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Ten years of professional blogging – what I’ve learned
- DigitalJack 9y agoI'm happy he wrote this, and I'll read it again at home tonight. But what's the deal with "write the title last" and his examples all start with the title?
- ccostes 9y agoI found that odd, too. Guess it's sort of like a tl;dr, but it felt repetitive.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoI don't really understand your point. This is what he means: I often write a placeholder title, write the essay, and then at the very end, spend a good chunk of time iterating on titles until there’s a good one. It isn't uncommon for me to handle blog posts that way as well, or even paid freelance articles if no title was provided. You put in a title that suggests what you are talking about, then you write the piece, then you try to figure out what the most important detail is or the most compelling hook or the shortest way to make the essential point. Writing good titles is quite hard and good titles often grow out of the piece after it is written. You get to the end and you have written multiple paragraphs to give a good lead up and then your final paragraph draws a conclusion in a way you didn't have in mind when you started. And therein lies clues to a good title. I fairly often pull ideas for a title from the last paragraph or two of a blog post. And I usually don't know what that last paragraph will be until I have written the entire piece.
- DigitalJack 9y agoI must have missed that. Thanks for pointing it out, I was bothered by the seemingly contradictory advice :) all I noticed was: >"Titles are 80% of the work, but you write it as the very last thing. It has to be an compelling opinion or important learning" followed by >"Most of my writing comes from talking/reading deciding I strongly agree or disagree. These opinions become titles. Titles become essays." and then the example >"The best example of this in my work is 'Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing' which started out as a tweet with 20+ shares, and then was developed into an essay afterwards."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Kagerjay 9y agoMy biggest issue with blogging is that my writing isn't that great, and that while I'd rather write on a wordpress platform, medium is just easier to write with (WYISWYG). Or even posting on a discourse forum is easier. That, and blogging is technically not productive so I can never find a happy mix between the 2.
- EGreg 9y agoHow to achieve money blogging in three easy steps: 1. Attract people with titles like this one 2. Make your blog popular (???) 3. Put advertising Thanks for reading this post! PS: How I made $100,000 a day with one weird trick (Long sales copy follows) "I used to not make money and now I made $20K! This system is great!" (Keep Scrolling) If you act now it will be only $10!! And we chare you $300 a month later. PPS: Does anyone know why they always use the word weird trick? The author comes across as super unbiased that way? LOL
- fermuch 9y agoStep 3 should go before step 2, or else you'll lose most of the profit.
- joshua4 9y ago"People are often obsessed with needing to write original ideas. Forget it." I hate him. Idiot! Fuck this guy
- InterimNew 9y agoIs this sarcasm? I don’t understand the reason for this comment, would you mind expanding on it?
- Top19 9y agoI was about to downvote you but then I saw his quote “Titles are 80% of the work”. Ugh. You’re right. F* him.
- trendia 9y agoIn the publishing business, titles are usually chosen by the editor, not the author. Although the editor has a tough job, I don't think anyone would say that they're doing more work than the person who wrote the piece.
- dang 9y agoPlease don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- IamNotAtWork 9y agoFunny I never heard of him until today.
- wellboy 9y agoOne of the top 5 bloggers in tech.
- evo_9 9y agoBe that as it may why should the poster be downvoted for this? Whenever I fool myself into thinking HN is above petty ego bullshit this kind of thing reminds me how mistaken I am.
- dang 9y agoThe comment was unsubstantive and arguably a bit snarky. Those are downvoteable qualities on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Be that as it may why should the poster be downvoted for this? Because the snide one-liner post wasn't a productive contribution to the discussion. And that would be true whether or not the blogger was prominent.
- Spooks 9y agoI think the downvotes are for the lack of contribution from his comment. It was unnecessary and not on topic.
- j2kun 9y agoWhat does that even mean
- tytytytytytytyt 9y agoI haven't either, but saying that apparently counts as snarky and snide here.
- hkon 9y agoInteresting. I wonder what opportunities blogging has given him.
