageviews mean nothing to me, but these simple gestures do.

Sidenote: If you're not simply looking to blog and share with others, but are
also intent on your pageview count, along with perhaps selling a product...all
of the above still applies, but drip campaigns are also still extremely
effective. Collect emails of interested parties and DO NOT betray their trust.

TL;DR: Focus on content, not pageviews. Be genuine and write what interests
you, people will come, I promise.

------
LeicaLatte
Video has killed text. Fair and square.

------
tmclaugh
I blog for work. I took a step back from product TechOps (we're a SaaS
company) to write for us. We make a service that people like me, an ops
engineer, would use. My rules for writing are I write about things that are
interesting to me that fall within the general problem space and I don't sell
product. I've struck on writing highly technical posts and including code or
CLI examples of what I'm doing. If there's code I release GitHub repositories.
A reader should be able to take what I wrote and instantly apply what they've
learned. You can probably guess those posts outperform other posts anywhere
from 2-5x depending on the popularity of the subject matter. If I strike gold
we're looking at 20-30x performance.

The next key is promotion. I have a decent Twitter following (>1K) and have
developed contacts with people in my profession. I schedule tweets for what I
write that I think is really good. Hootsuite and Buffer can do that easily. If
I want to strike gold I post to Reddit. I've posted here before but get
minimal traction. I don't have enough time to invest in HN and just browse
here casually. I spend time on Reddit regularly because of non-tech boards I
love. (Hi /r/boston.) If I write something good for Reddit our traffic numbers
see a significant spike. Those are the 20-30x performers.

All that said, ask yourself why you're writing. If you're writing for a
specific audience then respect your audience. I've taken the talk up approach
over talk down. I don't boil hard topics down to telling you what you should
do without providing you a how. I'm also respectful of the communities where
my audience congregates. That means I stay away from talking about our
product. If my name is on something that discusses product I put those on
LinkedIn and Twitter once or twice.

If you're writing for yourself, ask yourself again, are you writing for your
enjoyment or your reputation? If you're writing for your enjoyment then
whatever. Traffic numbers don't mean you have nothing of value to say. Just
means you don't have an audience and that's going to happen today with the
information saturation we all face. If you're writing for reputation, or
because you'd like an audience to engage with what you've written for pure
enjoyment, then promotion is key. I've used twitter because I'm on their
regularly. My writing is only a small part of what I put onto twitter. I like
posting pics of my cats, my food, and witty things I say to my girlfriend.

Wish I could share more and maybe be more articulate but need to work. FWIW, I
have had a blog post become popular in the past week. Someone just filed a bug
against once of the example repos. Knowing people are reading and inspecting
my work to use it makes me happy and know that I'm doing something worthwhile.
:)

------
lkrubner
The classic essay on this subject is by Clay Shirky: "Power Laws, Weblogs, and
Inequality"

As he says:

"Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable

To see how freedom of choice could create such unequal distributions, consider
a hypothetical population of a thousand people, each picking their 10 favorite
blogs. One way to model such a system is simply to assume that each person has
an equal chance of liking each blog. This distribution would be basically flat
- most blogs will have the same number of people listing it as a favorite. A
few blogs will be more popular than average and a few less, of course, but
that will be statistical noise. The bulk of the blogs will be of average
popularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different from this
average. In this model, neither the quality of the writing nor other people's
choices have any effect; there are no shared tastes, no preferred genres, no
effects from marketing or recommendations from friends.

But people's choices do affect one another. If we assume that any blog chosen
by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by
another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses
her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of
liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he
and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with
a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the
future because they were chosen in the past.

Think of this positive feedback as a preference premium. The system assumes
that later users come into an environment shaped by earlier users; the
thousand-and-first user will not be selecting blogs at random, but will rather
be affected, even if unconsciously, by the preference premiums built up in the
system previously.

Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred
over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference
for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference
for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your
friends (a preference for "solidarity goods", things best enjoyed by a group).
It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be
different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that
any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and
for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

Because it arises naturally, changing this distribution would mean forcing
hundreds of thousands of bloggers to link to certain blogs and to de-link
others, which would require both global oversight and the application of
force. Reversing the star system would mean destroying the village in order to
save it."

[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_o...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_old.html)

------
angry-hacker
My personal view is that people are not used to read blogs anymore, everything
has moved to few big social networks. Medium is popular too, but it's more of
a HN bubble thing.

People share and like things on social media for their headlines or agenda.

While I'm crying the blogs are dying out, I have noticed myself checking and
finding new ones less and less too, despite having HN as my only social media.

------
KCFforecast
Concepts and names are kind. To give and example, in a recent post of
jeremykun.com blog about math and computing the author explains a concrete
case of conjugate prior without jargon. But in fact, if you know what that
post is about, that is the magic word aka math jargon conjugate prior, you
will find that en.wikipedia gives you many insights and links about that
concept. Wikipedia is getting better and better and now there are an enormous
quantity of good resources to learn form. Also informative comments, like
those here in HN, are making blogging more and more difficult because your
post is going to be only a drop in an ocean of knowledge where parts are
interrelated. No post should reject math jargon, since those words, like
conjugate priors, are the key to looking for rich and complete information
about it. To give another example, if someone try to explain monads he/she
should not try to avoid the term monad since monad importance relies on is
capacity to model many rich and differences sceneries ranging from security to
multiprocessing.

Openai or distill aim is to explain or visualize ml ideas, but I think that
more than displaying animations or pretty graphics, we need clear concepts and
definitions, and to inform the reader that there is no royal road to
understanding, you must pay the prize to understand the main concepts, that
the only real road to understanding.

To not be categorical, perhaps there should be some posts about explaining in
very shallow terms what's the meaning of something, but in the end many times
you end up without a real meaning of the concept and you can look hundred of
same level posts and waste your time, because the concept required to be
framed on its appropriate level.

Edit: Edited for clarify and grammar.

