Ten years of professional blogging – what I’ve learned

What is the disadvantage of writing more of a shorter 'teaser' story on medium to funnel traffic to your blog?

Is that what you do with twitter and and reddit (funnel to medium)?

And this is on a no-name website not optimized for SEO at all. The SEO arms race has been going on so long that we've reached a point where, if you're a good writer, it's easier to follow Google's guidelines than try to cheat the system.

Medium and other blog sites are basically a guest blog, except you're not getting paid for placement. Google ranking is everything and posting on medium does nothing but hurt you gravely

Same here. Though I did not really end up getting 36k views just 10% of that. Before Hackernoon, my read count hovered around 300-400, though I would like to believe it will grow.

> Collecting email addresses is extremely easy. Design a pretty CTA image that links to your email sign up form. Bonus points if you'll create a free guide or some other giveaway. This makes Medium about 95-99% as effective at building an audience on a custom blog. The post mentioned above generated about 200 email signups over time, which is pretty good for free exposure I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

If possible, please expand on this. I have zero email marketing experience so really want to start something on that end. Any links/tutorials on building a CTA image and adding on a blog post will help.

I've always just kept a single blog but this coming year I'm experimenting with a new blog to see if it makes sense as something apart from my (mostly) tech-related blog.

My blog has month-long gaps. I have accepted that. It has a few popular pages which produce occasional spikes. Mostly, it is a long-form storage of my opinions, where I can refer people to.

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/blog_en.html

That's a new normal, I suppose. Definitely is for me as a reader.

These days I pretty much follow only one blog directly (Slate Star Codex). Everything else I get to through search, HN, meta-blogs (so-called "planets") and social media. Though when I find an interesting post, I often then check out the entire blog.

Just one data point, but I'm under impression this way of reading is common.

If you want to do this long-term, get your own domain and distribute your content elsewhere if needed. E.g. on medium you can post articles from your blog and it links back at the bottom if you think Medium is important for your audience, announce posts on Twitter, Facebook, have RSS feeds, ...: bring the information where the users are, but have the central source of it under your control. Pointing the domain at a service is fine, it enables you to move if there are issues.

My blog is quiescent right now (I discovered I'm an essayist rather than a "blogger"), but it goes back to 2000, albeit quite messily from the first platform conversion I did. No platform has been around that long. Goodness knows the platform where it started is long gone and forgotten by almost everyone.

1. You have much more control about how your words are presented on your own website. Got an interesting idea for a style? Know how to code some neat features for the site? Want to avoid ads or calls to donate or subscribe altogether? Go for it, you've got the power to do just that.

2. You're not under corporate control like you'd be on a 'platform' and can't be as easily bullied off the internet by angry scumbags in a social media lynch mob. Oh sure, it can still happen if you annoy people that much (see, a certain far right website that had trouble finding a host recently), but you're still more protected than on a service that cares only about saving its own reputation.

3. If you don't like the service, you can move elsewhere and keep the same URL, theme and content.

4. All money made via the site goes to you rather than a middleman.

5. And well, it's really closer to what the internet should be in general. We should be supporting people who setup their own sites and ventures, and who don't merely help walled gardens become more popular or dominant online.

Plenty of reasons really.

Ultimately though, I chose to run one on my own for the mere satisfaction of "owning" it. Maybe it's, uhhh, like how buying a house is thought to be a step up compared to renting an apartment? Something like that. There's also that feeling where I feel like I'm only half there if it's under a platform like Medium or Tumblr.

I admit the benefit of being on a network like those are bound to be helpful: if you're looking for them. Eitherway, I thought I could just cross-post things anyway if I ever wanted to.

I would not have been able to sell one of my blogs if I had used a platform like Medium or Tumblr.

I've also seen someone's blog get deleted on a different hosted platform without warning and no way to recover the deleted content. If you don't control your application, you are at the mercy of another, unknown person's decisions.

Titles can be written to be intriguing without being sensational or misrepresenting the content.

Also I think there is some implication that "clickbait" articles are either uselessly short, rehashed or outright stolen and exist purely for the ad impressions.

That said, I think some of Andrew Chen's titles are right on that knife's edge of sounding like stereotypical clickbait, despite his articles being too well thought out to be truly in that category.

1. "Titles are 80% of the work" describes how much effort he puts into the title, and how much he suggests.

2. "Titles are 80% of the value" describes how much value readers personally get from your work, regardless of whether they share it or not.

3. "Titles are 80% of the signal that determines whether a blog post is shared on social media" describes how much they drive sharing, and suggests that a good title is worthy of a non-trivial amount of thought.

I personally feel he was trying to say #3, and definitely not trying to say #2. But he literally wrote #1, and somebody might be deluded into reasoning as follows:

If you ought to spend 80% of your time on the title, and if it's responsible for 80% of the sharing, and all you care about is sharing, then it follows naturally that you want to put 80% of your time into it (#1), and that since you only put 20% of your time into the content, and since it only contributes 20% to whether you get ephemerally famous, it needn't provide more than 20% value to the reader (#2).

But despite that, I feel he was trying to say #3 only.

Ironically, the title of that post is the very click-baity "How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step".

More to the point, that post was written so long ago that it nearly pre-dates Twitter and Facebook. It preceded the shuttering of Google Reader by six years. Jeff has great writing advice for sure, but the way that content travels online has changed drastically.

Does that excuse writing click bait titles? No. But the author wasn't advocating doing that.

I think naming things is hard... at least that's my take on it.

I often find that a variable/function/class that is harder to name than to use or implement while programming. I expect the issue would be a little more prevalent in writing. You want something short, not click-baity, memorable and with the right connotation. I could see that taking more effort than writing the post.

When putting an idea in words, the less words you use, the more effort it takes.

I often write a placeholder title, write the essay, and then at the very end, spend a good chunk of time iterating on titles until there’s a good one.

It isn't uncommon for me to handle blog posts that way as well, or even paid freelance articles if no title was provided. You put in a title that suggests what you are talking about, then you write the piece, then you try to figure out what the most important detail is or the most compelling hook or the shortest way to make the essential point.

Writing good titles is quite hard and good titles often grow out of the piece after it is written. You get to the end and you have written multiple paragraphs to give a good lead up and then your final paragraph draws a conclusion in a way you didn't have in mind when you started. And therein lies clues to a good title.

I fairly often pull ideas for a title from the last paragraph or two of a blog post. And I usually don't know what that last paragraph will be until I have written the entire piece.

If the goal of your blog is purely to establish yourself as some authority on topic(s), do you then have to build audience numbers like he has? Is it common for a lot of people doing this to also do talks at conferences, etc?

If your goal is to monetize the blog, then I think his points matter. Titles matter, attracting readers matter, establishing an email list matters. However if you just want to share opinions and ideas or work you did I don't think a lot of his points matter.

Secondly, in reference to the story you are commenting about, she says in the thread that she always consumes her feed until she sees repeats. Not to mention that she says none of the people in that social circle saw the post. At some point, if Facebook is pushing something down that many spots, it is the same as never showing it. Everyone's attention span is limited.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html