- matt_s 9y agoThis is also a question I have. I'll often find comments everywhere that when applying for tech jobs, having a relevant blog is of little value, hardly looked at. If the goal of your blog is purely to establish yourself as some authority on topic(s), do you then have to build audience numbers like he has? Is it common for a lot of people doing this to also do talks at conferences, etc? If your goal is to monetize the blog, then I think his points matter. Titles matter, attracting readers matter, establishing an email list matters. However if you just want to share opinions and ideas or work you did I don't think a lot of his points matter.
- hkon 9y agoyes I have seen some who have progressed into publishing books based around some particular interesting topics they wrote about on their blog. But I am curious to know if some less obvious benefits come from blogging. I could imagine that you could get more of the spontaneous oportunities from speaking at conferences because of the in-person interaction after/during your session. But from blogging, the long tail might be what is really valuable. Blogging for ten years for instance, at least you have ten years of stuff online to your name. Has to be worth something.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- flaviuspopan 9y agoI appreciate you taking the time to summarize all this; I've only begun writing in earnest this past year and I'm glad to know that the habits I'm working on developing now are sustainable for the long term.
- stereo51 9y agoThat’s why I refuse to write on Medium or Quora. Quora is also remarkably corrupt and has a habit of banning people who speak out against bad practices in venture capital.
- PatientTrades 9y ago> Titles are 80% of the work I hate to be negative, but that is actually quite disturbing that he considers the content only 20% of the work and the title 80%. Feel like those two values should be switched otherwise is just sounds like clickbait blogger.
- tootie 9y agoI'm curious about the point of running your own blog instead of hosting on Medium et al. I get that you want to avoid being locked in to a platform that could belly up, but isn't there a big benefit in network effect? Is he just counting on external channels like Twitter to promote his site?
- jacquesm 9y agoControl of your content matters. If your platform of choice becomes 'sourceforged' you will have no choice but to move losing all links to your content. It also helps to know for sure that nothing underhanded is happening with respect to malware or tracking with your visitors.
- mooreds 9y agoYou can, however, have your own domain (blog.example.com) on medium. It would be a pain to migrate all that content, but at least you could preserve the links with some work. That said, I think that totally owning your location online is totally worth it.
- komali2 9y agoI'm going through this right now - all my old content is on blogspot.com, and I want to move to my current blog at mydomain.com/blog. I'm sure there's a way not to move all these article URLs by hand, but then I have to go and make sure all the inline images come through as well, which were uploaded to blogspot directly. I mean, I was just looking for a quick solution in college so I can't blame myself, but I do want to run back to 18 year old me and kick my heels a bit for creating such a big chunk of technical debt I doubt I'll ever actually fix.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoYou can add a third party domain to BlogSpot. It isn't hard at all. That may not get the result you personally want, but it is completely do-able.
- ppeetteerr 9y ago"Titles are 80% of the work" That's called click-bait. If you want good advice, follow Jeff Atwood's post on the subject: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-achieve-ultimate-blog-success-in-one-easy-step/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-achieve-ultimate-blog-s...
- ProAm 9y ago"Marketing"
- tootie 9y agoIt's only click-bait if the headline is a lie. A great headline for great content is a win-win.
- ghaff 9y agoIf the title were really 80% of the work, that doesn't say much for the content. And other things in the post around focusing on frequency etc. set off my alarms. That said, if you dismiss the importance of headlines and use vapid boring ones, you're probably not getting the [EDIT: readership} you could.
- guelo 9y agoClick-bait doesn't have to be a lie. Stuff like "... will make your jaw drop!" or "... what happened next blew my mind!" aren't really lies.
- j2kun 9y agoDon't know why this is downvoted. If the title is the hardest part of professional blogging, then the content must be relatively vapid.
- halayli 9y agoThe title is what readers see first. If content and title don’t match then yes it’s trash. But that doesn’t mean that having a good title isn’t important.
