Ask HN: How do people find your blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

58 pointsbumblewax53 comments

Hi HN,

I've seen a few posts encouraging people to start blogging or collect their TILs in the form of a blog. I find this to be a great idea, but if it's meant to be public, how would you approach the sharing of this information?

I don't love the idea of spamming social media with links just to get people to discover your blog, but maybe that's the best approach.

The other option I guess is to just post and let it be discovered, but would that ever happen organically in today's internet?

From the other end, as a reader, how do you keep track of interesting blogs? Is RSS still being used? Personally I've realized I read blog posts shared on social media or here on HN, which comes back to as a blogger you might have to spam your links to get traffic.

View on HN

My experience is if you write anything even semi-thoughtful, it usually shows up on HN eventually, through some invisible force that science has yet to identify. :)

Less tongue-in-cheek: the best blogs I read are those that the author just puts on the web with no expectation of "gaining an audience." They simply write about whatever resonates with them, things they want to share with the world. At the most, they _might_ link to their posts on social media.

Once you start doing SEO tricks, trying to sell people your newsletter, or start peddling an affiliate links program, my opinion is that you've crossed over into "content creator" territory, which is a derogatory slur in my book...

If your goal is to build an audience: focus on individual posts, not the blog as a whole. You don't need to spam links to your blog to drive traffic: I've written some blog posts that I have never shared anywhere but get a continual stream of traffic because they answer questions that people google. If you write a post that you think will be valuable to a specific audience (e.g: HN readers) then you can share it with confidence (you do not need to feel like you're spamming) but sharing every post you write just for the sake of it is pointless: focus instead on writing valuable things. After you've got a bunch of posts that are regularly being read you'll have the information you need to convert them into readers of your blog, e.g: if your most popular posts about AWS, you'll know that there's an opportunity there to produce more of those type of posts and build an audience.

Here's my blog: https://briancaffey.github.io/

I use use the POSSE method: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (https://indieweb.org/POSSE). I typically republish my articles on HN, Reddit, DEV, Medium, HashNode, Twitter, SubStack and HackerNoon. I also have an RSS/XML feed.

85.5% of my traffic is through organic search, 10% is direct, the rest is referral/social/email.

I get the most engagement when sharing articles on Reddit for most of my posts since I can target specific communities where people might be interested to read what I write.

I also have a small MailChimp newsletter where I write occasional updates on what I'm working on and start campaigns for my latest blog posts (once a month, ideally).

The blog uses Nuxt and the Nuxt content module. I have Google Analytics, Adsense, Drift integration which has resulted in some good connections with people. I also use the Google Search Console to learn about what people are searching for when they click on my articles.

Over the last 7 days I have had a little over 400 visitors. Last year I got a $103 payment from Google for Adsense ads.

Can you explain the thought process behind Google Ads on the site?

Despite my various ad blockers (Pihole, etc), I would generally view ads on a blog as setting a tone akin to microtransactions on a video game, rather than trying to build a brand or simply document thoughts/ be viewed as a thought leader.

Sure, I wrote one of my recent articles on this topic: https://briancaffey.github.io/2021/10/31/how-and-why-i-added.... I mostly treated Adsense as a learning experience.

I realize that most people who visit my site will use an ad blocker, so they won't see ads.

At one point I built an ad-block blocker (like you see on news websites), but doing that is sort of a cat-and-mouse exercise. It worked with some ad-blockers, but not others, so I disabled it. It also seemed to really bother people! I got lots of nasty chat messages through my Drift integration.

It is also an incentive for me to write articles that get a big audience.

Your post on this topic looks very good :)

https://briancaffey.github.io/2021/10/02/how-i-write-and-sha...

Post at https://briancaffey.github.io/2021/10/02/how-i-write-and-sha... is gold

  >How do people find your blog?

Generally soeaking, they don't. I've just checked and my blog has been running since 2004 and I still get very little traffic.

Mind you, I just write about things that tickle my fancy or which annoy me. So I've definitely not got a 'target demographic' --unless there's some othe poor sods out there with the same eclectic interest as me.

Mainly I just write my blog because I like writing and I like using language. So it's more just scratching a personal itch than anything intended to draw a lot of traffic. For me, writing occasional blog posts is the literary counterpart of doodling in my sketchbooks [which I've also been doing since forever].

