I find this article meh. I've been blogging for something like 15 years so here's my take:
* If you've been wanting to blog, stop pissing around, open a blog on wordpress.com and start writing. That's my first advice to anyone. Don't waste time on the technicalities, just write. You can move your blog to another platform later.
* Be regular. This is hard. I fail this rule most of the time. But a successful blog is a blog that's been going on for ages. I've posted 461 posts since 2013 on www.cryptologie.net and that's why it is working well.
* Do not look for perfect posts. You are not writing a book. A blog is to share knowledge in a quick way, or to share what's on your mind. No hesitation, once you have something, publish it. People might call you out for saying something wrong, fine, that's free publicity and you'll have learned something new.
* Mix short posts with long posts. It's impossible to keep writing high quality content and long blog posts. So write small ones from times to times to fill in between better blog posts. This is what make people keep going on your blog. It's like a facebook news feed, it needs to have something every time people check it.
* Write on trendy subjects. What did you learn recently that could be helpful to other people? What did you have trouble to learn because there was no good resource on the subject? You could be that resource. What is google trend saying? Are there any trendy topics in your field? What are people talking about recently?
I think your advice is great, but I also disagree that the article is meh. I've been blogging for about 10 years, and my blog won a Webby award and a W3 writing award. I don't say that to brag, just to add credibility that other people think my blog is worthwhile.
Anyway, I agree with almost everything the article says, and there are some things in there that are not obvious to people who are just starting out, which I think puts it well above meh.
But, the one thing I disagree with is his first step when writing a blog post: brainstorm titles. I started that way, but I found I almost always changed the title and sometimes even change what the post is all about by the end.
I generally start with an idea instead of a title; then write down what I know about it; then I put those thoughts in an order that I can use to tell a story; then I research to confirm what I think I know is indeed factual. That is where it becomes interesting.
Sometimes I'm completely wrong, and the story becomes that -- the truth is often more interesting than the assumptions. Sometimes I discover things about what I knew that are more interesting than the original idea. Sometimes what I knew is true and I just back it up with facts and the idea alone was interesting enough to begin with. Lastly, sometimes it's complete shit and I shelf it until the time feels right or I find a new approach to the subject.
I’m 21, but I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years.
I grew up doing this.
What I’ve written on the internet has reached millions of people. Most of what I’ve written is in Italian, but I was also quite successful when writing in english. My Quora profile, reached 400k people in three months.
i feel like these are reasonable qualifications to give blogging advice. Your advice sounds good, but are you speaking from experience or is it just something that makes sense to you? what exactly do you find meh about his advice and why?
Yeah and the blue background and font also annoying. But he is not American, so maybe it works better for him and his readers.
TBH, there are few tips or rules. I have seen successful blogs that employ virtually every kind of format and style. Some that follow all the rules an others that break them all. First-mover advantage seems to be important. I'm sure the first person to blog about Bitcoin did well, but the 284th guy? Probably not so much.
Agree on everything you said, except for two points, which imo are a personal choice.
Look at waitbutwhy.com and julian.com they don't write about stuff they find on google trends and don't post regularly, yet they're among the best blogs out there
>If you've been wanting to blog, stop pissing around, open a blog on wordpress.com and start writing. That's my first advice to anyone. Don't waste time on the technicalities, just write. You can move your blog to another platform later.
Terrible advice. If your blog proves popular, it'll be impossible for you to move away without losing your position in search engines. Lock-in.
One well researched article is better than a lot of mediocre content
I remember similar advice on patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) blog that i really took to heart. something along the lines of "it's better to have a few laser polished articles, than a ton of content". so to this date i start writing posts and quit half way through to keep only my favorite ideas up there..
there is another camp i.e. Seth Godin who write a short post every day, and that could work too perhaps. but i think most people would be better off with the advice in OPs post
I started a website in 2005 that is still in operation today. We started out posting 1-2 articles per week, I had a lot of spare time then. But that rate was unsustainable with our small team and small budget, and we reached a point of burnout, and had to decide whether to slow down or shut down. After a hiatus to mentally recuperate, we opted to continue writing, though publishing less often and digging deeper into the stories.
