
You should blog even if you have no readers - nathanmarz
http://nathanmarz.com/blog/you-should-blog-even-if-you-have-no-readers.html
======
HSO
This scratches an itch I've had for some time now. I've been off and on with a
blog of my own. The problem is, I change my answers to the following questions
all the time, so I've been trapped in a cycle for some time now, put it
online, take it down again, put it back up, take it down,... Here are some of
the negative ones, how do you guys answer these (or do they never even come up
for you)?

\- "I know writing is good for me. But why write for other people, why open
myself up like this? If it's all in the process, why post or publish it, after
all, when I'm done writing, I'm done."

\- "If I write something, expose myself, and nobody reads it, will I not look
ridiculous?"

\- "There is so much noise out there, why would I think I'm not just adding to
it? Let's all be quiet for a time."

\- "If I have a good insight, why put it out there and take the risk that
someone will come and 'steal' it or adapt it and win big?"

\- "Will I not be easily manipulable if I put my thoughts and preferences out
there? Someone could take me for a ride by using this material to their
advantage or fun"

\- "Ok, blogging/writing/publishing stuff can make you known and perhaps even
popular. Now, shouldn't you optimize for 'what people want'? Or leave out
unpopular things?" (but where is the fun in writing if you can't say what you
just want to say anymore?)

Also, I sometimes read what I wrote years back and cringe at the stupidity or
attitude. How embarrassing if all this was online and somehow remained
available even after I took it down. But by definition, you don't know that
what you are writing is stupid or full of shit while you are writing it.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
> "I know writing is good for me. But why write for other people, why open
> myself up like this? If it's all in the process, why post or publish it,
> after all, when I'm done writing, I'm done."

The feedback is important. You improve your writing skills by honing them
against the whetstone of your readers.

> "If I write something, expose myself, and nobody reads it, will I not look
> ridiculous?"

If nobody reads it, no one will think it's ridiculous.

> "There is so much noise out there, why would I think I'm not just adding to
> it? Let's all be quiet for a time."

If there's too much noise, the solution is to improve the signal-to-noise
ratio by broadcasting more signal.

> "If I have a good insight, why put it out there and take the risk that
> someone will come and 'steal' it or adapt it and win big?"

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Value comes from how carefully and persistently you
put an idea into practice.

> "Will I not be easily manipulable if I put my thoughts and preferences out
> there? Someone could take me for a ride by using this material to their
> advantage or fun"

The more you interact with others, the better you'll get at spotting people
who just want to take you for a ride.

> "Ok, blogging/writing/publishing stuff can make you known and perhaps even
> popular. Now, shouldn't you optimize for 'what people want'? Or leave out
> unpopular things?" (but where is the fun in writing if you can't say what
> you just want to say anymore?)

Optimize for what turns your crank. Your readership will figure itself out.

~~~
HSO
Hey, I like some of these comebacks ;)

> If nobody reads it, no one will think it's ridiculous.

Ok, you got me here. Still, if you have a blog and there's tens and tens of
entries and nary a comment to be seen, doesn't that look sad somehow?

~~~
Lewisham
I think part of it is to remove ego from the equation. The likelihood that
anyone will be followed by name/blog alone is minuscule.

However, if you treat writing as a personal exercise, and understand that
"marketing" (for want of a better word) a post of yours you particularly like,
it's definitely useful. Submit high signal posts to
here/Reddit/Digg/communities you are part of and you think will enjoy it.

I've had two blog posts hit the HN front page; both garnered about 4000 views.
One of them also hit Reddit's /r/programming, pushing the view count to 20000.
However, the Reddit commentary was essentially useless, whereas the HN
commentary was awesome. In fact, the Reddit commentary was quite scathing, and
that bruised my pride for a good couple of days afterwards. Sometimes
obscurity is better.

However, I don't regret writing. The writing is the most important bit. The
reading... less so.

------
grellas
Writing is like exercise for the brain. Not all of us will write like Paul
Graham, or anywhere even close to his level, but all of us can benefit from
forcing ourselves to think more carefully about our ideas, and there are not
many better ways to do so than to attempt to express them in some systematic
written form.

Writing is also an iterative process. You write about something once and this
causes you to focus upon what you are saying in ways that you had not done
before. You re-visit the issue later and often derive more insights on the
topic. You get comments and criticisms from others and this also causes you to
examine your ideas more carefully. You also may find that, even if your ideas
are reasonably well developed, your method of presenting them may be sub-
standard. From experience, for example, you learn that it rarely if ever pays
to take a cheap shot at someone and, when you get called on it, you learn to
express yourself with more class the next time. So, you learn not only to
express yourself intelligently but also in a manner that is appealing and that
removes unnecessary barriers to understanding.