I don't have any stats-gathering software running on my blog. So I don't even know how many visitors I get. The only way I can ascertain there are any at all is from occasional comments being posted. Ironically, jusdging by this metric, my most popular articles seem to be fairly run of the mill 'how-tos' rather than the ones I'm most pleased with, from a 'quality of my writing' point of view.

I started blogging in early 1998. Originally my goal was recording what I did so when it went wrong I could describe what I had done when seeking help. Now I write so I document want I did so I can do it again when I need to repeat it. That 'what did I do wrong'-aspect is there there and still heavily used.

How do people find me? Search engines I think. Many times I have encountered an obscure error message, searched for it on the webs, and found it documented in my own blog post.

Write what you're doing and how you're doing. Document the errors and the solutions for that error. Don't restrict your blog post to a list of steps. Things can and will go wrong. Document them too.

I read the mailing lists looking for answers and from time to time I would see someone had asked a question which I knew the answer. I would post the link to my blog post.

Start off by documenting everything you do as you do it. When you're replacing old SSDs with new and faster SSDs, write about that. Document each step. Someone else will be grateful that you did. Likely, that person will be you when you do to do it again a few years later.

One of my most popular blog posts is how to untar a tarball.... Do not underestimate what others will find useful.

How people find my blog?

They don’t (:

I still find it useful to write. Helps me to improve my writing skills – or at least prevents my writing skills to deteriorate.

PS. I think the reason I keep a website is that I like this ‘digital garden’ ethos. My own little turf which I can tend to and see what becomes of it.

If you haven’t encountered this concept before, this is a decent starting point: https://salman.io/notes/digital-gardens/

>I don't love the idea of spamming social media with links just to get people to discover your blog, but maybe that's the best approach.

It's encouraged on

* https://searchmysite.net/

* https://wiby.me/

* https://feedle.world/

I only write for myself, so I've got nothing in the way of efforts to be found.

As for blogs I want to follow, I'm using inoreader, it's good at following RSS as well as regular blogs without syndication.

People will follow you if they find most of your content useful or interesting, and it's much easier to make your content useful initially and experiment to find the interesting stuff.

My most popular articles are very simple ones answering common questions. Those kind of posts are pretty easy to make and seem to have continued traffic with no effort. It's mostly search engine traffic and then a bunch of company wikis that must be linking to some of my guides.

If you want to go hard you on audience building you probably want a good 60-40% of your content to clearly deliver value to the reader. Large how-to guides are good here, especially if you focus on a specific technology set.

The rest of your posts can be the more opinion pieces that you experiment with over time and refine. That gives people an easy pathway into your blog via search engines and plenty of content to explore once they get there.

I've blogged for going on 16 years. I seek an audience, people who want to keep reading what I wrote, rather than virality. I write about a couple of niche topics plus personal essays and stories. The long tail of the Internet brings a fair number of readers and a small number of them stay. Sharing on social media brings most readers, and a larger percentage of them stay. It's really very much bringing on one new audience member at a time. I'm on track for 280,000 pageviews this year. My blog gets good engagement from readers with a fair number of comments on each post, which is what makes it rewarding and worth keeping going. blog.jimgrey.net if you're curious.

Blog traffic is pretty hard to get in the modern internet. Even popular blogs have stagnated to posting only on insta/yt becausee of the instant eyeballs and revenue. In the end it all comes down to how many other sites link to your content.

I started a technical/tutorial Rails blog (codewithrails.com) about a month ago. I’ve mostly just shared links in places where Rubyists and Rails dev hang out.

For content, I mainly blog because it’s a useful way for me to understand things. If I can explain it, I’ll have a better understanding.

Whether people find it useful, well that’s a personal question and point of view. But I’ll continue to share what I’ve learned myself both for the community and as notes for my future forgetful self.

So far, people have been discovering my blog through word of mouth and them sharing it to their friends.

How do you share your links without looking like a spammer?

I think you will need to apply an internal litmus test. For me, I ask myself whether what I’ve written and shared would be something I’d want to read myself.

I write a blog that at its peak it had a not-huge-but-not-small-either userbase, and a massive TIL.

Blog and TIL are two radically different things.

