Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder?

Maybe it's the niches. What was your old blog about compared to the new ones?

Also, the sheer amount of material you have to compete with for people's attention is insane these days.

I also wonder if most people still read long articles. Do people prefer video or podcasts over lengthy articles?

My personal view is that people are not used to read blogs anymore, everything has moved to few big social networks. Medium is popular too, but it's more of a HN bubble thing.

People share and like things on social media for their headlines or agenda.

While I'm crying the blogs are dying out, I have noticed myself checking and finding new ones less and less too, despite having HN as my only social media.

To me, there are just more and more content posted out there. So yes, blogging has become a lot harder. To stand out, your content must not only be of great quality but also be shared and promoted by your readers.

If your retention is low, I advise you to create a subscriber list, if not done already.

Put your blog on on .onion address on the tor network. I get far more traffic from within tor to my hidden service than the exact same copy of the site on run on the clear web.

As another commenter has said, people don't bother with blogs anymore. Seems that Facebook pages are the way to go for engagement. Instagram too, if your content works for the medium. I think Twitter is good for some niches, but its popularity wildly varies by country.

Dramatically sad as you can't get more walled garden than that, but that is the future we built.

I don't really think there is any trick to it, but the maturity of a blog is what helps. Even after years of being exposed and publicizing your blog, most people still have no idea that you exist. Imagine all of the people who know that Facebook exist. 1 billion people, at least. Instagram has at least 100 million people. That is A LOT of people. Now how many people know you exist? Likely less than 1% of the Facebook OR the Internet. I always like to stare at this map: http://internet-map.net/

It reminds me of how vast the Internet is and how insignificant my website is. Kind of like looking at Earth, compared to the universe. Yet, the visitors I do get, that happen to come across my website? They were looking for me or accidentally discovered me and most of them are usually happy they found me. I get those emails that let me know they are grateful they are to have found my website, or some article that helped them get a job, or just reading an article made them want to write and submit their own article to my website.

I've been running a website (http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com) for several years now and I'd say its fairly popular. It is a niche which focuses on jobs, careers, and the workplace. In the beginning, I used to just post everything myself, but it became near impossible to keep coming up with topics, though the topics in this niche are so vast and cover just about anything and everything pertaining to a job.

I remember when my visitor base just consisted of my mom and my girlfriend. 35 visitors was the highlight of my day. Years later, the website is receiving about a thousand people a day and it varies, less or more, at times depending on the month, season, or trends of unemployment or if a certain article is just popular that month or a keyword or phrase just hits what people are looking for, or if Google just happens to change their algorithm to favor my website for that week or month. I have had a few companies submit articles and take out their own Facebook ads to drive traffic to it (their own article). Many factors can play a role in driving traffic to the website and other than what I can learn from the few analytics scripts I have installed, I just accept whatever traffic I get and I am grateful for any traffic. The website has been penalized at least twice, the latter just a few months ago, and without Google, traffic was cut in half (based on a 2-week penalty).

I think just a month after opening up the blog and welcoming posts by others, in essence, creating a community, and it grew in popularity, mostly because when you offer to publish articles for people, they tend to share it as well. Repeat visitors and new authors, the traffic just keeps coming. But it also technically remains as a steady flow. I don't have the resources or money to spend on social media interacting with fans, so I really just rely on my contributors and readers to do the work with a few automated scripts that randomly choose an article every couple of hours and post it to Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn.

I have learned over the years: just keep writing. Google will help you get found eventually. There are articles I wrote years ago that only received a few hundred visitors when first published, yet you can get one day where it happens to go viral. I went in for an interview once and it was so awful that I decided to write about it. It was just the way this woman shook my hand! I could not stop thinking about it that it probably ruined my own interview for me. ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/power-of-the-hand... ) In the beginning, it might have had only 300 visitors or so, but then one day, the article went viral! It was probably one person posting it on Reddit or som...

I've been wondering about this as well. I just started out blogging (just a personal blog with a ton of opinions and software stuff) and have no idea if it gets an audience or not . I don't really care if I do, besides the feeling that if I look at the stats, it equals talking to a wall sometimes.

My blog also doesn't get too much attention. And it was always like that. I was writing in a couple of places, a couple of my blogs, and on a corporate blog. My most successful blog post had about 10k of visitors across the first year.

I also noticed that the average session time is about 2 minutes, sometimes is just too short to read through a blog post. So I assume that people come there just to get a solution to a problem they have, not to read through all the text.

Another thing is that over 70% of my blog entries are from two posts, a tutorial like ones. And this is only because someone found them informative enough to place a link on stackoverflow, and some other places.

At the very beginning I wanted to earn on the blog enough to work only on the blog. In reality that's impossible for a technical blog, and instead I just treat it as an interesting part of my CV.

In my (limited) experience, I've found that I get the majority of my traffic from aggregation sites such as HN and /r/programming.

