Ask HN: How do people find your blog?

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.

'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 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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)

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).

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.

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

As a reader, I use NetNewsWire and RSS.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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...

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

So be careful.

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.

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.