I write the TIL for myself, and it's open, but it's pretty much useless to anybody else. This is because TILs reflect the writer's mental structure, which is very individual; the topic has been discussed on HN before.

Regarding the blog, I didn't/don't publicize it at all, but it actually got noticed by some BigCo.

It's important to ask oneself what's the purpose of having it discovered. Fame and glory :)? Career? And/or just helping people?

In the case of my blog, I didn't care about it being discovered. However, it did help people; if one cares about writing quality posts, people will find it and use it as reference, in a virtuous cycle, although there is a limit - blog do "age" with time, even if some articles stay popular.

The discoverability will be based on the fact that the most popular (useful) posts will be used as reference over the web.

If the target is being popular for the sake of being popular... well, then one gets into the SEO topic. I don't personally advise this, but to each their own :)

Having a popular (or so) blog doesn't necessarily help with the career. It can help as part of a portfolio, but prospective employers will either ignore it, or take just a peek, unless they know it already - in that case, it's definitely a big help.

* I have a (very) low traffic blog [0]

It is indexed by most search engines and alas by SEO companies. They sometimes index my site several times a day, yet there are only 200 to 500 real users per day (verified with Google, Apache's logs and Cloudflare). I use Google [2] and Bing console webmaster tools (which results sometimes in a lot of work because Google has weird requests). It is probably a waste of time for a low traffic blog but as I use my own code, I don't want to make mistakes. I have 500 to 900 clicks per month on Google.

The best thing I find for traffic is to insert my blog URL in my signature when I post on very specific websites. (see @dazc comment).

* One on my daughters has a small shop selling weighted blankets for France and possibly western Europe. She has also ~400 visitors per day, does not care of any form of SEO (even low hanging fruits), but once per week she makes a Twitter post [3] about her cat which is also her site's mascot.

[0] https://padiracinnovation.org/News/

[1] https://sistercatblankets.com

[2] https://search.google.com/search-console

[3] https://twitter.com/SCBlankets/status/1598316934528991233

Devon Nash has great videos on YouTube that go in depth into this.

1. Use a 10 to 1 ratio of producing good content and promoting your own (for example 10 good posts in the technology subreddit, and one which is an article from your technology blog)

2. Zero to One principle. Write thoughtful comments in areas were people who would be interested hang out. Subreddits, Twitter Circles, HN etc. People will click on your profile and see links to your other content and check it out. Commit to a few of these in the spaces you choose every day

3. Produce good quality content for a long time. If it's evergreen content, it will just become more valuable to people who discover you, and they will become more likely to stick

4. Utilize social media. But don't just spam a link to your blog post. Chop it up into chunks and syndicate it. If you wrote a long blog post summarize key points in a tweet. Highlight one aspect on Tik Tok or YouTube in a video or short

5. Ask yourself, "How am I different from other people who blog in this space?", "What is my value proposition

Point 3 and 5 are worth highlighting again. Produce good content consistently for a long time, and focus on why your readers will find the content you create valuable. In the beginning don't spread yourself too thin. Maybe just work on posting good blog posts. Once you get a good handle on that you can start branching out to other platforms. I've basically summarized the points in this^1 YouTube video, but it's still worth watching

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CECW-nko-gY

'The other option I guess is to just post and let it be discovered, but would that ever happen organically in today's internet?'

The reason a lot of blogs don't surface much via organic search is because they don't focus on one single topic. It's hard to be an authority on random thoughts or ramblings unless you are already well known.

Start with a niche and then if/when you gain traction you can expand into other areas.

I mostly write for myself, but occasionally a discussion with a friend or colleague will come up and I'll say "hey, I wrote a blog post about this" and share the link with them.

I did have one case where a job interview skipped a step because "we read your blog and it sounds like you know what you're talking about," so I guess it can kind of act like a portfolio if you link to it on your CV, but otherwise I can't be bothered to promote it.

As for finding content, generally my strategy is to follow hyperlinks on blog posts to other blog posts and bookmark things that interest me like it's still the 90's. Sometimes I don't remember a blog post's title, but I'll remember the title of the one three clicks ago that I bookmarked, and that's how I'll find it again. There's something oddly rewarding about rediscovering some far corner of the world wide web that you'd never get to otherwise, as if the amount of work it took to find is somehow proportional to the value you get from reading it.

