
Ask HN: How do you promote your blog articles? - wkoszek
I noticed that posting just once to Twitter&#x2F;FB&#x2F;LinkedIn&#x2F;HackerNews works so-so. Some articles get surprisingly little number of clicks. If you&#x27;re a blog author, what do you use to promote your articles?
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Mz
I took a look at your blog and your HN profile. Some suggestions:

Specify in your HN profile that the link is to your blog and maybe give some
general idea of what you write about. "This is my blog where I write about X,
Y and Z."

Update your blog more frequently.

Engage more in public forums. You don't have much karma here and I have no
idea who you are. Post good comments and good articles.

If you think someone would genuinely be interested in what you have to say on
a topic, give them the direct link to a particular piece, either in public
discussion or via private message. But don't be too pushy about this. You need
to genuinely think it might be relevant and useful to them. There must be
something in it for them, not just you.

Use your blog to respond to things and engage people. If you have a lot to say
about X in a discussion and you feel you won't do it justice writing a long
piece off the cuff, write something short (in the discussion itself) and then
blog at length about it fairly soon after. It can help improve your writing by
helping you figure out "who" you are talking "to".

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acemarke
I blog about React and Redux at
[http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/) . I
generally post links to Twitter, /r/reactjs, and EchoJS. Picked up enough of
an audience over the last few months that I've had a number of React email
newsletters link to my posts, as well as some other aggregators like
JavascriptKicks and random FB-type groups.

~~~
wkoszek
Can you share a bit of your numbers? I wonder how it looks like over time. I
think it helps you a lot that it's a niche topics. I need to align with this
idea more (posting on 1-2 topics max)

~~~
acemarke
My last "big" post was on January 26. Since then, Google Analytics says I've
been averaging roughly 200 users/day, with noticeable long tail traffic from
several newsletters. My top couple days were about 1500 visitors apiece, and
my top three articles so far have 8.8K, 7.7K, and 6.9K pageviews.

For what that's worth :)

It helps that I'm a maintainer of Redux, and had already established a bit of
a reputation in the React/Redux community as someone who has collected a lot
of info about those tools, and helped out a lot of people who are learning
them.

~~~
wkoszek
Can you add a link to your website to your HN profile?

~~~
acemarke
Linked it in my first comment, but sure, done.

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fiftyacorn
It depends on your motivation. I have a blog to keep my technical notes, and
while its nice to see other people reading my blog its not my main reason for
writing

My blog is picked up by dzone, and a few other Java sites - so I get a lot of
readers through syndication, although not as much thru traffic. Ive not posted
to reddit as a bit weary of the response

I can post my blog if anyone is interested

~~~
wkoszek
Put it in the HN profile, so that we can know you :)

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skyisblue
Post on a subreddit that relates to your blog

~~~
wkoszek
Do you get any results that way? I either do something wrong, or it just
doesn't work well for me:
[https://www.reddit.com/user/wkoszek/](https://www.reddit.com/user/wkoszek/)
Some of my stuff can be shit, but some articles did well at HN/LinkedIn and on
Reddit I got 0 results. Example: [http://www.koszek.com/blog/2017/02/06/how-
much-software-engi...](http://www.koszek.com/blog/2017/02/06/how-much-
software-engineer-should-invest-in-career-growth/)

~~~
wazanator
User page doesn't exist. You may have been shadow banned. Make sure if you are
submitting links to your blog that you follow their rules about not making the
majority of your submissions your content.

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urahara
Everything, depending on resources available. There are hundreds of ways to
promote, free or paid. The best one is to build your own loyal user
base/mailing list and announce each new blog post. Guest posting is great, but
requires a lot of effort.

~~~
wkoszek
So I added a mailing list a while back. I have 11 people now, and quite a bit
of posts: [http://www.koszek.com/](http://www.koszek.com/) but the growth is
very slow. I suspect it's because it's not a single-niche blog plus writing
which isn't written by a native English speaker. Wondering what else I could
"debug" here.

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DrNuke
Selling opinions from scratch (neither as a niche guru nor as a public /
mediatic persona) is quite a steep proposition. Very focussed case studies and
success stories might serve us JoeBloggers better than general essays imho.
Good luck.

~~~
wkoszek
Yeah. I need to align more with what you've just explained.

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michalptacek
I believe in a word of mouth effect and "natural" reach. My opinion is that
once you create a really valuable content, people will find your articles
automatically.

Instead of spending 3 hours a day thinking of how to promote your content, try
to spend these 3 hours on actually creating a better content. It doesn’t mean
I don’t post my content to FB, Twitter, Pinterest etc of course :)

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pryelluw
What are you writing about and how? Answer that and Ill tell you how to
promote it.

