Ask HN: How do you market your blog/articles
Dear HN
What are some best ways to market your blogpost to the right audience and gain visibility
It is about investing in stocks but with a venture capital mindset (my background is in tech and vc)
For me the audience seems to come in waves because right now I work full time and I haven't focused on marketing much.
but here is what has worked for me so far:
1) write high quality content (i think it's better to write fewer articles but more high quality). This is your best marketing.
2) To start off, tell your family, friends, and co-workers about it - I find them to be supportive and will sign up if you ask, but frankly only the ones interested in the subject matter will actually regularly read the emails. That said, they will give you real feedback.
3) Interest based groups like fb groups can help sometimes
4) twitter - when i participate in the conversation regularly, this can help a lot actually.
5) Rmr what I said about high quality content - Some people actually contacted me about my SS and wanted to talk on the phone/zoom etc. They usually shared the site with their friends/audience after our conversation. One linked me from their blog which drove a lot of traffic. I think this is a great way if you can make it happen.
Overall, I find I have a good sign up rate from folks interested in investing + innovation, and people interested in investing with options.
If you're interested, check it out:
http://playingfordoubles.substack.com/
Anyway good luck!
- I joined all of the relevant Facebook Groups. Maybe 25% of the ones I joined were worth staying in.
- I added thousands of people doing cool stuff in the same space
- I optimized my Facebook profile to get link clicks to my blog
- I created an in-content CTA to download a template
- And a bottom bar that promoted my Facebook Group
The more I add value in relevant groups and on my own profile, the more of my target audience investigates who I am, sees my FB profile CTA, click my link, get on my email list and join my Facebook Group.
Then all these people engage with my new content.
For the time being, marketing my blog has been through friends and family members.
I also get views straight from google. I think the title of a post sometimes brings more organic views from google.
For me right now, my goal is to output great content to the world. Great content comes from an intersection of reading a lot, observing the world and interacting with the world.
If anyone is interested, check it out. https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/
I have an older post on Medium related to Django migrations that seems to get passed around on Reddit. If newer posts are relevant, I will occasionally post them to sub-Reddits.
Have about 159 free subscribers + 10 paid.
I just write. Then, I post it here + subreddits. Sometimes, it got noticed (or not).
Surprisingly, I see much traffic from Google.
I have from 1k to 10k views within the first 24 hours. Nothing huge so far.
How to sell your work when all you know is a backend.
I read a while back, years ago, that you need something like 100 blog articles, before your site reaches critical mass, and where you can make some decent advertising revenue.
There was a blog website that just talked about things like space launches, and stories about outer space. It only published like 3 blogs a week. And most of the articles were rehashes of what Reuters published, so it wasn’t anything really insightful or investigative. It was just some random person’s individual opinion on the matter.
And it was pulling in something like $250,000 to $400,000 USD or so, annually. This is not significant for a business of course, but it might be enough to sustain one person, maybe two. And possibly gain yourself financial independence.