I think you first have to answer the question about why you want to blog in the first place. Do you want to get revenue from it? Do you want to share your knowledge with others? Do you want to signal about how skilled/smart you are? Do you want to build an archive as a memory for your future self?

Then, after answering this question, ask yourself - is blogging the best way to achieve the goal? This is what led me to delete the small blog I had and concentrate on better things.

With regards to how you find other interesting things to read - nowadays mostly by marginalia search [1]. I've found that I rarely want to read more than one or few posts from a specific blog. Most blogs are not narrow enough and you find a lot of different subjects covered. So it might be better to specifically look for things you are interested in, rather than follow all articles in a blog by a concrete author.

[1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/

I do nothing for my site besides just write about stuff I'm thinking about. I do try to keep it simple and fast-loading. Google searches sometimes turn up things I write. I guess I'm not going for much more than that! I'm a huge fan of RSS, and plan to write about my efforts getting Tiddlywiki (my site generator) to generate valid RSS feeds, but that work isn't complete yet.

As a reader, I continue to use RSS (self-hosted FreshRSS instance), which is great for tracking other blogs as well as Mastodon feeds. This has been great over the past week, since so many interesting folks are joining Mastodon.

EDIT: To your last point, anything I write that shows up submitted on social media (including HN) is posted by others...I don't tend to post stuff myself.

Do something new, write about it and invest some time. And do this as frequently as possible. Don't do it for clicks but for yourself. Best case is doing something long lasting / educational, that is still interesting in several years - even if technology has advanced. I try to see my personal blog[1] as way to keep my notes organised.

Nobody cares about Powerbank 2021 reviews or yet another "how to flash a raspi os image on an sd card" - except it contains something new or something not everybody does.

Examples:

- Not interesting (old content): The Top 5 Powerbanks 2021

- Interesting: Building a DIY 100W PD Powerbank[2]

- Not interesting (everybody does it): Copy raspi os to micro SD cards with dd

- Interesting: Copy raspi os to micro SD cards with cp and how Linux deals with files[3]

[1]: https://pilabor.com

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WI9Nwqvplo

[3]: `sudo cp raspi-os.img /dev/sda`

The 3 elements of a successful blog are writing, technical and marketing: to first order they are the same amount of work.

A realistic plan for writing is to write an article a week for 52 weeks.

You can outsource the technical bit to medium or silverback, or you can hack together a static site generator, or install Wordpress or write your own blog software and no matter what have a fight with comment spammers, troubles with indexing, etc.

A book or movie or music publisher spends a lot in marketing to promote its product and you need to also for the same reasons. This could be paid marketing but it's hard for that to be cost effective for a blog. You need to create about 20-50 links for each new blog post, the power of blogs for SEO is that each blog post is a new page that can accumulate links. Posts to social media, comments on blogs, a synopsis of your blog post on LinkedIn, posts on web forums, wikis, etc.

> * You need to create about 20-50 links for each new blog post*

It looks like a full time job, doesn't this kill the pleasure to create something very personal?

20 links is 4 links a day for 5 days a week, not quite a full time job.

It is more work that most people want to do.

I know somebody who was using Medium who was really impressed that he got 70 views on something he wroter. I found it hard to break it to him that I would have been impressed if I'd gotten got 70,000 views on a blog post -- and that's the difference between the easy way and the hard way.

Thanks,

IMO a more effective way is to offer users a chance to post links on their social network. If they are satisfied, the chances of others liking the position will be much higher. Once I got 22,000 views on a post without any effort (this hasn't happened another time).

People generally discover my blog via LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, Lobsters and Hacker News. I personally have no idea how big the following for my blog is and I really don't care to know. If you keep writing consistently you end up getting more domain authority and people will find you more easily on search engines. If your only goal is to make number go up, then you will have to chain-spam things. I think I have found a way to avoid having to do that by having my blog automatically post to Mastodon when I make a new post.

My RSS feed is most of my egress bandwidth to the point that I'm considering putting my RSS feed into my CDN to speed things up.

Uhhh, I am just now writing a blog post “Blogging in 2023”, and it's a personal reflection on why I blog on my domain instead of using a social network.

