Ask HN: I just started blogging; how can I improve?

Personally the content style isn't my sort of thing. It seems to follow the trend of having a light tone, lots of inline images, and other features which seem to make it into a 'medium-style' post (it's not necessarily bad, just not my thing).

What is your goal out of writing? If you can nail that down, then it should be easier to improve or at least see what needs improving.

For writing first drafts, I've found it useful to take walks while dictating to an app called Otter.

For editing those drafts, I've found that the guidelines in the book Style: Towards Clarity and Grace are really actionable.

My recommendations for improving.

1) Make sure you can measure readers, and set yourself goals to grow. Seeing the number grow will give yourself extra commitment. I use Medium, and their weekly recap is also very motivating to me.

2) Develop your audience, either on HN, Reddit, mailing list, etc.

3) I personally write "keyword-oriented", meaning I try to state 1 or 2 points per post, and analyze the keywords to make sure what I see from keywords is consistent to what I was planning to say.

4) Good keywords, especially on titles, help with SEO. For example from your 2 posts: one is good, one is bad :) (not bad in general, only from this perspective). The are other techniques as well, but I like the SEO style, because I prefer to write to answer someone else's question. (vs, for example, collect click because of a catchy headline.)

5) If you lack ideas, one "trick" I've used myself is this one. Whenever you have a problem, that a single search on Google doesn't solve, but you need 2+, then write about it. Even if it's just 2 lines of solution, it'll make a good post and keep you in the spirit or writing.

My blog: https://medium.com/@0x0ece

To give you some numbers, last year I gave a presentation to my colleagues on blogging titled "how to get to 100 reads/article". Now I'm typically over the 1k, with 3-500 reads/week. From HN (which is my sole network for "advertising") I used to get 10-30 reads, now I grew to typically 100+.

Enjoy, and keep on blogging!

I would recommend reading other similar blogs to get some input on how they do it. A content plan would be a good idea as well.

As always in this case, I give the same advice : commit to it, be consistent and find pleasure doing it.

Starting a blog is even easier than ever now but too many times, people starts one and quickly stop writing. This is the rookie mistake.

You definitely think your voice/opinion has enough value that other people are willing to read about it which is really good.

Starting a blog is like doing a conference in an empty room. If the room is empty. you might not want to start talking.But if you don't talk, you'll know for sure that noone will show up. That's why, no matter what, keep writing and express your opinions because someday, someone will read your thoughts and will be grateful for it and you'll have your first fan and probably never know about it. That's the beauty of writing, you create a connection with people you don't know and most of the time, you'll never hear of them.

Warm vibes,

I suggest finding someone to help edit your articles. This can be done in a variety of ways.

You could submit all of your articles for review prior to publishing. This is ideal for a business blog. However, for a personal blog it can be expensive and add too much time to your writing process.

What I have done in the past for my personal blogs is have a writer friend give me feed back on my already published stories. I will trade dinner or technical help for their skills. It is painful to have someone find major errors in a published story, but you quickly learn to self edit.

Seth Godin has some tremendously clarifying ideas on this subject. Step 1 is answering the question “What is this for?” If the point is to exercise a muscle, then show up and write week after week and don’t worry about if anyone is reading it, and how to grow...etc. That’s a distraction to what you set out to do.

I have done something similar. To make this point clear to myself, I do not use any sort of tracking, so that I couldn’t figure out traffic numbers even if I wanted to. And I don’t advertise at all or put effort into growth, aside from dumping a url on LinkedIn.

One really nice benefit of writing about technical stuff and lessons learned is that it’s a great resource for future you. Just yesterday I pulled up my own article because I forgot how to do something I used to know really well when I was in the weeds. If you take the time to write it up, you’re free to release it from your brain.

My 2c:

First decide why you want to blog. That can drive the rest of your actions.

Think about who can be your target audience, if it is not a blog for anyone and everyone.

Write about what interests you and about what you think may interest other people. And write about what you know something about (unless the blog is just about talking about things that you did).

Add links to related content (in your posts), both in and outside your blog.

Use text formatting like bold and italics, but sparingly.

Might want to add relevant images now and then to some posts.

Final point: Stick to it for a while. Don't stop very soon, even if you do not see results.

I've been blogging for over 10 years now, at:

  https://jugad2.blogspot.com

I would not call myself very good at it even now. But even what I have done in these years, has been useful for increasing my visibility, and I've got training and consulting work many times, for which the clients say they got to know of me via my blog (or my published articles or my open source software projects).

Good luck.

I'll say it since nobody else did: your punctuation is wrong. Question marks and exclamation marks shouldn't have a space before them.

Set up some syntax higlighter for your code samples, as they are super hard to read. Prism is a good choice.

First of all, it's good thing that you have decided to commit to it. Well, to improve upon your blogging, the first and foremost thing is to find out what you are good at. Sharing experience and thoughts may not be enough. Internet is overloaded with content. Adding more inane content will not get you anywhere. So find out what's your passion and how it is unique. Once you discover what you really know well, the advantage is that you can write well about it. You can always find ways to improve upon writing if you are writing about something you are good at. It does not matter what it is. It could be gardening, cooking, race cars, films, gadgets. But you need to discover what you are good at. Secondly, you need to identify who your audience is. Is it an expert audience or just teenagers? What kind of people are going to read what you write. This will give you an understanding of what kind of stuff you should be writing. Once you understand who you are writing for, you can align everything to it and improve. The key is to identify your readership. Thirdly, you should read some good bloggers. Just observe how they approach a topic, open and close the discussion, examples and images they use. Make your note and try them out in your unique ways in your blog if those things fit.

A combination of these things should help you improve your blogging skills.

Keep writing.

Do it badly until you get better.

Listen to Seth Godin. He talks about this, often.

I really didn't expect to get this much nor such great feedback. Thanks a lot, everyone, for taking the time to go through it and give me all these pieces of advice, and even follow-up when I had questions. Thank you!