This is a good article. I liked and upvoted it. Nicely done.
Having said that, I feel as if I must in a good-humored way poke fun at this type of article. The vast majority of the articles I see on HN talking about overnight success at something (How I made 30K my first month! How I turned 40K visitors my first week into $3000! Etc) are actually using HN as a marketing channel. So when I see articles that are 30 minutes old with dozens up upvotes, and some kind of promise to tell a tale of high traffic, it makes me laugh. Yes, with that kind of market traction I'm sure you had that many visits. Next month we'll be reading about the really cool traffic stuff that happened this month, and this article is part of that. It's actually pretty cool if you think about it: by providing us with something we want (advice on blogging) the author is actually becoming a better blogger. Lots of nice recursion there.
Please don't take that the wrong way -- I mean no disrespect. I'm certain everything is on the up and up, and like I said, great article. I just think that readers can easily get mixed up, that's all. As a reader you could start thinking that HN was primarily a marketing venue. While I love HN and love promoting my own stuff and seeing other ideas (Need books to learn marketing and start-ups? Try http://hn-books.com), HN is essentially a one-shot deal. As one other commenter pointed out, there are probably better things to do with your time than chase an audience on HN. Blogging is a great activity. Chasing eyeballs, at least to me, turns blogging into something a lot less fun.
"Chasing eyeballs, at least to me, turns blogging into something a lot less fun."
An important corollary to this is: chasing eyeballs without any way to retain them is neither fun nor productive. The article -- which I quite enjoyed -- does a nice job of pointing that out. And, while the point may sound obvious, it's certainly nontrivial and not immediately intuitive. And even if you have nothing tangible to sell, you're still "selling" your blog. So you've got to make it consistently engaging to the people you've decided to target.
The first mistake many bloggers make is to write for themselves. They assume that an article they found interesting to write will also be interesting to read -- or worse, that an overarching blog topic they love is interesting to a big group of people. Not always the case. You can write about your passions, and you can always lure in a bunch of outside readers with a well-marketed post. But don't expect everyone -- or even 99% of those whose attention you got -- to stick around if they don't care for the rest of the material on your blog.
I'm not advocating that everyone write big, general-interest, broad-topic blogs. The internet has enough of those. So writing about a niche domain is fine. Just be consistent, and stick within that domain. Deviate every now and then if you have something amazing to say. But don't be one of those blogs that's ostensibly about X, but veers off into Y and Z greater than 50% of the time. If I came to your blog to read about startup marketing strategies, I really don't care what you have to say about college basketball, or Call of Duty, or the pricing of the Harry Potter Blu-ray set. Don't write just anything that comes to mind. Have the discipline to stick to a domain and a "brand." Joel on Software is about Joel on software; it's not "Joel on Software and Kittens and Foreign Film Reviews and Fixed-Gear Bikes and What He Saw at Starbucks The Other Day."
This one time on an article that was written specifically for the HN audience, I asked a question related to the article, knowing that the author might read it and answer.
I am seeing this comment pattern more often now; Its like the opening sentence is meant to insulate the commenter from being dinged in the event that this article turns out to be a honeypot.
"Tweaking a button and seeing conversions increase 8-fold is a beautiful thing. Seeing an hour of work turn into 120k visits is magical."
If you are a starter at HN, then do not get misguided by the quote above. If you are aiming for using blog writing as SEO for product marketing and reaching out to new customers then it is good effort. But if you are looking to get eyeballs for adv revenue then stop right there. There are better things you can do with your time.
If you don't have a product, the benefits are more along the lines of finding your voice, learning what resonates with the people you care about, and getting comfortable putting content out where people will see it.
I mentioned the numbers in the sense that I used to think traffic and on-site behaviour was a magical thing that "happened". It was more about having that "aha moment" of how it all works than about doing anything particularly profitable.
Given all that, I think new & future founders would do well to try blogging for a while, reaching out to whoever your future customers would be. It lays a bunch of strong foundational skills that are tough to internalize through reading case studies.
When is the last time someone earned a lot of money from blog? Maybe five years ago. These days blogs are only used to get traffic, either directly or via SEO, to pages where you sell the real product to the customer.
I have had the same experience when my 'Is tumblr a bot fest?' post got #1 on HN. I went from 10 views a day to more than 1k a day. Those types of things are crazy.
My only advice is - dont let it go to your head. Keep writing. Keep thinking. Keep hustling.
Good article about getting at the core of what users ALREADY want. I think that this is the crux of the confusion for most people. Many startup entrepreneurs want to make vitamins when they should really be making aspirin.