Do it often enough and you will improve and potentially make an impact. But,
even if you don't, you will be better off for the exercise. And that is the
main point of this fine piece, a point well worth making.

------
jakarta
Blogging has been a really positive experience for me. I started with 0
readers 2.5 years and write about a pretty specific niche within investing. I
didn't really promote myself. Basically, the first 6 months of blogging I
focused on just creating original content. I hated that most blogs were just
links to articles by the MSM. It paid off and other well known aggregators
started linking to my stuff.

Since then it's been a really wild and rewarding ride. I've had a chance to
consult on stories for reporters at the Wall Street Journal and posts featured
in the Financial Times, NYTimes, WSJ. I've even been contacted by some of my
heroes (really great investors who've been written about in books like The Big
Short).

Now, in a couple of weeks I'm being flown out to interview with a firm that I
never dreamed of applying to. All because they read some of my posts and
enjoyed them.

The key to me is just to start writing. Write all the time and strive to
continuously improve on it. I think that if you produce good content, people
will come. Most of my most popular posts are things I've worked really hard
on. Some examples include me reading 5 years worth of message board posts to
track down everything that person X said or visiting the library to dig up a
physical copy of a report from the 1980s to scan and then post. If you create
value, readers are going to keep coming.

~~~
Alex3917
"If you create value, readers are going to keep coming."

People subscribe to your blog based on expected future value, not based on
perceived past value. Unfortunately there are many scenarios where every
single one of your past posts could have high perceived value, but the
expected future value is relatively low. For example, if each blog post is
about a completely different topic. There are very very few writers who can
get away with this, and most of the ones who do are only able to do so because
the writing follows a predictable pattern in some other way, e.g. Malcolm
Gladwell. The sad truth is that how often you update your blog is usually a
better predictor of the number of readers you'll get than the value of the
actual writing.

In the end it's maybe 25% about having good ideas and helping people and 75%
about putting on a show.

~~~
ehsanul
_In the end it's maybe 25% about having good ideas and helping people and 75%
about putting on a show._

This is very unfortunate, but also true when it comes to pure popularity on
the web. However, one would hope that people starting blogs are not doing it
just for the sake of popularity. The grandparent's case is a great example of
how writing with the intention of creating value with original content can be
very rewarding in a way that would be impossible by just "putting on a show".

~~~
Alex3917
I agree, my point though was that even if you are creating original content
with value, you're still not going to be popular unless you're also putting on
a show. The exception is if you're already very famous for something else.

------
lionhearted
Completely agree. After meaning to do it for a while, I started doing a
personal blog at this start of this month, at least once a day now. The big
thing for me is I blog whatever observations I have that are quick, even if
they're just okay. Then I keep a list of things that'd take me longer to
write.

I remember looking at the bottom of a coffee lid and thinking about whether it
should be face-up or face-down, so I took two pictures of it and posted it
here - <http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=38> \- it's just sort of junk, but
it helped get into the rhythym of writing every single day, no matter what. A
lot of my entries are pretty mundane, but a couple of them have been quite
popular and gotten spread around my friends and a couple other people I've
met.

I think the biggest thing is that you're going to bad when you start. If you
want encouragement, go look at the early works of prolific bloggers - often
poorly written, tentative, scared, making mistakes, and writing for no
audience. But doing it makes you improve. The biggest pieces of encouragement
I got were reading the early works of Stephen King and the first Sherlock
Holmes book. The Sign of Four (first Sherlock book) wasn't all that great of a
piece of writing and was a commercial flop, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kept
going until his short stories caught on. Being a lover of Sherlock Holmes, I'm
glad he did it. Also, it's encouraging towards getting started.

------
dpapathanasiou
I think of mine primarily as "notes to myself", for things I'm likely to want
to read again in the future.

E.g. what to do if apt-get upgrade fubars lilo
(<http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=295>), or how to setup mercurial on shared
hosting (<http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=82>), etc.

They're much easier to find again on the blog, versus in some random config or
readme file, lost in my myriad archive folders.

Also, if any of those posts are helpful to other people with the same
problem(s), I'm happy to be able to help anyone who finds them.

