Take your experiences and your knowledge your distinct flavor and distill it into a potent package.
For an example, check out my essay currently on the front-page:
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259588
It also helps to "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere" (POSSE). This gives you a nice balance of freedom and control over your online identity.
[2] https://indieweb.org/POSSE
This essay provides great advice on finding things to write about:
[3] https://www.benkuhn.net/writing
# Second, be helpful (and opportunistic).
In order to be helpful, you must (1) know stuff and (2) share it.
To learn stuff, read voraciously and write obsessively.
To share things, be everywhere first. I have a bunch of keyword notifications to help people in my fields of expertise.
If you can't be there first, be there better. Hone skills that are difficult to ignore.
# Third, don't be annoying.
This takes finesse, and I'm personally still trying to find the balance.
People will signal to you when you're not wanted. Listen to those messages and cool down. Other people are generally not your problem.
Here's an example of how to be annoying:
Eventually, freelancers and marketing agencies liked my website and called it their home.. and I don't do any marketing for it anymore. They do all the work for me and I have the platform they need. Never paid for advertising or marketing for it. It's been an amazing 10 years... at least a dozen projects spawned from it. I have spoken to so many people from all over the world who have an article on there. Approaching 5,000 articles and counting. I'll probably keep it going until my last breath.
My website became my passion for what I was studying in college... didn't get a chance to pursue my psychology degree beyond a bachelors in science because I got into programming and web design and never left... so this kept me at least pursuing the interest of it.
There is already so much misinformation masqueraded as content today, offer your audience some value they can take away.
I try to share insights wherever I see it: philosophy, economics, movies, corporations, etc. Helps me train observation, writing and analysis skills: https://trendguardian.medium.com/
I also try to write high quality content, and about things I worked with or encountered-thus hitting relevant Google terms, which in turn brings me a little bit of organic traffic.
My blog: https://marcolabarile.me
I don't know if I would say "promote" but I post articles here (HN), twitter, and email my friends and family some times.
Good work.
for those of us who began forming memories as the berlin wall fell, it's been quite a ride -- it seemed, for this brief moment that we'd all kind of live in arcologies with solar powered desalination or something and instead... [tabs over to Al Jazeera] yikes!! russia are JERKs.
strive to be the ghost in the machine if you want to be a hacker.