So writing posts that appeal to these audiences is one way to get engagement.

But I've only been blogging for <2 years, so I can't comment on whether it's harder than it once was.

there are three pillars of "editorial content traffic generation"

  - social
  - search
  - newsletter

it does not really matter which with one you start

a) first you need to get one of them right

then b) "the strong feed the poor", convert them from one channel into the other. and yeah, if you do it baldy (i.e. newsletter popups, constant reminder to follow you on fb, ...) 99% will hate you, but you can iterate on the 1%.

the big questions: why do you need the quantity? if you do not have a quantity traffic dependent business case (i.e. adsense) then a few people who value your input can be more rewarding then 10 000 skimming over your content and clicking away the newsletter popups & follow me on fb call-to-actions. the strategy follows the goal, "lots of traffic" in itself is a poor goal.

I've been blogging for a couple of decades at this point. Yes, it has definitely gotten harder to attract an audience.

It does depend on the sort of blog you're running, though. Information-heavy blogs addressing actual urgent needs still do OK if they're appropriately promoted. More opinion-focused blogs do much less well unless they're very unusual in some way.

(Sweeping statements, obviously.)

Have you considered video blogging instead of a text based blog? If you are anything like me you are reluctant to put yourself in front of a camera because let's face it, most of us visiting HN are probably not fashionistas with the best hairdos but I have considered it because I think this is increasingly a more popular way to blog. Video blogs offer greater accessibility and appeal to the laziness of human beings (including myself) with respect to attention required.

Personally speaking I would be more likely to follow your technical vlog channel on YouTube rather than a text based blog. The problem for the blogger is the increased production value investment required compared with a text blog. Not only do you have to create the script, you must edit video and do other things that are probably not your primary interest. Code snippets become screen share videos etc. I think this can make video blogging highly time consuming but if done right it's probably easier to get views. Text blogs are appealing because it's all you need to do is write the content and put it up. We coders like the idea of writing code and putting it up and getting success but anyone who's started a startup and made something knows that never works, there's a whole bunch of other 'business stuff' that needs to be done in the same way a vlog requires more 'production stuff' to be done.

No.

Getting page views for well written and original content (especially tech topics) is not hard, in fact there is a severe dearth of good technical writing. How often you post, how many sharing options you provide should not be what you optimize for. Optimize for writing original, well informed content that shows domain expertise. Such content has no problem attracting an audience. But the problem with writing such content is that it's pretty time consuming.

Let me share my own anecdata. Three of my posts got significant attention when I posted them to my blog, around 30k pageviews and now I get a few thousand views every month from search engines and people sharing my posts on social networks. I don't spend any time promoting it, only post to a couple of subreddits initially, that's it, (and HN where my posts did not gain traction so far) .

Posts :

https://www.ploggingdev.com/2017/01/multiprocessing-and-mult...

https://www.ploggingdev.com/2016/12/performance-measurement-...

https://www.ploggingdev.com/2016/12/analyzing-programming-la...

Especially the first post linked above has gotten most of the attention and now ranks on Google for python multiprocessing and multithreading related keywords. My blog is clearly not very popular by HN standards, but it has given me a good understanding of what type of content has no issue attracting attention as explained above.

Edit : You might find the following post by Nate interesting, it talks about how to choose topics to write about (among other things) : https://www.nateberkopec.com/blog/2017/03/10/how-i-made-self...

Concepts and names are kind. To give and example, in a recent post of jeremykun.com blog about math and computing the author explains a concrete case of conjugate prior without jargon. But in fact, if you know what that post is about, that is the magic word aka math jargon conjugate prior, you will find that en.wikipedia gives you many insights and links about that concept. Wikipedia is getting better and better and now there are an enormous quantity of good resources to learn form. Also informative comments, like those here in HN, are making blogging more and more difficult because your post is going to be only a drop in an ocean of knowledge where parts are interrelated. No post should reject math jargon, since those words, like conjugate priors, are the key to looking for rich and complete information about it. To give another example, if someone try to explain monads he/she should not try to avoid the term monad since monad importance relies on is capacity to model many rich and differences sceneries ranging from security to multiprocessing.

Openai or distill aim is to explain or visualize ml ideas, but I think that more than displaying animations or pretty graphics, we need clear concepts and definitions, and to inform the reader that there is no royal road to understanding, you must pay the prize to understand the main concepts, that the only real road to understanding.

To not be categorical, perhaps there should be some posts about explaining in very shallow terms what's the meaning of something, but in the end many times you end up without a real meaning of the concept and you can look hundred of same level posts and waste your time, because the concept required to be framed on its appropriate level.

Edit: Edited for clarify and grammar.

I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.

