You should blog even if you have no readers | Hacker News Reader

You should blog even if you have no readers

nathanmarz.com

207 pointsnathanmarz54 comments

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.

There have been many, many times where I was struggling with some technical issue and I found a solution to the same (or similar) problem on someone's blog.

Even if you don't get a lot of traffic or comments, you may be able to help someone in the future.

That alone is a good reason to do it.

Actually, I found more and better solutions in blogs than in official documentation and books. Especially the topic of edge cases or documentation that doesn't work as advertised or error messages that don't mean what they think they mean.

No official install guide will say "But if you are running this on Ubuntu 8.0.4, it will throw off a spurious error message about wrong xpong version. you can ignore it and everything will be fine or you can fix this by running the install with --xpong-compatible", but bloggers say things like that all the time.

I try to blog every time I run into misleading documentation and every time I run into an error and there are no useful results when googling for that error message. The error messages and install guides are probably the biggest traffic generators for my blog.

> "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.

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?

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.

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?

Some people blog on locked-down (private) blogs. You don't have to make it public.

This is why I turn off comments. On publicly trafficked blogs threads are often an idiotic menace--among people who know me, Facebook suffices.

Someone somewhere is going to read it if it's posted. I think it's worth the maybe slim chance that someone will get something useful out of it.

When I make a blog post, it gets about 80 hits during that week, then drops to about 10 hits a day. Over the theoretically endless life of the blog, that's a lot of chances to make a difference for someone.

Regarding your point that if it's all in the process why publish? consider that publishing makes the writing happen.

You might already be familiar with Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com). If not, it's a videogame themed webcomic that's been around for about 12 years now. They're successful - in fact, they have defined what "success" means for a webcomic.

They recently put out a anniversary book to celebrate how long they've been around. In an interview, the two guys responsible for the comic are asked how they've kept up with a Monday, Wednesday, Friday comic schedule for over a decade. How does that deadline impact their work?

Both the writer and the artists are clear on the idea that the deadlines are necessary. The writer compares the deadlines to a beast that must be fed. He goes on to state that the deadlines make the comic. Without the deadlines, there would be no comic.

Similarly, I was talking to a physics friend a bit ago, and mentioned I was working towards a conference submission deadline. Her field doesn't have hard deadlines for papers, and she envied having a date at which you had to just say "It's done."

It works better if there's someone to hold you to that deadline. I've set deadlines on personal projects before, but with no one to call me on it or check, it just goes by without me meeting it.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a specific person, either -- just a public commitment. If you say "look for a new post on my blog every Monday," you'll feel pressure to deliver.

"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."

Most of the noise is generated by people who never ask themselves this question.

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.

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.

Obvious question... blog link? :-)

Seconded. I love to read about investing/trading and would definitely like to read blog by an individual who is producing original content.

"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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

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...

Here it is: http://joshpearce.posterous.com/children-have-bad-business-s...

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

Make a case for a policy change to the person in charge.

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.

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?

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.

Few people are able to blog and then _not_ worry about who's reading it and who isn't, why there aren't any comments or there are some hostile/stupid ones, etc. etc. This can become a major source of distraction, and for some, obsession.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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

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