The results of this change of format are mixed. On the one hand, it now feels like quite an accomplishment when we wrap up research, writing, fact-checking, recording (podcast version), sound design, illustrations, etc. And most readers/listeners seem happier than ever with the quality of the content. But on the other hand, our rankings in Google have fallen considerably to sites that post frequent, low-effort content. The gatekeepers seem to prefer the pap.
Additionally, there are a minority of readers/listeners who are outright hostile about our reduced output. Just as an example, I received this via email a few days ago:
You are the laziest website on the internet. If I was to succumb to your nag messages and give you money, you would just waste it. This isn't really a real website, and it has no reason to exist. Give up and shut down. A website isn't worth visiting if it looks the same every 6 months someone visits. Just put a bullet it in already and end its pain. You failed. Just call time-of-death, already. Or, whatever, die slowly of cancer... It's not like your life amounts to anything...
So, while I agree that deeper content is "better", it has its drawbacks.
Look at popular blogs, and when I say popular blogs I mean blogs where people keep on checking your posts, participate regularly in conversations, etc. They are all highly active.
On the other side, blogs that post rarely AND that are famous are very rare. People tend to forget about them. Note that a post that buzzes thanks to a link on HN or reddit doesn't make it a popular blog.
There is something to be said about writing begets writing. Long thoughtful posts are great, but those take time and often do not get finished. The more someone posts, the easier it gets to post. Then the more they'll post, and so on.
I think John Gruber does a pretty good job at https://daringfireball.net where he posts shorter stuff mixed in with longer out articles. I think I heard him say once his goal was to get someone to check his site once or twice/week.
Seth Godin is an interesting example. Do you know if he started publishing one short post a day before he became famous or after? I guess once you have name recognition, then different set of rules apply.
One another example is backlinko's Brian Dean. He writes really long articles and doesn't post often (but updates his older articles when relevant). He too seems to be doing very well
It depends on your competition and your chosen keywords.
For most niches, it makes sense to write around 6-15 long articles (>6000 words) and then a bunch of 500 word articles that lead to the big article - most of the time a guide (you're doing on-page SEO and target long tail keywords with those small articles).
But people like Brian from Backlinko also show other ways. Strategies like Backlinko's depend on the backlink structure (he writes about it here [1]). If you try to do it without caring about the backlink structure (you certainly should, too), the way I've described is the most economic (basically a hybrid solution).
Like most things, it almost certainly depends. It's easy to get into a mode where you allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good and hardly ever publish anything because it's not just right.
(And, half the time when you do publish that perfect piece, it lands with a thud because others apparently didn't think it was as great as you did. I've had pieces I've tossed off in a few hours get tons of traction while other pieces I've spent a few days polishing don't attract readers at all.)
On the other hand, I wouldn't counsel putting out a lot of crappy 500 word posts even if you don't have anything fresh to say.
> Spend 50% of the writing time actually writing, the rest tweaking, reading and illustrating. Details are important.
I find this true not just of blog posts, but any time I've done formal writing at all. There is an immense gulf in quality between writing that has gone through even just one heavy edit/revision process and writing that never has.
I've recently been encouraging my technical co-workers to expend more time on not-code, such as documentation, tutorials, plans, postmortems, internal RFCs, carefully worded PR/commit comments, etc. One challenge is that people sometimes think that when they "finish" a piece of writing, they're done. Unless you've been iteratively revising pieces of it in smaller chunks, I think you're really only halfway there.
This is good stuff. I blog for fun and I agree with almost everything here, especially the stuff about advertising. I am not against advertising in general but putting ads on your page is an acknowledgment that you care more about money than writing what you want. There is nothing morally wrong with this, but it turns a hobby into a job.
Lastly, I encourage everyone to publish blogs or articles. Each blog post on an independent site is a blow against the content farms and social media giants that control so much of the discourse these days.