There are a variety of reasons why I think blogging is no longer as visible as it used to:

- People don't read long form as much as they used to. Especially considering the content that gets popular on the Internet are now images, videos, short messages, there is less of an audience for long form writing and content producers are more focused on the lowest common denominator.

- Hyperlinks used to be a valuable social currency, not as much anymore. People are more inclined to use search engines or social media to find content, which is kind of lame because recommendations via links from the authors themselves are much more relevant than algorithms.

- Social media and large corporations have made it much harder to get people to leave their platforms. Instead of being an entry point, they want to be the destination for content.

- There is simply too much garbage out there, and curation/aggregation for quality content is nearly non-existent unless you already know the right places to look. Otherwise you get fed the same garbage as everyone else, or trapped inside an algorithmic filter bubble.

Am I the only one who thinks it might have gotten harder simply because so many more people are producing content these days?

That's why other commenters say they get their traffic from r/programming or HN. You are a blog in a sea of blogs and other crap.

Well, here is my take on this topic, as a non-blogger(iow, consumer of sorts). Please excuse this not-that-well-written rant in advance.

What do people - in my opinion - search for:

#1 Help & advice on a specific topic (like, how to disassemble a vw golf 1.3 '87 petrol engine)

#2 Specific information (list of vw engines)

#9 Opinions (compatible with their views / controversial, ideally from people they like or hate, but most importantly, already know >> my-favorite-auto-blog : why vw golf I was the best golf ever manufactured || that-fiat-loving-morron : why vw golf I should be banned from the streets)

#999 Random opinions from people they never heard of (some-guy-on-the-internet : 10 best things about the vw golf I generation || some-other-random-guy : 10 most beutiful wordpress themes of 2017)

--

When you start your blog, you are that random person. I red many great, well researched, well written articles but honestly, I have no idea where I found them nor by whom they were written. Two reasons why:

a) Subscribing to someone I don't know is a risk I'm unwilling to take. I hate spam as much as averyone else. I don't know what you'll do with my email address. I don't want to get notifications about your new cat. I don't want to participate in any of your surveys and I don't want to help you make your blog better. Sorry, a day has only 24h, every minute wasted is a minute of your life you _won't_ get back.

b) I have no easy way to find out if your blog is any good in the first place.

The problem with blogs as a format(incl. video blogs) is that you effectively surrended all the contextual synapses your information is generating - to a search engine. Context has sometimes more value than the actual information. If I red your well-written article about linux kernel hardening, I _do_ want to know your opinion about different security subsystems for example. But what does your blog provide to make this task easier - a calendar? That primitive, useless junk called a "tag cloud"? A href link to an "older" post? Most of you don't even include a list of the most popular or recent articles. You want us - consumers - in this day an age, to actually click through some calendars on your blog an spend - no, waste - our valuable time to search for contextualy related topics? Who else is better at deciding about the context of your information than you - the bloke who is writing it? Can't you be a little more creative and write a system that would actually present all the information you have published since 1985 in a natural, contextual way?

People produce valuable content daily, but they somehow forgot to care about the context. If your blog is unable to set your article into a braoder body of knowledge and relies solely on a search engine/social media, well, then you get what you ordered. Good luck paying for all kinds of trickery to get your page visits.

I have just posted a long post that probably will be located near the bottom because is lengthy. So here is a short one with my 2 cents: 1) I like to read quality post, I think quality is the main source to sustain a post. 2) Don't shallow your post if you want to have an open road for future success. 3) Your post is a drop in an ocean of knowledge in which content is interrelated. Perhaps you can be successful posting in a niche but I think that niche won't last. 4) I think that in the future quality post will get more recognition.

For cross-posting you can try ifttt. I'll refrain from the main question, as I'm not qualified to answer it.

> Is the only option these days to be cross-posting?

No, it's SEO. For me at least. I don't follow blogs, but I find the same blogs over and over again, when I search for specific keywords.

The thing with blogs is: Usually, I'm looking for specific information right now. I need answers. I'd never sign up for a newsletter, because in a few weeks, I might've grown beyond this already.

Blog Posts have almost no quality. A lot of those early blog guys cashed in, like ZenHabits, Ramit Sethi, etc. They are charlatons, who offer nothing of substance and charge 1000x for products becuase people like a certain post, and then binge all their other shit. It's just marketing bullshit. I have yet to find quality posts that aren't from intelligent people like Paul Graham, or Norvig.

I think people are conditioned to view content and return to the origin of the link, e.g. Facebook, Reddit, News Hacker, because these are the modern feed readers. (The feed is typically dictated by others posting to these sites.)

Anecdote agreeing with the OP. I used to get 10k visitors a month in 2015, that dropped to 7.5k in 2016 and currently get about 5k a month even though the niche I talk about has gotten more and more popular (Neo4j). Nearly all my posts are technical and link to source code. Maybe there are just more bloggers about Neo4j. http://maxdemarzi.com