- 9y ago
- 1undo 9y ago> Titles are 80% of the work If you writing fluff sure, but if your writing great content the title is less important. Good work sells itself. 90% content 10% title just my 0.02.
- misnamed 9y agoUnless you have a large subscribed audience, titles are important for getting people to click in.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoBadly titled articles with excellent content can get rapidly flagged to death on HN.
- personlurking 9y agoSomewhat relevant is a question I asked here several months ago. There were 181 comments, so there's enough to be able to extract some knowledge from them. Ask HN: Has attracting a blog audience become harder? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13966190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13966190
- netman21 9y agoSurprised at how poorly written this is. Typos all over. I would hope that someone who considers himself a writer would take care to write well.
- 1undo 9y agoHe only spends 20% on the actual writing, and 80% on the title. So out of an hour only 12 minutes of writing and 48 minutes of working on title. That may explain the typos
- netman21 9y agoHa! That explains it.
- wyclif 9y agoSo he spends 20% time on writing, but can't run spellcheck?
- amigoingtodie 9y agoThe title had no spelling errors.
- wyclif 9y agoBut the body text has quite a few.
- henrik_w 9y agoNot blogging professionally, only for "personal use", but recently wrote up my experience of blogging for 6 years: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-programming/ https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...
- mooreds 9y agoI've been blogging for 14 years. The hardest thing for me is to dive deep into a particular topic. My blog reflects what interests me at a given time, and that can vary wildly. This keeps the blog interesting to me, but means that the vast majority of my traffic is search engine based, rather than folks who are coming to my blog to find out what Dan thinks. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make, and have even blogged about: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2188 http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2188
- ghaff 9y agoI'm fairly certain that blogs (and newsletters) are way more effective commercially when they dive deep on a topic. That's not a reason to do it that way--especially if it's just a side thing you do as a hobby or for publicity. But if it's something more serious it makes sense to compartmentalize your interests. I've always just kept a single blog but this coming year I'm experimenting with a new blog to see if it makes sense as something apart from my (mostly) tech-related blog.
- mooreds 9y ago> I'm fairly certain that blogs (and newsletters) are way more effective commercially when they dive deep on a topic. Totally agree! It's the same as nicheing as a contractor/consultant. People don't want generic stuff, they want focused expertise. That said, my career has been the main source of fodder for my blog and that career has been a general technologist (with a web/unix focus), so that's why my blog meanders. If I consulted again, I'd probably try to narrow the focus to what I wanted to work on, because, as you say, focus == commercial success.
- ghaff 9y agoHaving said that about focus, you need to keep your eye on the future as you suggest. I've known people who were probably effectively world experts in some company or computer architecture and, when those inevitably went away, they were never able to replicate their success in another way.
- 9y ago
- nickjj 9y agoI've been blogging for about 2 years (120ish articles posted) and a lot of what he says makes sense. Especially finding your voice. I still don't feel like I've figured that one out. My problem is I started blogging after working as a developer for 20 years so I want to talk about a billion different topics. But the quickest way to become successful in this field is to write a ton about 1 specific thing and then suddenly you're "that guy" about the topic you're writing about.
- Evelyn65 9y agoI quit working at shoprite and now I make $35h - $80h...how? I'm working online! My work didn't exactly make me happy so I decided to take a chance on something new… after 4 years it was so hard to quit my day job but now I couldn't be happier. Heres what I do, •••••••••>>http://www.bosscyber.com http://www.bosscyber.com
- Sam_Harris 9y agoNot a link. Just a pop-up.
- justboxing 9y agoTweet # 6 in her 'Tweet Storm' > So I flipped to his feed, and sure enough, there'd been a post in November about him being in the hospital. I was never shown this post. How does she know that she was NEVER shown this post? Isn't it possible that she didn't scroll all the way past a few 100 status updates, and the friend's hospitalization post was #101 in that scroll list, and she just didn't make it that far with her limited attention span?