~~~
mkr-hn
I've been doing math-related entries on mine for the same reason. I just
recently finished college, and the difficulties of the college algebra and the
remedial algebra classes are fresh in my mind. I've been taking all the stuff
the books explained poorly (which is everything) and making it as clear as
possible.

------
codexon
I blogged, and I haven't gotten much out of it even though I have over 500 rss
subscribers and showed up multiple times on the front page of HN and Reddit.

1\. I have not become a better reader. In fact, it made me more impatient
because of #2.

2\. Writing blog posts did not make me smarter. It made me realize that a blog
post's success is a balancing act between being controversial and saying what
people want to believe.

I also learned that the average time spent reading even my longest technical
articles was around 20 seconds. Yes, even programmers have the attention span
of a peanut. And true enough, I often saw comments where someone says "but you
didn't do X" when I wrote I did X in the 2nd sentence. So my articles have
gotten shorter and shorter, and so has my patience for reading other articles.

3\. Anything else that came out of it has not really been a benefit so far. I
am not even a quarter of the way through the minimum payout for Google
Adsense. Needless to say, it is not even feasible to pay hosting costs this
way.

~~~
Ardit20
Perhaps the problem is that you are focusing too much on what people want. For
sure to have your audience in mind when writing is important, but to have your
audience be your master leaves you aiming for the lowest common dominator.

Maybe you should take less care of your readers and be your own harshest
critic. Do you like your post, do you think it is great, might it need
something added or taken away.

There are many people out there all with their opinions and moods of the day
and prejudices and.... you can't please everyone. Please yourself first and
foremost, then perhaps you will find a readership you love :)

~~~
codexon
If I was writing for the lowest common denominator, I would be writing about
lolcats and celebrities.

The problem is that even the high-brow audience coming from Hacker News and
the programming subreddit (where most of my audience is from) have tiny
attention spans unless they are reading what they want to believe. People
won't even spend 20 seconds to read your post unless you are a celebrity like
Paul Graham.

If you like the idea of a personal diary that no one reads, put it in a text
file. Put it online, and you'll have to deal with spammers, hackers, and
critics that don't even bother to read the article and insult you. If you want
to see what I mean by this, take a look at the comments of my most commented
posts. It is really discouraging.

~~~
ezyang
I have lost my patience with the programming subreddit. Find a better target
audience.

------
euroclydon
I spent a good deal of time this past week putting my first serious blog post
together after reading Steve Yeggie's You Should Blog:
[http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-
bl...](http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-blogs)

Here it is: [http://joshpearce.posterous.com/children-have-bad-
business-s...](http://joshpearce.posterous.com/children-have-bad-business-
sense)

------
sfphotoarts
Isn't this why we used to write essays in school? Blogging is a self imposed
homework schedule of essay writing, except rather than being graded by a
teacher we get our grade from readership.

~~~
ciupicri
It's graded if you have any readership and if the readership is qualified
enough to grade you. I know a couple of blogs who seem to be (very) good when
you look at the comments, yet the most successful posts are about something
trivial and controversial and there's almost no in-depth analysis. In a way,
these blogs are like reddit compared to HN.

------
Tycho
Does anyone have advice for a would-be blogger who has no real expertise or
industry experience or sources? Is a blogger without those things a
contradiction in terms? I'm a decent writer when it comes to formulating
essays, and occasionally I say insightful things, but when it comes to
broadcasting an opinion piece to the world it doesn't seem viable. Should I
just stick to posting on HN? Anyone else start from this situation? (ie. blogs
seem like a good IT career enhancing asset but see no reason why you
personally should blog)

------
kenjackson
The problem I have with blogging is the opportunity cost. While blogging may
help me as a coder. Does it help more than me actually writing code, or
commenting my existing code, or reading an article, or a paper, or spending
time reading other peoples code?

I suspect more than anything blogging helps you become a better blogger, and
then there are some minor secondary effects. I'm not convinced that if I have
zero readers that blogging is the best use of my time.

~~~
jefffoster
I started blogging purely as a way of improving my coding skills, and I was
pretty cynical about it. From blogging I've had good feedback about how I can
improve, and the mere act of keeping a blog has kept me motivated enough to
keep learning and keep posting. In my opinion, definitely worth the cost.

~~~
kenjackson
Where did you get the feedback from? From readers or just from yourself as you
blogged?