I like the current trend of being able to support e.g. bloggers (or youtubers, or whoever) via Patreon; I do believe there should be multiple providers of the same service because right now Patreon has too much influence / mindspace, but it's a good alternative for advertisement - not as scummy, and much more reliable. $1 / month / fan is nice. I follow one youtuber (and not the annoying screamy meme type) who seems to have 13.000 Patrons.
I agree with your last sentence about "each independent blog post". But you must realize that hosting content isn't free. If you want a blog that doesn't end with .wordpress.com or blogspot.com, you'll have to pay.
Otherwise, you publish on Medium, which IMO is just as bad in terms of handing over your IP to content farms.
Eh, none of this really matters unless you actually care whether or not anyone is reading your content. I've been blogging random thoughts and assorted happenings in my life since 2002, and it's all out there on the public interwebz, but I write for an audience of one - me. If any poor soul happens to stumble across it, then that's their bad luck.
Just more vague tips that maybe worked for him and won't for most. i have several articles on my own blog/website that are over 4000 words and all original content. Want to guess how much search engine traffic they get? Z-e-r-o
Personally, I think giving numbers (like 0-12k/month in 7 months) is useless if it is not put in some context.
Several times I googled what should be expected amount of visits to see if I am doing ok or not. Result? It is kinda disheartening to see that after pouring a lot of love, getting rather nice feedback about articles etc, you see that you are getting e.g. 2k visits a month, while someone states that is "should be about 1k visits... a day". And you put some effort into marketing your content!
Thing is, if you look at the amount of searches of the topics you cover, you might find that the person who posted such advice caters to 20x as large audience as you, so that 2k/month might be a really good result! But to see that, you have to put the numbers in some context instead of looking at the absolute numbers. If we applied this to e.g. youtubers we could conclude, that random gameplay streamer does a several times better job than a science channel author.
100% agree. I run a network of very focused blogs with small but targeted audiences. Each blog may only have 3,000 views per month, but it's serving a city with 10,000 people, so we've captured 1/3 of the market for the entire city. And everyone who views the site is local. But I still hear companies balking at our advertising rates complaining that the CPM (cost per thousand views) is way too high.
At the average $2.80 CPM, we'd make $9 per month. In a city of 10,000 people, what would get more attention: a cheap Google ad, or your name sitting at the top of the only digital media outlet in the city? That's worth a $10 CPM, I think.
It's about the percentage of the market captured, not raw view numbers.
I started writing (aka blogging) in 2002, on Blogger with a custom commenting plugin developed by an indie Russian developer. Movable Type was the in-thing before finally settling down on WordPress.
During the early hay-days, my site witnessed million visitors monthly and boasted of Google PageRank of 8. If I can recollect, I'm sure the Alexa Rank was also in one of the top 100 or 1000 for a pretty good amount of time. There were advertisers willing pay good dollars that the site easily earned few thousands each month. There was No YouTube, No Twitter, No Facebook, No Github. My free and open source "downloads" would choke the servers and (mt) would gladly host at a good discount to handle hundreds of GBs of download each month.
I used to write anything and everything that fancied me. Readers "Digg" it and many other aggregators love reposting the articles, and the site won enough awards that I stopped adding "badges" to my site.
But then, I learned more, realized that many of my articles are shallow and pretty much stopped writing. If I pick up a topic, I research and saw that many have written about it, then I just don't write. I write once a while, sometimes lengthy and personal opinions. Traffic has dropped so much that my current blog is grandfathered by WPEngine on a free tier, shielded by CloudFlare and is just surviving.
Here is what I believe one should do;
* Pick a niche but don't be afraid to go wide once a while.
* Ok to go short (Seth Godin style) or lengthy journalistic style writing.
* If it is a personal blog, be personal.
* Have a content strategy, plan and just write.
* Learn to re-purpose content. Your YouTube video can become a Podcast audio, the transcripts can become a blog post, interesting text/quotes from your post can be fodder for your social media.
Any blog IMO should have a minimalist design. You want to draw attention to the content and present it as plainly and with as little visual clutter as possible.