And my personal answer is: I blog for myself, and knowing that things will be public forever force myself focusing more.

I write mainly about technical stuff that annoys me, or solution to problems I faced and didn't find a solution on the internet.

Sometimes people write me an email asking for some clarification, and my supposition is that people find my blog 'cause they have the same niche problem.

About following other blogs: RSS or mailing list subscriptions. I use hacker news to find interesting blogs.

If your blog is noncommercial, it's not spamming to crosspost new blog items to social media.

My blog gets posted to HN sometimes by people who aren't me, and sometimes by me (when I post something I think is important for HN to read in a timely fashion). I also have a mailing list that people sign up for on my website, and I mail it a few times per year (although I hate taking up people's time so right now I usually mail about 0.5 times per year).

Also, why worry about "getting traffic"? Just write; let readers worry about discoverability. If it's good, people will find it.

Link aggregation and social media, followed by RSS, followed by word of mouth, followed by search engine results. At least, that’s my rough impression based on my request log and the number of people who recognize my blog when I meet them IRL.

I agree with your estimation that you need to share links as a blogger to get traffic, but I don’t think it’s necessarily spamming unless (1) you’re intentionally putting out blogspam, or (2) you’re spamming sites/forums that you know aren’t appropriate venues but will read your posts anyways (e.g., flamebait).

To be honest I'm not sure, since I removed Google Analytics from my blog a few months ago and didn't bother replacing it with anything else. I do link to my blog from my few social media profiles, but in general I kind of just go with the "post and let it be discovered" thing. This is mostly because I use it as a public journal of sorts rather than something I want to drive a big audience for.

If you (or someone in this thread) like self-hosted Docker stuff, I've been using FreshRSS [0] and TinyTinyRSS [1] (former is more visually modern, latter is a bit more deeper in functionality).

[0] https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS

[1] https://tt-rss.org/

As a writer, I have feeds for my Common Lisp and Emacs posts on Planet Lisp and Planet Emacs respectively. I'm hoping to improve visibility on Twitter, which I started using recently.

As a reader, I mostly rely on Planet aggregators. I am thinking about starting to use Elfeed on Emacs to track blogs. But a large number of them do not include full articles in feeds, which is quite annoying.

Content is still king. Well written and unique content on a fast and user friendly site will find its way to the top of search results, even if nobody links to your page.

Spamming social media is a waste of time, unless you become an expert in social media - and in that case your content will be on social media and not on your blog.

Why do you want many people to read your blog?

For me, the answer is: years after I wrote it, and they will comment or email me and ask for help on something I wrote once for fun then discarded :) I try to help, but it's often hard.

Best thing is to write for your own satisfaction, share links to HN now and then if you write something you think is interesting - you'll pick up a few readers and get some interesting interactions.

> Is RSS still being used?

I am also curious. I've enjoyed Outlook 365 RSS reader for a long time but I just cancelled my subscription. Currently navigating through Thunderbird.

Related: [Ask HN: Do you maintain a list of RSS links of GOAT blogs?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140)

I have a large collection of feeds. I find them from HN submissions and also from interesting commenters that have their website in the profile.

I also find feeds on social media.

You can get a pretty good set of feeds by searching HN for stuff like "ask hn" "favorite blogs"

I don’t know. I also don’t care to know. I blog so I have a reference I control to point to, to share pictures, and generally to have a central online place for my life I can share directly with people. If nobody else even knows it exists, that’s just fine by me.

I think private blogs is the future.

Too much saturation nowadays, not to mention LLM content generation.

Lastly, there are an exaggerated number of thieves. It's just not worth it to post publicly right now if your intention is to make money from blogging.

Google, Hacker News (https://seliger.com/blog), Twitter, people emailing each other, etc.

As a reader, I use NetNewsWire and RSS.

1. Post something real useful. No selling or blogspam

2. Share on a subreddit that doesn’t mind getting link posts to useful stuff.

My submissions to HN became marked dead due to submitting my things too much. I triggered the self promotion filter.

So be careful.

Hopefully they don't, good things must be hidden in this era of ours.