I'll weigh in with some context to back up your traffic stats. My blog is basic and I don't have a product to sell. Generally just me ranting about stuff that winds me up. http://www.voltsteve.blogspot.com
The post with the most views was 'My experiences as a recruiter on Hacker News'. Now, granted, a post with that title is going to attract a lot of views but the HN post had almost 400 upvotes and to date, that particular post has had 21k Pageviews and approximately 90% of that came directly from HN.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|14 years ago|reply
Having said that, I feel as if I must in a good-humored way poke fun at this type of article. The vast majority of the articles I see on HN talking about overnight success at something (How I made 30K my first month! How I turned 40K visitors my first week into $3000! Etc) are actually using HN as a marketing channel. So when I see articles that are 30 minutes old with dozens up upvotes, and some kind of promise to tell a tale of high traffic, it makes me laugh. Yes, with that kind of market traction I'm sure you had that many visits. Next month we'll be reading about the really cool traffic stuff that happened this month, and this article is part of that. It's actually pretty cool if you think about it: by providing us with something we want (advice on blogging) the author is actually becoming a better blogger. Lots of nice recursion there.
Please don't take that the wrong way -- I mean no disrespect. I'm certain everything is on the up and up, and like I said, great article. I just think that readers can easily get mixed up, that's all. As a reader you could start thinking that HN was primarily a marketing venue. While I love HN and love promoting my own stuff and seeing other ideas (Need books to learn marketing and start-ups? Try http://hn-books.com), HN is essentially a one-shot deal. As one other commenter pointed out, there are probably better things to do with your time than chase an audience on HN. Blogging is a great activity. Chasing eyeballs, at least to me, turns blogging into something a lot less fun.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|14 years ago|reply
An important corollary to this is: chasing eyeballs without any way to retain them is neither fun nor productive. The article -- which I quite enjoyed -- does a nice job of pointing that out. And, while the point may sound obvious, it's certainly nontrivial and not immediately intuitive. And even if you have nothing tangible to sell, you're still "selling" your blog. So you've got to make it consistently engaging to the people you've decided to target.
The first mistake many bloggers make is to write for themselves. They assume that an article they found interesting to write will also be interesting to read -- or worse, that an overarching blog topic they love is interesting to a big group of people. Not always the case. You can write about your passions, and you can always lure in a bunch of outside readers with a well-marketed post. But don't expect everyone -- or even 99% of those whose attention you got -- to stick around if they don't care for the rest of the material on your blog.
I'm not advocating that everyone write big, general-interest, broad-topic blogs. The internet has enough of those. So writing about a niche domain is fine. Just be consistent, and stick within that domain. Deviate every now and then if you have something amazing to say. But don't be one of those blogs that's ostensibly about X, but veers off into Y and Z greater than 50% of the time. If I came to your blog to read about startup marketing strategies, I really don't care what you have to say about college basketball, or Call of Duty, or the pricing of the Harry Potter Blu-ray set. Don't write just anything that comes to mind. Have the discipline to stick to a domain and a "brand." Joel on Software is about Joel on software; it's not "Joel on Software and Kittens and Foreign Film Reviews and Fixed-Gear Bikes and What He Saw at Starbucks The Other Day."
[+] [-] bad_user|14 years ago|reply
I got an answer alright: it's in my ebook
[+] [-] thetrumanshow|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandee|14 years ago|reply
If you are a starter at HN, then do not get misguided by the quote above. If you are aiming for using blog writing as SEO for product marketing and reaching out to new customers then it is good effort. But if you are looking to get eyeballs for adv revenue then stop right there. There are better things you can do with your time.
[+] [-] robfitz|14 years ago|reply
If you don't have a product, the benefits are more along the lines of finding your voice, learning what resonates with the people you care about, and getting comfortable putting content out where people will see it.
I mentioned the numbers in the sense that I used to think traffic and on-site behaviour was a magical thing that "happened". It was more about having that "aha moment" of how it all works than about doing anything particularly profitable.
Given all that, I think new & future founders would do well to try blogging for a while, reaching out to whoever your future customers would be. It lays a bunch of strong foundational skills that are tough to internalize through reading case studies.
[+] [-] babuskov|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ofca|14 years ago|reply
My only advice is - dont let it go to your head. Keep writing. Keep thinking. Keep hustling.
[+] [-] robjohnson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Peroni|14 years ago|reply
The post with the most views was 'My experiences as a recruiter on Hacker News'. Now, granted, a post with that title is going to attract a lot of views but the HN post had almost 400 upvotes and to date, that particular post has had 21k Pageviews and approximately 90% of that came directly from HN.
[+] [-] jccodez|14 years ago|reply