Some people want to use their blog as a kind of interactive CV but that should be treated as a separate project, as it will just introduce more clutter.
What's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g. disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own feedback facility is risky.
I turned off comments and allow people to contact me through Twitter or email.
That seems to be such a high barrier to entry that the contact I do receive is almost always because someone disagrees strongly or because they are very thankful for something they learned.
In either case, it stops pointless crap like 'first'.
Alternatively [I blog as a form of self-documenting, under the term blogumentation](https://www.jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/). My audience is me. Sometimes my audience will be my colleagues, or strangers on the Internet, but it's always written for me first!
I don't know about 'authoritative', but ads do seem to hurt. The existing experimental and quasi-experimental literature shows very bad effects on user behavior:
I really question that. I can't believe that in this day and age anyone thinks that having AdSense on a blog site is some indicator of superior quality. And affiliate links at least raise the possibility of conflicts of interest.
Way back when I experimented with ads and links but I came to the conclusion that the money was pretty trivial in the scheme of things and it took away from the otherwise non-commercial nature of my site.
Some very useful tips in there. Especially the first one: "No one has time to read your article, write the first lines like they’re a TLDR." Not a good idea for fiction! but it's essential to save a reader's time. If the main topic is buried 3-4 paragraphs down, I've already left.
Note that this one person is getting significant attention writing about a specialized topic (EDM). That probably characterizes most blogs that attract much attention.
A few people managed to be 'generalists' in the early days (e.g. Kottke), but you're probably better off trying to find a congregation that feels under-represented online and is looking for a home. (It's not a blog, but, e.g., deviantart.)
There's also a technical reason for writing the TLDR up top. When a web crawler indexes a page for search results, they capture a snippet of the first <p> tags that follow the <h1> of the title. That snippet is what is shown on the results page, and really is what determines whether a user wants to click the link shown by the search engine.
Sad and annoying. Top Google results are very likely to include long articles that ramble on and on and never get to the point, in the name of "optimization". Search Engine Optimization is Reader Experience Pessimization.
I'm conflicted about the notion that "no one has time to read your article." That says more about dilapidation of reading culture than the fact that length of a text is necessarily bad. I see it happening to me and I don't read something not because it is valueless on its own but because there is simply too much else outside of it drawing on my attention.
If there's more and more pressure to say less, eventually you'll say nothing. If you say everything, nobody will read it unless they have eyes set on your work.
Most people seem to be trained to write an expository piece in a classical model of assert a premise => provide an argument => yield a conclusion. They're not used to putting the conclusion where the premise should be sort of like an abstract.
I would need to see a citation for this. I work with digital marketing folks a lot, who are well-versed in things like SEO, and the general trend seems is toward shorter and more frequent content. That's not to say that I don't write a longer piece when the content warrants it, but for written articles/blogs/etc. 800-1000 words seems to be fairly common. Certainly there's also something of a trend from giveaway long books to 25-50 page ones.
This seems like one of those things that will reverse itself. Once a measure is known to its subjects it becomes worthless. (That's not my idea but I'm too lazy to look up the source right now.) If enough people write long articles just for SEO, the algorithm will change and they might actually find themselves penalized. Then there will be lots of whining from folks who thought they could profit by prioritizing SEO over quality and by treating SEO as a one-time-solvable problem.
To promote new content to an already-converted audience.
Compare the site engagement of users who willingly gave you their email address, to a user who landed on your page from a search query, browsed it and left the site. What are the chances that that user will remember the name of the site and make a return visit? Your page could have been one of 10 he looked at to get an answer to his question.
I wrote short stories and video game reviews for the kids section of my local newspaper when I was 10-12yo. When I was older (13-18) I switched to writing about music. My IQ, not that I've tried to measure it, is probably very average. I was a kid and I just wanted to write.
[+] [-] baby|7 years ago|reply
* If you've been wanting to blog, stop pissing around, open a blog on wordpress.com and start writing. That's my first advice to anyone. Don't waste time on the technicalities, just write. You can move your blog to another platform later.