Aaaand here's the one person on this thread who's blog I might actually want to read ;)

- Identify your goals. Are you blogging for extra income? Do you want to connect with a specific kind of reader, and grow a like-minded community? Do you want to be the best resource on the internet for a subject you love? Are you trying to get a new job? Will you write a book about this subject someday? Your goals inform how you'll promote your content.

- Write THE authoritative post on a subject you are deeply passionate about. For me, this is "tiny machine learning," especially computer vision for single-board computers. A few of my posts are keyword-authoritative for "Raspberry Pi TensorFlow."

patio11's salary negotiation post is a great example of an authoritative post. I've been linking my team-mates to this blog post 2x times a year since it was published, during raise/perf seasons. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

- Publish on a consistent schedule. I struggle with this one, but every successful blog I know posts at least weekly. You'll have more hits the more times you step up to the plate.

- Publish via multiple channels. I run a self-hosted Ghost blog & newsletter, and use Zapier to cross-post to medium.com. Make sure you provide a canonical URL, which tells search engines that your blog is the original source.

- Submit guest posts to a popular publication (again, use a canonical link back to your primary domain)

Example: https://medium.com/towards-data-science/3-ways-to-install-te...

If you inspect the HTML source, you'll see a rel="canonical" link element with href="https://www.bitsy.ai/3-ways-to-install-tensorflow-on-raspber..." telling search engines to index my original post.

- Social media audience. I only have around 2k followers on Twitter, but that generates around 90k impressions each month. My 2023 goal is to write for my LinkedIn network too, which has grown to 1k+ connections.

Posting articles on your main social feed can be effective, but what's more effective is to reply to other people's Twitter threads. Build a library of authoritative posts about something specific, like how to write a Gstreamer plugin in Rust. When you can genuinely add value to a conversation, I think it's ok to mention that you wrote about ____ in Twitter replies. If you don't have a blog post already written, you can write an outline on the spot using Twitter. If the cliff notes version gets positive feedback, you can write the full thing.

before HN, i just used to post something and google would magically index it and a ton of people would pour in suddenly one day.

I always wanted to start and write on my blog - just to share some things that other may find useful.

I started with something simple - entirely preloaded (all howtos) and static:

1. http://www.strony.toya.net.pl/~vermaden/links.htm

I assume no one ever entered it ... besides me of course.

Then some time later - I though that having that 'static' links site is pointless - lets start 'proper' blog this time. I have chosen Gogle Blogspot this time.

2. https://vermaden.blogspot.com/

... and after several posts I generally abandoned it.

Several years later I made a decision to make another blog ... but this time with some strategy behind.

3. https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

This (3rd) attempt was 'successful' and people sometimes actually visit my blog - sometimes even comment. In March of 2023 I will 'celebrate' the 5th year of that blog. I have made about 100 posts there and I made about 100,000+ views per year:

- https://i.imgur.com/raWvrZj.png

What is the secret of [3.] being successful and [1.] and [2.] definitely not? Sharing.

I do not know what blog (subject matter) you are trying to share - but for IT/UNIX/BSD/Linux related blogs (as mine) you need to share each post on these mediums:

- mastodon

- twitter

- lobsters

- hacker news

- FreeBSD forums

- reddit (r/BSD)

- reddit (r/FreeBSD)

- reddit (r/unix)

- reddit (r/linux)

- linkedin

Not sure about Facebook/Meta as their 'ecosystem' definitely does not suit my needs.

You need to ask yourself where and how people would try to find your content. They would definitely not browse a catalog of blogs. Maybe they wil ltry the search engine ... but search engines only pick up sites that are somewhat popular. They omit pages/blogs that are 'unknown'. How blogs are known? By many links pointing to them.

In other words - if you do not share your work/posts on all 'relevant' platforms - then you will 'die' in a 'non-known' hell.

If you believe your work - and it is work, you 'waste' your time to write/share these things you do - is valuable - then share them in all possible mediums/medias. If your content is good - you have to do nothing else. If your content is crap - You will immediately get feedback about it :D

One of the things that I really appreciate was the feedback I got. I often assumed that I know a lot about 'X' topic - just to change my mind after several comments later and providing and UPDATE to my blog post :)

I do not know what should I add here more so I will end my comment - but feel free to ask if You have any questions.

Regards, vermaden

Just be shameless, that's how Terry Davis did it.

My blog is lirorc.github.io :)

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