What I learned from a month of blogging and 250k visits
blog.thestartuptoolkit.com
blog.thestartuptoolkit.com
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.
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."
There's "blogging" -- writing on the web for marketing purposes, and "blogging" using the web as a daily journal.
My personal blog is my journal. Whether you care or not about the topics I write about does not concern me in the least. I've been blogging for several years and get 10-50K visits a month and rank on all kinds of weird and odd keywords. Yes, it's totally awesome when I am passionate about something that lots of HNers will find interesting. There's nothing like seeing 20K visits. But if I'm just journaling for eyeballs, I am not doing anything but trying to make a more and more popular noise.
On the flip side, I love writing targeted material: I have several sites where I post niche pieces. Want to see my funny picture collection? I'm posting them all on http://caption-of-the-day.com But I don't think of these in the same way as my blog. The things you describe are all about blog/marketing, not blog/journaling.
I would say that I admire people who can write tons of tightly-focused material every day. But it strikes me as being a bit unnatural, at least to me, like writing an encyclopedia by starting with "A" and writing straight through. My brain doesn't work that way. Sure, visiting the site it's great to have it all and nicely on-topic, with a little email sign-up, an ebook, landing page and the rest of it. But that's not journaling, that's marketing.
If my goal is to write something people want, I'm marketing. If my goal is to write something that helps me think, I'm journaling. Marketing is great -- lots of awesome things to share. In my mind journaling is better -- helps me be a better person so that I can help folks better. So when I read "blog", I'm not thinking of the web-personality who is the expert and writes everything you wanted to know about underwater basket weaving.
I don't want folks to think the primary purpose of writing is to market something. That's bad. Very bad.
I see a ton of blogs that are conflations of journal and subject-matter-blog: neither fish nor fowl. And that's where things go wrong, IMO. In many cases it's a fine line to toe, but the blogs I've stopped following are the blogs that don't seem to have a consistent leaning in either direction.
"I don't want folks to think the primary purpose of writing is to market something. That's bad. Very bad."
It doesn't have to be bad, so long as the author of the blog is forthright with his intentions. A lot of company blogs fall into this category. Many of them are trying to sell product, albeit indirectly. I know that's what they're doing, and I'm fine with it.
To your point, I wouldn't be fine with someone who's ostensibly journaling but keeps trying to sell goods or services. Or with someone who's simply content-farming in an attempt to capture eyeballs and monetize them via ads. There needs to be an honesty and transparency of intentions, one way or the other.
I found I couldn't do it. I could either tightly focus -- and lose interest in writing -- or write what I wanted -- and write solely for me.
My old job is consulting, so I have a fair amount of consulting material on my blog. I'm wrapping up some of it into an ebook. But I wouldn't use the blog to promote the ebook, at least not directly. It's just not targeted for that. Instead, I'll probably set up a micro-site for ebook and crank out a couple of dozen high-quality resource articles.
I actually love writing targeted articles as well, but I just can't maintain the energy level for more than a few weeks. What can I say? Stuff bores me easily.
I got an answer alright: it's in my ebook
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.
Certain blog posts of mine have made several hundred dollars. I refuse to believe that I'm the only one.
Edit: I'm talking about blog posts written in the last five or six months, just to clarify.
I know this sounds like a "you can too" commercial but I actually did. I posted it on text-link-ads.com and sold a load of text-link ads (i.e. google juice) at the bottom of the page. From that more marketers discovered me and then bought ads direct on a year upfront basis.
The amount paid ranged from about $20/month (of which I'd see half) with TLA to $100/month (I kid you not) for direct sales. It's whittled down to nothing now but it worked out about $10k or so of revenue over the two or three years after I finished blogging which wasn't too shabby.
Obviously Google could wake up one day and kill you for it but since I didn't have any audience I also wasn't bothered by that.
(Great button btw Rob :)
And yes, they've also realized that all those subscribers are good for more than just ads, so they're upselling them books and videos and seminars and whatever else.
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.
My only advice is - dont let it go to your head. Keep writing. Keep thinking. Keep hustling.
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.