How I got 50,000 page views by simply being me
jgc.org
jgc.org
Being authentic is wonderful. Of course, we know authenticity is prized by this community (and many others). So if we get up on a soapbox and say "Be authentic!", are we being authentic or are we marketing?
I think the answer is "both".
The prior post rubbed me wrong not because it was "Give people what they want!" and not because it was introspective, but because it seemed to glorify pageviews for the sake of pageviews, as opposed to there being some strategy to actually create value. If folks had perceived value creation, they probably wouldn't have cared if titles were optimized for their interests.
I'm not particularly enthusiastic about personal promotion via scaring people into thinking Facebook exists to out gay people, but at the bottom of that post, there was a brief aside about how you should take the hint if people retitle your post when tweeting it. That is a SOLID piece of concrete, actionable advice about writing good titles, which is a core competency for marketing It also provides value to all parties. There is a reason I don't title my blog posts "Something I thought today."
I think if people perceived the posts as "creating more value than they captured", they would have no problem whatsoever with optimizing the execution of them.
But I think I overshot my targets and my attempt at exposure is leading to a backlash. I'll just stop talking now and go off and write my next article, which will be more 'me'.
If I'm going to take the time to write an article for my blog, I'm generally going to write something that I think would be interesting enough to be worth reading for other people as well as worth writing for myself. Otherwise I'm merely indulging myself, and that tends to make for unbearably bad writing.
Likewise, when I think of a title, I try to come up with something that will attract people's interest so they read the article.
Is that "social engineering"? If not, how is it different from what you did? Is the issue here intent - the intent to create something interesting/useful vs. the intent to capture pageviews per se - or is it merely the tone of your subsequent introspection, which admittedly was nakedly gloating about having achieved your objective of attracting readers and twitter followers?
Finally, what is the latter if not a reasonable proxy you used to measure the former?
90% of the posts here speak about improving conversion (A/B testing and such) instead of adding features.
How much value that adds ? _ZERO_. But you accept that.
Now explain to me how that is different than iterating/engineering your blog posts ?
> ...unimportant people with low follower counts.
This shows a fundamental lack of respect for people who choose to give you their time and attention. You worked to get my attention. Don't turn around and insult me. Publicly.
When people are done being offended maybe they will realize that there is something to learn from it, whether you agree with it or not. It would be interesting to see how this would have played out if the target of this "hack" had been someone other than the HN community themselves.
Website owners do it for money. Bloggers and Twitterers do it for fame.
I would personally love to see more posts on Good writing, Audience targeting and Engagement.
Claiming authenticity and claiming you have no underlying motive are powerful mainstream marketing techniques. I doubt the motivations of this author are any different than the motivations of the other author that admitted he was trying to manipulate us. This author is just taking advantage of our gullibility whereas the other author was pointing it out. Nobody likes to hear they've been manipulated, but which is really the more valuable message?
There's a reason why TV commercials don't start out with "The purpose of this commercial is to manipulate you into buying this product."
Huh? 37signals and similar do pretty well out of it.
That's an unanswerable question, but you can't rule out the possibility they'd be doing better still.
Those two messages seem very irrelevant to my life. The post didn't even have an interesting story =/
If anyone got something better than that out of the post, please tell me because this is at the top of HN and I don't know why. No rudeness intended.
Simply writing and waiting for the traffic to roll in is unrealistic. You can still author great content and promote it via social/news/blog platforms. Just because you market yourself well doesn't make your content crap.
I read for all kinds of reasons, sometimes to further my business goals, sometimes to learn. The simple fact that you'd go out of your way to get the answer to a question that bugs you really impresses me. That's exactly why I am a programmer to begin with, the kid in my just simply never stops wondering about questions like that and every now and then I have time enough to find the answer to a few of those.
So, likely your next post will be inspirational in some other sense.
Keep them coming, and I'll definitely be reading.
I find the truth is a little more complex, however. Analytical guys being what they are, I look at my blog stats from time to time. (Look! Shiny numbers and graphs!) When I start doing this too much, then I end up trying to "game" the system, and my writing goes downhill.
So I had a very visceral response to John's post: if you really are just writing "you", then you aren't looking at your stats (and not caring whether other people do or not) If, however, you're looking to the community for validation (and don't we all do that to some degree)? That's when you start writing posts that are basically "Look at me! I'm much more honest/trustworthy/humble than that other guy"
Write for you, yes. But if you tell us too many times "I write for me" then you're really not writing for you anymore, are you?
Sorry if that sounded like Mr. Asshole Guy. Like I said, the criticism comes from my doing the same thing.
At first I took it all at face value. Gradually I started hating the apparent dominance of snake-oil-selling bloggers. Then I decided that there was more to it than I first thought and am preparing a strategy that fits in blogging with my other goals.
Consider: what is the art of promotion, but another form of power? It can be abused, just like programming skills can be abused for malicious purposes, but it can also be applied to contribute to other efforts.
Blogging is a worthy cross-promotional tool, and it could give you the star power necessary to start a community or a collaborative project from scratch. And in the meantime, ad monetization gives a little bit of reward for building a strong site.
And you don't have to work within the "make regular posts on vapid topics" cycle to succeed: Good posts on niche subjects can go a long way, especially if you stick to making them search-friendly "evergreen" articles and not pure news/rumor/opinion. While you can't compete with the likes of Demand Media on quantity, you can exploit specialty subjects far better.
Edit: studying at school also doesn't create value by itself, and many people never get much value from their studies, but these who know for what they learn get the most
I think the "tribal aversion of engineers to marketing" thing is very valid - being able to drive traffic is useful, and engineers seem to think that building systems that reward driving traffic (such as Google) makes you a better person than using such a system successfully (if you want to make money with Google, you're going to need to drive some traffic). It's such an arbitrary thing. If the system is worth building then it must be worth using too.
Monetary value of those uniques: $0.00
Self esteem/social confirmation/confidence boosting value of those uniques: very high.
It has, however, been the main reason i've got my past few jobs. Having something that you can point to that has some sort of impact can open a lot of doors.