- apetresc 9y agoOkay first of all - you're commenting on the completely wrong post. Secondly, in reference to the story you are commenting about, she says in the thread that she always consumes her feed until she sees repeats. Not to mention that she says none of the people in that social circle saw the post. At some point, if Facebook is pushing something down that many spots, it is the same as never showing it. Everyone's attention span is limited.
- rayalez 9y agoA few counterpoints on benefits of using Medium over of your own blog: - Submitting your articles to publications is a very easy way to get a lot of free exposure. For example, my most successful post [1] generated 36k views and 1.5k medium subscribers in the first couple of weeks just by being accepted to HackerNoon. - Collecting email addresses is extremely easy. Design a pretty CTA image that links to your email sign up form. Bonus points if you'll create a free guide or some other giveaway. This makes Medium about 95-99% as effective at building an audience on a custom blog. The post mentioned above generated about 200 email signups over time, which is pretty good for free exposure I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. - If you're interested in growing your own publication, you can easily request good stories written by other authors(one click on a menu under each post). That gives you free content and audience, if you want. - For me personally, Medium's editor significantly lowers the barrier of entry. Something about the well designed WYSIWYG format takes away the pressure and makes writing more engaging. Besides it's easier to publish short-form content. Many of my posts start out as tweets that ended up being too long, or as HN/Reddit comments I'd like to share in a better format. 100-200 word Seth-Godin-style posts are easy to write regularly and medium's format encourages you to do that. - You can always export your posts from medium into your personal blog. That's what I do for mine[2]. Write on medium to gain free audience and exposure, repost to your website, then promote posts from your site on twitter/reddit, thus still keeping all the benefits. You can even cherry pick your best articles - use medium to generate a ton of posts without any pressure to be good, and publish the ones you're most proud of on your site. [1] https://hackernoon.com/full-stack-web-development-the-complete-roadmap-9fe43ec0ba32 https://hackernoon.com/full-stack-web-development-the-comple... [2] https://startuplab.io/blog https://startuplab.io/blog
- amigoingtodie 9y agoAre you being penalized for having duplicate content on medium and your blog? What is the disadvantage of writing more of a shorter 'teaser' story on medium to funnel traffic to your blog? Is that what you do with twitter and and reddit (funnel to medium)?
- rayalez 9y ago
- robteix 9y agoGood read. I used to blog very regularly years ago, but since the end of Google Reader and the growing popularity of Facebook and Twitter, I’ve been blogging less and less. Always wanted to pick it up again. Anyway, this caught my attention: > Since starting a normal job (haha) it’s gotten harder to write on Sunday evenings, since that’s when the work email starts Don’t do this to yourself.
- chamoda 9y agoI've found that writing a blog post is one of the best ways to learn something deeply. So I write stuff, not for marketing but own my personal development. Of course marketing is nice sub result, but I never focus too much on title like the OP. My process looks like folowing - Choose the subject (usually a very small topic or algorithm) - Study it deeply for at least a weak, sometime months. - Start writing the post, learning is still happening. - Finish the post. At that point I usually have a very good understanding of the topic. Never think that you can't write about a subject because you are not an expert. You may not be an expert but there are more people who know less than you and they will find the post worthwhile. https://blog.chamoda.com https://blog.chamoda.com
- known 9y agoSounds like https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2012/04/learn-anything-faster-with-the-feynman-technique/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2012/04/learn-anything-fast...
- wangarific 9y agoAnother benefit of publicly sharing your learning is that if you misinterpreted or misremembered something, others can point it out so you don't go through life with incorrect ideas.
- jclos 9y agoI have found the same thing while teaching during my PhD. Most of my student peers despised it and couldn't understand that I wasn't volunteering to teach to help the university, I did it for the very selfish reason of helping myself cement basic undergrad knowledge.
- bbno4 9y agoI often find that writing blogposts is essential to help my learn. I find that understanding formuale and understanding how things work is often better for my academic learning than memorising formulae https://medium.com/@brandonskerritt51 https://medium.com/@brandonskerritt51