* Be regular. This is hard. I fail this rule most of the time. But a successful blog is a blog that's been going on for ages. I've posted 461 posts since 2013 on www.cryptologie.net and that's why it is working well.
* Do not look for perfect posts. You are not writing a book. A blog is to share knowledge in a quick way, or to share what's on your mind. No hesitation, once you have something, publish it. People might call you out for saying something wrong, fine, that's free publicity and you'll have learned something new.
* Mix short posts with long posts. It's impossible to keep writing high quality content and long blog posts. So write small ones from times to times to fill in between better blog posts. This is what make people keep going on your blog. It's like a facebook news feed, it needs to have something every time people check it.
* Write on trendy subjects. What did you learn recently that could be helpful to other people? What did you have trouble to learn because there was no good resource on the subject? You could be that resource. What is google trend saying? Are there any trendy topics in your field? What are people talking about recently?
[+] [-] bonestamp2|7 years ago|reply
Anyway, I agree with almost everything the article says, and there are some things in there that are not obvious to people who are just starting out, which I think puts it well above meh.
But, the one thing I disagree with is his first step when writing a blog post: brainstorm titles. I started that way, but I found I almost always changed the title and sometimes even change what the post is all about by the end.
I generally start with an idea instead of a title; then write down what I know about it; then I put those thoughts in an order that I can use to tell a story; then I research to confirm what I think I know is indeed factual. That is where it becomes interesting.
Sometimes I'm completely wrong, and the story becomes that -- the truth is often more interesting than the assumptions. Sometimes I discover things about what I knew that are more interesting than the original idea. Sometimes what I knew is true and I just back it up with facts and the idea alone was interesting enough to begin with. Lastly, sometimes it's complete shit and I shelf it until the time feels right or I find a new approach to the subject.
[+] [-] SonicSoul|7 years ago|reply
I’m 21, but I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years.
I grew up doing this.
What I’ve written on the internet has reached millions of people. Most of what I’ve written is in Italian, but I was also quite successful when writing in english. My Quora profile, reached 400k people in three months.
i feel like these are reasonable qualifications to give blogging advice. Your advice sounds good, but are you speaking from experience or is it just something that makes sense to you? what exactly do you find meh about his advice and why?
[+] [-] paulpauper|7 years ago|reply
TBH, there are few tips or rules. I have seen successful blogs that employ virtually every kind of format and style. Some that follow all the rules an others that break them all. First-mover advantage seems to be important. I'm sure the first person to blog about Bitcoin did well, but the 284th guy? Probably not so much.
[+] [-] 0xferruccio|7 years ago|reply
Look at waitbutwhy.com and julian.com they don't write about stuff they find on google trends and don't post regularly, yet they're among the best blogs out there
[+] [-] johnchristopher|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnauz|7 years ago|reply
Terrible advice. If your blog proves popular, it'll be impossible for you to move away without losing your position in search engines. Lock-in.
[+] [-] SonicSoul|7 years ago|reply
I remember similar advice on patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) blog that i really took to heart. something along the lines of "it's better to have a few laser polished articles, than a ton of content". so to this date i start writing posts and quit half way through to keep only my favorite ideas up there..
there is another camp i.e. Seth Godin who write a short post every day, and that could work too perhaps. but i think most people would be better off with the advice in OPs post
[+] [-] DamnInteresting|7 years ago|reply
The results of this change of format are mixed. On the one hand, it now feels like quite an accomplishment when we wrap up research, writing, fact-checking, recording (podcast version), sound design, illustrations, etc. And most readers/listeners seem happier than ever with the quality of the content. But on the other hand, our rankings in Google have fallen considerably to sites that post frequent, low-effort content. The gatekeepers seem to prefer the pap.
Additionally, there are a minority of readers/listeners who are outright hostile about our reduced output. Just as an example, I received this via email a few days ago:
You are the laziest website on the internet. If I was to succumb to your nag messages and give you money, you would just waste it. This isn't really a real website, and it has no reason to exist. Give up and shut down. A website isn't worth visiting if it looks the same every 6 months someone visits. Just put a bullet it in already and end its pain. You failed. Just call time-of-death, already. Or, whatever, die slowly of cancer... It's not like your life amounts to anything...
