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Comment by Damogran6 | Hacker News Reader

It's not the Blog I have a problem with, it's building the audience. I suck at self promotion, and my soap-box isn't close enough to a steady stream of passers-by.

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Adjust your goal from "Build An Audience" to "Publishing stuff I myself would want to read if it existed" and the audience will find you eventually, as long as you follow POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE) and have genuine posts.

any idea how good the tooling mentioned there is? its the key to successfully applying this strategy, the best way would be to have it as a part of your blogging software/platform of choice and just working. because no one wants to do the monkey work of reposting everywhere

Automated cross-posting is pretty well-trod territory.

Not sure you need a lot of tooling unless you publish many articles per week. If you're just doing one article per month, linking them (not reposting, but sharing a link: "syndication") on 5-6 platforms would take you a couple of minutes at most.

Why do you need to self-promote? You don't need to build an audience. Write for you, not for anyone else.

That's just muttering to myself with extra steps. :D

There's value in muttering to yourself in a way that means you can revisit those mutterings one day!

If I'm writing for just myself, I could save myself the trouble & just not post. If you were just writing for yourself, you wouldn't have commented here (and neither would I have).

Because that typically doesn't pay the bills unless you are both talented and fortunate enough to get noticed. Creativity takes time and effort and pouring it into a silent void void is demoralizing for most people.

My approach to blogging comes down to the following principles:

1) Make the content I would like to see more of on the Internet, for its own sake.

2) I think my interests are really cool, a few others on the planet may also think so and find benefit.

3) My blog is a public notebook. So why post publicly? It forces me to organize my thoughts in keeping with the principle that “if you can’t teach it to another, you don’t know it.”

4) The narrow focus will never make me rich or famous so my blog isn’t confused with a job - it’s just a replacement for a lack of a local community that cares as much as I do about something.

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