

Your Post Is Finished. Now? Blog Promotion Time - RBerenguel
http://thecopypasteblog.com/post-finished-blog-promotion-time-2/

======
nimai
Let's say you are a member of X community - vintage cars, death metal,
whatever - and your interest in this is completely independent of reputation
or profit.

You actively pursue this interest in your free time, and find that many of the
problems you encounter have already been solved, and solutions are already
available on the internet.

As you develop your skills, the problems you encounter become more and more
situation-specific, and you find it helpful to ask questions on forums related
to what you are doing.

At some point, you get annoyed at the disorganized nature of the forum. You
end up repeatedly linking people to other threads, which are usually poorly
formatted, and difficult to find. You decide enough is enough.

You set up a blog. Your only motivation is to solve common problems rapidly -
any monetization merely helps offset the costs of web hosting. This is your
hobby, after all.

As time passes, your blog begins to develop its own unique "voice" in your
community - you have a specific set of problems related to your community that
you are very good at solving, and you have built up a significant amount of
reference material that others find very, very helpful when they are starting
out.

When the blog reaches a certain critical mass, you end up with users who are
intimidated by the amount of information on your site. Not everyone has time
to browse through your entire archive, but they still want a decent "baseline"
of expertise to work with.

At this point, enough people will want a printed version of your content that
it wouldn't make sense not to offer it. If the demand for your skill set is
great enough, you could make a career off of it.

Professional writing is paid research, more than anything. Why do you need to
convince people that the research you've already done is worth reading? Why
can't you help people with their own research instead?

Even if your SEO skills are garbage, a basic wordpress install gives Google
more than enough information for people to find you when they need help. You
shouldn't be writing anything that is already available through a Google
search. Why waste your time repeating someone else's work?

If you feel a real need to replace someone else's work, because you feel it
can be done better or more completely, why aren't you talking to this person,
or even actively working with them? If this really is your hobby, and you
really are an expert, why should they feel threatened?

Sorry for the long rant, but I really, really, really find the blogosphere
completely disgusting right now.

There should not be competition among people who are genuinely interested in
the same topic. Especially on the internet - there is just no excuse.

~~~
RBerenguel
Well, if you have a blog, without some kind of promotion the only reader you
will have is you. Maybe your mother, too. Of course, original content (and
_good_ original content) is what it should be... Writing for the sake of
writing (i.e. blogging about blogging just to make money off bloggers) is like
some perverted pyramidal scheme.

I wrote this as a guest post from my own experience for sharing my posts,
where I write (except maybe in some case, I can be sure after more than 700
posts) only original content. But before I started actively promoting my
content, I had mostly readers coming from Google to a few selected places (
_very_ few). After good promotion, my posts started finding readers, and when
they were interested, they delved deeper in my blog, finding my old posts. My
subscribers grew (I've tripled since I started my blog seriously), and so did
my interactions.

But as you say, there are zillions of repetitions among the blogosphere (I've
seen it also, all over the place) and this is completely sick. But as it
stands, it is and endless run: if I create good original content without
promotion, the repetition people will just fill the place and no-one will read
what I have to say. And I enjoy too much blogging (blogging with readers... if
I want to write for myself, I'll do journaling) to be forced to give up.

~~~
nimai
If your content really is that good, having a single social person start
reading it is more than enough attention to get the word out. Not a single one
of the blogs I subscribe to have ever promoted themselves beyond selling
merchandise or showing up at conventions - and these are entirely the result
of demand, not any initiative on the part of the author.

The only thing promotion does is skew search results in favor of your blog, at
the expense of other blogs which address the same problem. If your writing
really is better, this is completely unnecessary.

It seems like you crave attention more than anything, which is certainly a
nobler goal than blogging strictly for money, but in the long run, you're only
going to attract readers who also crave attention. Once you're no longer
capable of giving them that attention, they will go somewhere else.

There is a "wall" between blogs like yours and the ones that really take off,
and it's entirely based on the author's motivations.

~~~
RBerenguel
Social media doesn't work like this, this approach would take ages. People
following me at twitter like my content (quite a few of my followers do so
after reading my blog, thus I assume they like my content), but the number of
visits I get through twitter is close to 0, and some of them even retweet or
post my stories.

On the other hand, the only promotion from the post that helps searchs results
is commenting in other blogs, and not in all (because of the "nofollow" tag).
All the steps I suggest has 0 net effect with search results. To rank high you
either need to be linked to, be the only one addressing the problem, or do
some kind of black google magic.

Finally, being both Hacker News readers, I am really interested in knowing
which are these blogs (as we both read here, if they interest you they
probably may interest me), and I want to see what they are about.