So, while I agree that deeper content is "better", it has its drawbacks.
[+] [-] baby|7 years ago|reply
Look at popular blogs, and when I say popular blogs I mean blogs where people keep on checking your posts, participate regularly in conversations, etc. They are all highly active.
On the other side, blogs that post rarely AND that are famous are very rare. People tend to forget about them. Note that a post that buzzes thanks to a link on HN or reddit doesn't make it a popular blog.
[+] [-] matwood|7 years ago|reply
I think John Gruber does a pretty good job at https://daringfireball.net where he posts shorter stuff mixed in with longer out articles. I think I heard him say once his goal was to get someone to check his site once or twice/week.
[+] [-] justaguyhere|7 years ago|reply
One another example is backlinko's Brian Dean. He writes really long articles and doesn't post often (but updates his older articles when relevant). He too seems to be doing very well
[+] [-] mockingbirdy|7 years ago|reply
For most niches, it makes sense to write around 6-15 long articles (>6000 words) and then a bunch of 500 word articles that lead to the big article - most of the time a guide (you're doing on-page SEO and target long tail keywords with those small articles).
But people like Brian from Backlinko also show other ways. Strategies like Backlinko's depend on the backlink structure (he writes about it here [1]). If you try to do it without caring about the backlink structure (you certainly should, too), the way I've described is the most economic (basically a hybrid solution).
[1]: https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique-2-0
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
(And, half the time when you do publish that perfect piece, it lands with a thud because others apparently didn't think it was as great as you did. I've had pieces I've tossed off in a few hours get tons of traction while other pieces I've spent a few days polishing don't attract readers at all.)
On the other hand, I wouldn't counsel putting out a lot of crappy 500 word posts even if you don't have anything fresh to say.
[+] [-] andy_wrote|7 years ago|reply
I find this true not just of blog posts, but any time I've done formal writing at all. There is an immense gulf in quality between writing that has gone through even just one heavy edit/revision process and writing that never has.
I've recently been encouraging my technical co-workers to expend more time on not-code, such as documentation, tutorials, plans, postmortems, internal RFCs, carefully worded PR/commit comments, etc. One challenge is that people sometimes think that when they "finish" a piece of writing, they're done. Unless you've been iteratively revising pieces of it in smaller chunks, I think you're really only halfway there.
[+] [-] AndrewStephens|7 years ago|reply
Lastly, I encourage everyone to publish blogs or articles. Each blog post on an independent site is a blow against the content farms and social media giants that control so much of the discourse these days.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
Otherwise, you publish on Medium, which IMO is just as bad in terms of handing over your IP to content farms.
[+] [-] justpassingby-|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mortivore|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|7 years ago|reply
Just more vague tips that maybe worked for him and won't for most. i have several articles on my own blog/website that are over 4000 words and all original content. Want to guess how much search engine traffic they get? Z-e-r-o
[+] [-] maddening|7 years ago|reply
Several times I googled what should be expected amount of visits to see if I am doing ok or not. Result? It is kinda disheartening to see that after pouring a lot of love, getting rather nice feedback about articles etc, you see that you are getting e.g. 2k visits a month, while someone states that is "should be about 1k visits... a day". And you put some effort into marketing your content!
Thing is, if you look at the amount of searches of the topics you cover, you might find that the person who posted such advice caters to 20x as large audience as you, so that 2k/month might be a really good result! But to see that, you have to put the numbers in some context instead of looking at the absolute numbers. If we applied this to e.g. youtubers we could conclude, that random gameplay streamer does a several times better job than a science channel author.
[+] [-] freehunter|7 years ago|reply
At the average $2.80 CPM, we'd make $9 per month. In a city of 10,000 people, what would get more attention: a cheap Google ad, or your name sitting at the top of the only digital media outlet in the city? That's worth a $10 CPM, I think.
It's about the percentage of the market captured, not raw view numbers.