I just feel like I have 20 little projects I'd like to do, but don't have
time. Is blogging the top thing on the queue?

~~~
jefffoster
From myself (telling the story seems to give a lot of feedback) and from
readers. And sometimes the flames of Reddit even contain useful information!

Blogging is definitely not top of the queue, but if I'm going to go to the
effort of learning something new, I might as well write some notes on it and
the extra effort of putting it into a blog seems worth it for me.

------
danilocampos
Even if you blog to an app running on localhost that no one will ever see,
you're going to be better for it. One of the best ways to fully understand
anything (idea, argument, problem, feature, goal, failure, whatever) is to
have to wrap words around it. Writing forces you to think things through.

You end up knowing more about your subject than before you began. Guaranteed.
When is that ever bad news?

------
ezyang
As part of a bet between friends, I began blogging at the beginning of this
year. (The bet was: write a blog post a week, and if you don't, you have to
pony up money for a shared food/beer pool.) I aimed for something a little
more ambitious: three blog posts a week.

I've managed it so far, but it takes a lot of time and most of my effort is
making sure a post comes out on time. One of the great things about this is
that I've really had to focus in on collecting interesting topics to write
about; the bad thing about this is that most of the iterative parts of the
writing process are cut out; I'm exercising just the "initial drafting"
writing muscle, so to speak.

I want to keep blogging three times a week until the end of this year, for the
sake of continuity, but from there, I think I'll probably tune down the
frequency and work on the post-processing aspects of writing a little more.
I'd love to hear peoples stories about how their writing process has changed
over time.

------
mcgraw
Everyone starts at 0.

Write something you feel pationate about. Spread the word and you're bound to
get 1 person to read it. With Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites
spreading the word is easier than ever. If you have core knowledge of
something people will want to read it.

People follow people to see what they've had for dinner these days.

------
DTrejo
750words.com makes it really easy for me to get the words out. I think I'll
start transforming those into posts.

------
greenlblue
The internet at this point is just noise and I don't see how encouraging
people to contribute to that noise is going to make things better.

------
tokenadult
You should also edit Wikipedia even if you only use dead-tree reference
sources. Indeed, if you are familiar with dead-tree reference sources, you
especially should edit Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia is good practice in saying
something in a verifiable, neutral point of view manner that anyone can
challenge.

------
dnewcome
You get the most value out of blogging if you publish it. Period. Writing
drafts is great, but it just isn't the same as putting it out there. It's like
practice vs. performance. No amount of practice can take the place of the
experience gained by performance.

------
anonymousDan
What if you are working for a company who might be a bit reticent about
letting their employees blog about whatever they want? How would you go about
broaching the subject so as to get around this? Comments other than 'quit your
job' would be useful!

~~~
mkr-hn
Make a case for a policy change to the person in charge.

------
ThomPete
Blogging is Brain Logging

I use blogging to get specific on some of my loose thoughts get around to do
some research etc.

Luckily this seems to be thoughts others are sharing. But even without the
traffic I would still be blogging.

And yes it does open for opportunity I have to say.

------
bandhunt
Anyone want to argue why you should NOT blog? I'm debating starting to blog,
but as a startup founder I'd rather put every minute into improving my company
- or is writing a blog going to improve my company? Thoughts?

~~~
TGJ
Say something stupid and the rest of the world gets to see it. Write about a
particular belief or political stance and it may come back at you.

Start a journal and keep that for a month. If you like it and can devote time,
then think about making it public.

------
flexterra
I have a blog and almost no readers. My take on this is that I write for
myself some sort of public notebook.

------
moab9
Unfortunately, my blogs all start off sounding like a PBS narrator and end up
sounding like Colonel Kurtz.

------
nazgulnarsil
a further piece of advice. don't let perfectionism keep you from writing.
don't be afraid to make mistakes and contradict yourself. getting it all out
on paper will help you form a more coherent picture of your own opinions.

------
kadavy
"Blog like nobody is reading" is what I always say.

------
ndimopoulos
I second what mcgraw says.

I would also add:

If you have a topic that you love talking about, then go ahead with the blog.
You will need to have a regular posting schedule.

Try getting a few posts in draft mode (ready to be published). This way you
will have something to post even if you do not have the time to post at that
interval (weekly, biweekly etc.)

Letting your readers get used to a regular posting schedule will help a lot.

Twitter/Facebook are good tools you can use to make people aware of your blog.

If you have something interesting to say, people will follow you :)

Good luck!

------
c00p3r
Write if you really have something to say, rather than when you must write
something out of habit or inertia. ^_^