[+] [-] mockingbirdy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|7 years ago|reply
During the early hay-days, my site witnessed million visitors monthly and boasted of Google PageRank of 8. If I can recollect, I'm sure the Alexa Rank was also in one of the top 100 or 1000 for a pretty good amount of time. There were advertisers willing pay good dollars that the site easily earned few thousands each month. There was No YouTube, No Twitter, No Facebook, No Github. My free and open source "downloads" would choke the servers and (mt) would gladly host at a good discount to handle hundreds of GBs of download each month.
I used to write anything and everything that fancied me. Readers "Digg" it and many other aggregators love reposting the articles, and the site won enough awards that I stopped adding "badges" to my site.
But then, I learned more, realized that many of my articles are shallow and pretty much stopped writing. If I pick up a topic, I research and saw that many have written about it, then I just don't write. I write once a while, sometimes lengthy and personal opinions. Traffic has dropped so much that my current blog is grandfathered by WPEngine on a free tier, shielded by CloudFlare and is just surviving.
Here is what I believe one should do;
* Pick a niche but don't be afraid to go wide once a while.
* Ok to go short (Seth Godin style) or lengthy journalistic style writing.
* If it is a personal blog, be personal.
* Have a content strategy, plan and just write.
* Learn to re-purpose content. Your YouTube video can become a Podcast audio, the transcripts can become a blog post, interesting text/quotes from your post can be fodder for your social media.
* Keep Writing.
[+] [-] nyc111|7 years ago|reply
But it helps if the font is legible in all media.
Good, straightforward advice, better than many similar articles.
Personally, in my blog, I only write what I like.
I also do what he says about editing and linking old articles.
[+] [-] cantthinkofone|7 years ago|reply
Some people want to use their blog as a kind of interactive CV but that should be treated as a separate project, as it will just introduce more clutter.
[+] [-] SonicSoul|7 years ago|reply
i take it to mean, don't worry about going crazy with hiring a PR firm to give you beautiful look/feel and/or some unique functionality
[+] [-] asciimo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PuffinBlue|7 years ago|reply
That seems to be such a high barrier to entry that the contact I do receive is almost always because someone disagrees strongly or because they are very thankful for something they learned.
In either case, it stops pointless crap like 'first'.
[+] [-] jamietanna|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ta3216|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|7 years ago|reply
1. "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio", Huang et al 2018: https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... [experimental]
2."The Effect of Ad Blocking on [Firefox] User Engagement with the Web", Miroglio et al 2018: https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-... [quasi]
3. and my own A/B test: https://www.gwern.net/Ads [experimental]
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
Way back when I experimented with ads and links but I came to the conclusion that the money was pretty trivial in the scheme of things and it took away from the otherwise non-commercial nature of my site.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|7 years ago|reply
Note that this one person is getting significant attention writing about a specialized topic (EDM). That probably characterizes most blogs that attract much attention.
A few people managed to be 'generalists' in the early days (e.g. Kottke), but you're probably better off trying to find a congregation that feels under-represented online and is looking for a home. (It's not a blog, but, e.g., deviantart.)
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|7 years ago|reply
So true!
> For SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words)
So sad!
[+] [-] andrenth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cantthinkofone|7 years ago|reply
If there's more and more pressure to say less, eventually you'll say nothing. If you say everything, nobody will read it unless they have eyes set on your work.
Most people seem to be trained to write an expository piece in a classical model of assert a premise => provide an argument => yield a conclusion. They're not used to putting the conclusion where the premise should be sort of like an abstract.
[+] [-] Mnlfrgr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kenji|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Aardwolf|7 years ago|reply
why?
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
Compare the site engagement of users who willingly gave you their email address, to a user who landed on your page from a search query, browsed it and left the site. What are the chances that that user will remember the name of the site and make a return visit? Your page could have been one of 10 he looked at to get an answer to his question.
[+] [-] lcfcjs2|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] paulpauper|7 years ago|reply
wtf..mindblown.. His IQ must be off the charts. no wonder he is so successful.
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply