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What I learned in ten years of blogging
- qwerty456127 8y ago> No one has time to read your article, write the first lines like they’re a TLDR. So true! > For SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words) So sad!
- andrenth 8y agoSad and annoying. Top Google results are very likely to include long articles that ramble on and on and never get to the point, in the name of "optimization". Search Engine Optimization is Reader Experience Pessimization.
- sct202 8y agoYup like those recipe pages where there's 4 paragraphs and photos unrelated to the recipe and then a box with the recipe at the bottom of the page.
- 0xferruccio 8y agoOP here, I think this is a consequence of choosing bad KPIs (like time spent on page) to define what should rank higher. In my experience the best approach to deal with this is the TLDR on top idea, so the Reader experience stays good and then going deep into the topic for the curious ones and the SEO juice
- andrenth 8y agoIt's a workaround, but I think the real problem, as you mention, is search engines using time spent on page as a proxy metric for "this page is useful", which in many situations just isn't the case.
- exoducks 8y agoI thought this was just a "natural" trend for advertising or something, I didn't realize it was a SEO thing. I've been noticing more and more that every time I'm looking for a recipe, I end up with a blog post the size of a novella as the first few results.
- rchaud 8y agoRecipe pages are long because Google penalizes sites with "high bounce rate", i.e. where the user opened the page, didn't interact with it (clicked a link, scrolled x% of the screen) and left, or clicked Back. A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade. That's why so much of the Internet feels so 'corporate' or make so many seemingly 'WTF' choices. They are optimizing around a monetization and growth strategy, not for your experience as a user.
- qwerty456127 8y ago> Recipe pages are long because Google penalizes sites with "high bounce rate", i.e. where the user opened the page, didn't interact with it (clicked a link, scrolled x% of the screen) and left, or clicked Back. A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade. Do many people actually copy-paste recipes? I usually open a recipe page and keep it open until I'm done with the dish). If I like the result I may copy the recipe.
- martimatix 8y agoI look forward to the day that a recipe doesn't come with a life story prepended to it.
- AndrewStephens 8y agoWith video advertising, sites have started to optimize for length of stay on the page rather than hits and I hate it. The recipe format was perfected in the middle ages - a simple list of ingredients and a description of the steps required. But the sites that capture the first page of search results for even the simplest recipe are all designed to keep you on the page long enough for the video ads to play through. Listen up idiots, if I like your recipe I will be on your page for minutes figuring out how to follow it and will return every time I want to make the meal. Your stats will be favorable - no need to bother me with how your dead granny used to make roast beef sandwiches or whatever. Just another way that advertising kills everything it touches.
- marcosdumay 8y agoYou won't even get to see the recipe if there isn't something about the dead granny sandwiches in there. It will be forever hidden into the 300th page of search results.
- dhimes 8y agoSo, I have a question: I'm seeing lots of videos on social media that are very long. They're cute or funny or amazing or something, but they seem like they are artificially long, like they are trying to keep me in the act of viewing them. If they aren't an advertisement themselves, then why is this the trend? What is the reward for engaging a viewer in a sight gag for several minutes? Are they gaming the ad companies by padding some "average view time" or something? It sure smells like shenanigans, I'm just not sure why.
- rchaud 8y agoI don't know about FB, but Youtube videos can only be monetized if they're a minimum of 10 minutes long. That's why videos by 'Youtubers' can be so painful to watch; they are trying to stretch out 2 minutes of content into 10, and it's obvious.
- cantthinkofone 8y agoIs that a feature or a byproduct? It doesn't make sense to me on the surface that a larger text would be linked to more necessarily. The length of a text doesn't seem like it would factor into the outcome of the page ranking unless I'm missing something. How would you determine what is a "good" or "bad" article, given a reader's preferences rather than one that simply gets associated most regularly with a search query?
- andrenth 8y agoAs I understand it, Google (and others?) rank pages higher if the time spent on them is high. Long text takes longer to read, so it's a way to increase that metric. Another explanation I've seen is for ranking longer texts higher is that longer text is assumed to be of higher quality because it's more content/took more work to produce/whatever. Whatever the reason, this leads to the rambling articles I mentioned, which seems to be a trend even for cases when the actual useful content is short.
- notacoward 8y agoThis seems like one of those things that will reverse itself. Once a measure is known to its subjects it becomes worthless. (That's not my idea but I'm too lazy to look up the source right now.) If enough people write long articles just for SEO, the algorithm will change and they might actually find themselves penalized. Then there will be lots of whining from folks who thought they could profit by prioritizing SEO over quality and by treating SEO as a one-time-solvable problem.
- Mnlfrgr 8y agoThat long articles are necessary to rank in Google is a myth. https://twitter.com/mnlfrgr/status/1074653395997388800 https://twitter.com/mnlfrgr/status/1074653395997388800
- 0xferruccio 8y agoDidn't know that! Great advice, I think that the origin of this might be in the fact that longer content is generally more researched and thus ranks better
- Mnlfrgr 8y agoYeah, that is possible. However, correlation != causation ;)
- josefresco 8y ago2000 words has never been the SEO optimal or standard length for articles. I've been involved in SEO for many, many years, 500 was always the standard.
- 3chelon 8y agoInteresting. I know 500 was the standard. But my understanding is that the big Google updates (Panda et al) put paid to that model in favour of the "authority site" model, hence you're supposed to rank better for longer content. I wonder if it only applies to new blogs though? Perhaps if you have good DA/PA/TTF metrics already then it doesn't actually matter about your content length.
- 3chelon 8y agoWith all due respect, one single article ranking #1 in Google hardly constitutes proof, or turns the argument into a myth. I am genuinely interested in the answer to this though. The idea that the article has to be longer/more detailed than the competition makes total sense.
- ghaff 8y agoI would need to see a citation for this. I work with digital marketing folks a lot, who are well-versed in things like SEO, and the general trend seems is toward shorter and more frequent content. That's not to say that I don't write a longer piece when the content warrants it, but for written articles/blogs/etc. 800-1000 words seems to be fairly common. Certainly there's also something of a trend from giveaway long books to 25-50 page ones.
- cantthinkofone 8y agoI'm conflicted about the notion that "no one has time to read your article." That says more about dilapidation of reading culture than the fact that length of a text is necessarily bad. I see it happening to me and I don't read something not because it is valueless on its own but because there is simply too much else outside of it drawing on my attention. If there's more and more pressure to say less, eventually you'll say nothing. If you say everything, nobody will read it unless they have eyes set on your work. Most people seem to be trained to write an expository piece in a classical model of assert a premise => provide an argument => yield a conclusion. They're not used to putting the conclusion where the premise should be sort of like an abstract.
- rchaud 8y agoImagine that you're searching for a solution to a Javascript issue, and you see two search results. One has the answer and links to a working Codepen, and the other provides some conceptual information and links you to MDN documentation so you can figure the answer out for yourself. Which one are you going to read first? If you picked the first one, does that indicate a dilapidation in reading ability, or that you needed an answer, and the first option provided the best one?
- CM30 8y agoHonestly, if you've written a coding article which doesn't have any code in it, you've probably messed up somewhere along the line. Generally, I'd say it's expected that anything programming related likely has at least a few code samples and a few demos to test out, otherwise its usefulness is rather limited.
- robocat 8y ago> dilapidation of reading culture Surely we read more than we ever did? Surely more people a literate than ever before? Certainly we didn't read much television... My friends that are dyslexic or illiterate have learnt to read in their 30s and 40s because of the internet.
- Kenji 8y agoSomeone who doesn't have time to read my article doesn't deserve its contents. My articles are not fast food and nobody gets to treat them as such.
- nyc111 8y ago> The design of your site is irrelevant. But it helps if the font is legible in all media. Good, straightforward advice, better than many similar articles. Personally, in my blog, I only write what I like. I also do what he says about editing and linking old articles.
- SonicSoul 8y agoyeah i feel like "design is irrelevant" probably still doesn't mean it can be offensive to look at :) i take it to mean, don't worry about going crazy with hiring a PR firm to give you beautiful look/feel and/or some unique functionality
- cantthinkofone 8y agoAny blog IMO should have a minimalist design. You want to draw attention to the content and present it as plainly and with as little visual clutter as possible. Some people want to use their blog as a kind of interactive CV but that should be treated as a separate project, as it will just introduce more clutter.
- cf498 8y ago> Any blog IMO should have a minimalist design. You want to draw attention to the content and present it as plainly and with as little visual clutter as possible. There is a German blog who hit "minimalist" rather well. http://blog.fefe.de/ http://blog.fefe.de/ Tbh, I prefer this kind of representation not just when it comes to blogs. Hackernews is another great example for "less is more".
- SonicSoul 8y agoOne well researched article is better than a lot of mediocre content I remember similar advice on patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) blog that i really took to heart. something along the lines of "it's better to have a few laser polished articles, than a ton of content". so to this date i start writing posts and quit half way through to keep only my favorite ideas up there.. there is another camp i.e. Seth Godin who write a short post every day, and that could work too perhaps. but i think most people would be better off with the advice in OPs post
- DamnInteresting 8y agoI started a website in 2005 that is still in operation today. We started out posting 1-2 articles per week, I had a lot of spare time then. But that rate was unsustainable with our small team and small budget, and we reached a point of burnout, and had to decide whether to slow down or shut down. After a hiatus to mentally recuperate, we opted to continue writing, though publishing less often and digging deeper into the stories. The results of this change of format are mixed. On the one hand, it now feels like quite an accomplishment when we wrap up research, writing, fact-checking, recording (podcast version), sound design, illustrations, etc. And most readers/listeners seem happier than ever with the quality of the content. But on the other hand, our rankings in Google have fallen considerably to sites that post frequent, low-effort content. The gatekeepers seem to prefer the pap. Additionally, there are a minority of readers/listeners who are outright hostile about our reduced output. Just as an example, I received this via email a few days ago: You are the laziest website on the internet. If I was to succumb to your nag messages and give you money, you would just waste it. This isn't really a real website, and it has no reason to exist. Give up and shut down. A website isn't worth visiting if it looks the same every 6 months someone visits. Just put a bullet it in already and end its pain. You failed. Just call time-of-death, already. Or, whatever, die slowly of cancer... It's not like your life amounts to anything... So, while I agree that deeper content is "better", it has its drawbacks.
- patio11 8y agoIt's tough to win the "I hope you die of cancer" demographic regardless of your actions, so why bother trying? (I have particular interest in this because geeks often cite them as the rationale for why not to price aggressively, because they complain about prices at every price point, including free.)
- AndrewStephens 8y agoThis is good stuff. I blog for fun and I agree with almost everything here, especially the stuff about advertising. I am not against advertising in general but putting ads on your page is an acknowledgment that you care more about money than writing what you want. There is nothing morally wrong with this, but it turns a hobby into a job. Lastly, I encourage everyone to publish blogs or articles. Each blog post on an independent site is a blow against the content farms and social media giants that control so much of the discourse these days.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoI like the current trend of being able to support e.g. bloggers (or youtubers, or whoever) via Patreon; I do believe there should be multiple providers of the same service because right now Patreon has too much influence / mindspace, but it's a good alternative for advertisement - not as scummy, and much more reliable. $1 / month / fan is nice. I follow one youtuber (and not the annoying screamy meme type) who seems to have 13.000 Patrons.
- toyg 8y agoI wish there was a way to do it with microtransactions though. I am never going to commit to yet-another-sub-that-I-will-forget-to-cancel-for-months, but I’d like to throw a couple of £ towards an individual post that I randomly find on the web.
- rchaud 8y agoI agree with your last sentence about "each independent blog post". But you must realize that hosting content isn't free. If you want a blog that doesn't end with .wordpress.com or blogspot.com, you'll have to pay. Otherwise, you publish on Medium, which IMO is just as bad in terms of handing over your IP to content farms.
- justpassingby- 8y agoEh, none of this really matters unless you actually care whether or not anyone is reading your content. I've been blogging random thoughts and assorted happenings in my life since 2002, and it's all out there on the public interwebz, but I write for an audience of one - me. If any poor soul happens to stumble across it, then that's their bad luck.
- mortivore 8y agoThis is interesting. If you're not writing for anyone except yourself, then why post it online? Why not just use a journal or an audio diary?
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoNot OP: I tend to blog tech fixes I found to make them more visible, I'm not really writing for an audience, but just recognising that there may be value in it and so ensuring that such value can be extracted. As much as anything it's a journal for me.
- robocat 8y agoI document my fixes on Stack Overflow, then put a comment with a link to the answer in the code. It is remarkably convenient, high Google ranking, with zero technical maintenance and seemingly permanent. Sometimes better solutions are given by other people. I have even found my own past comments when googling for solutions!
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoYes, I've found I use StackOverflow sites mostly now rather than blogging things.
- widforss 8y agoI just started writing a kind of emotional diary public on the web. I'm not linking to it anywhere (though it's not really hard to find), and I write it in my native language (not a good proposition if looking for exposure). The simple explanation for this is that I'm more keen to keep stuff if they're on the internet. Otherwise, they will just rot in my home directory and get thrown out on next reinstall in a couple of years. It's also a good emotional exercise. Am I really up to the task of releasing my inner thoughts publicly, even though nobody is likely to read it? The thing that made me start it was this challenge from Neil Gaiman. >The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself...That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.
- andy_wrote 8y ago> Spend 50% of the writing time actually writing, the rest tweaking, reading and illustrating. Details are important. I find this true not just of blog posts, but any time I've done formal writing at all. There is an immense gulf in quality between writing that has gone through even just one heavy edit/revision process and writing that never has. I've recently been encouraging my technical co-workers to expend more time on not-code, such as documentation, tutorials, plans, postmortems, internal RFCs, carefully worded PR/commit comments, etc. One challenge is that people sometimes think that when they "finish" a piece of writing, they're done. Unless you've been iteratively revising pieces of it in smaller chunks, I think you're really only halfway there.
- paulpauper 8y agoI’m 21, but I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years. wtf..mindblown.. His IQ must be off the charts. no wonder he is so successful.
- rchaud 8y agoI wrote short stories and video game reviews for the kids section of my local newspaper when I was 10-12yo. When I was older (13-18) I switched to writing about music. My IQ, not that I've tried to measure it, is probably very average. I was a kid and I just wanted to write.
- pjc50 8y agoLivejournal was full of bloggers that got started as teenagers. These days the cutting edge is video, but internet text culture is not going away.
- paulpauper 8y agoFor SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words) Just more vague tips that maybe worked for him and won't for most. i have several articles on my own blog/website that are over 4000 words and all original content. Want to guess how much search engine traffic they get? Z-e-r-o
- aaaaaaass 8y agocause they probably suck... length doesn't indicate quality.
- toyg 8y agoI have the opposite “problem”: my posts get weird traffic because of higher rankings than they would deserve. One thing I noticed is that titles matter: a “how to do X” is more likely to emerge than clever puns or artistic sentences - which is typically what one tends to use after writing longer essays.
- ghaff 8y agoYeah. People here like to complain about "clickbait" but that's what headlines are--and they were long before there was such a thing as a click. I write for a number of different websites and headlines (which the editor often writes or changes) are pretty much always very direct and self-explanatory. By and large, headlines (especially online) aren't the place for clever but obscure literary references.
- Konnstann 8y ago"Clickbait" headlines are those that misrepresent the content, not just things that catch your eye. Headlines are designed to get you to read the content, but when the headlines are misleading the content is a waste of time to read, similar to a fish biting a worm only to get caught, hence "bait".
- mockingbirdy 8y agoIt works. The content should be SEO-optimized, though (it isn't "normal" content, it targets certain keywords). Your domain ranking, on-page SEO, link structure, even title formatting and other stuff is also relevant. As someone who has 50k+ views per month on one site I know a thing or two about this. I also write a personal blog where I don't do SEO and only get around 300 views per month. I could optimize that, but I just write about things that I find interesting (without doing keyword research, doing A/B tests, ...).
- ta3216 8y agoI thought I read somewhere that ads make a blog seem more authoritative so I disagree about not having ads.
- ghaff 8y agoI really question that. I can't believe that in this day and age anyone thinks that having AdSense on a blog site is some indicator of superior quality. And affiliate links at least raise the possibility of conflicts of interest. Way back when I experimented with ads and links but I came to the conclusion that the money was pretty trivial in the scheme of things and it took away from the otherwise non-commercial nature of my site.
- ta3216 8y agoFirstly my readers would have no idea what Adsense even is. But if they see accompanying ads like Swarovski, Nordstrom, local restaurant, then yes, I believe it would positively impact their impression on an intuitive level. If they actively thought about it then no. I can see how it wouldn’t appeal to other sites though.
- gwern 8y agoI don't know about 'authoritative', but ads do seem to hurt. The existing experimental and quasi-experimental literature shows very bad effects on user behavior: 1. "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio", Huang et al 2018: https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pdf https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... [experimental] 2."The Effect of Ad Blocking on [Firefox] User Engagement with the Web", Miroglio et al 2018: https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-Blocking-on-User-Engagement-with-the-Web.pdf https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-... [quasi] 3. and my own A/B test: https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads [experimental]
- ta3216 8y agoI think it depends on the audience. Looking at your blog I can see how ads may not work as well. My blog is focused more on dining out, shopping etc where viewers think nothing of ads and I think they would even think it weird if there weren’t ads.
- maddening 8y agoPersonally, I think giving numbers (like 0-12k/month in 7 months) is useless if it is not put in some context. Several times I googled what should be expected amount of visits to see if I am doing ok or not. Result? It is kinda disheartening to see that after pouring a lot of love, getting rather nice feedback about articles etc, you see that you are getting e.g. 2k visits a month, while someone states that is "should be about 1k visits... a day". And you put some effort into marketing your content! Thing is, if you look at the amount of searches of the topics you cover, you might find that the person who posted such advice caters to 20x as large audience as you, so that 2k/month might be a really good result! But to see that, you have to put the numbers in some context instead of looking at the absolute numbers. If we applied this to e.g. youtubers we could conclude, that random gameplay streamer does a several times better job than a science channel author.
- mockingbirdy 8y agoTry keyword research tools like https://kwfinder.com https://kwfinder.com and others to get a feeling for the search volume and competition for a specific keyword.
- freehunter 8y ago100% agree. I run a network of very focused blogs with small but targeted audiences. Each blog may only have 3,000 views per month, but it's serving a city with 10,000 people, so we've captured 1/3 of the market for the entire city. And everyone who views the site is local. But I still hear companies balking at our advertising rates complaining that the CPM (cost per thousand views) is way too high. At the average $2.80 CPM, we'd make $9 per month. In a city of 10,000 people, what would get more attention: a cheap Google ad, or your name sitting at the top of the only digital media outlet in the city? That's worth a $10 CPM, I think. It's about the percentage of the market captured, not raw view numbers.
- baby 8y agoI find this article meh. I've been blogging for something like 15 years so here's my take: * If you've been wanting to blog, stop pissing around, open a blog on wordpress.com and start writing. That's my first advice to anyone. Don't waste time on the technicalities, just write. You can move your blog to another platform later. * Be regular. This is hard. I fail this rule most of the time. But a successful blog is a blog that's been going on for ages. I've posted 461 posts since 2013 on www.cryptologie.net and that's why it is working well. * Do not look for perfect posts. You are not writing a book. A blog is to share knowledge in a quick way, or to share what's on your mind. No hesitation, once you have something, publish it. People might call you out for saying something wrong, fine, that's free publicity and you'll have learned something new. * Mix short posts with long posts. It's impossible to keep writing high quality content and long blog posts. So write small ones from times to times to fill in between better blog posts. This is what make people keep going on your blog. It's like a facebook news feed, it needs to have something every time people check it. * Write on trendy subjects. What did you learn recently that could be helpful to other people? What did you have trouble to learn because there was no good resource on the subject? You could be that resource. What is google trend saying? Are there any trendy topics in your field? What are people talking about recently?
- paulpauper 8y agoYeah and the blue background and font also annoying. But he is not American, so maybe it works better for him and his readers. TBH, there are few tips or rules. I have seen successful blogs that employ virtually every kind of format and style. Some that follow all the rules an others that break them all. First-mover advantage seems to be important. I'm sure the first person to blog about Bitcoin did well, but the 284th guy? Probably not so much.
- bonestamp2 8y ago> the blue background and font also annoying Using a blue background with white text used to be an "easy reading mode" in Microsoft Word (with a simple checkbox to enable it). So, I wonder if there is some research behind this color scheme.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoSome very useful tips in there. Especially the first one: "No one has time to read your article, write the first lines like they’re a TLDR." Not a good idea for fiction! but it's essential to save a reader's time. If the main topic is buried 3-4 paragraphs down, I've already left. Note that this one person is getting significant attention writing about a specialized topic (EDM). That probably characterizes most blogs that attract much attention. A few people managed to be 'generalists' in the early days (e.g. Kottke), but you're probably better off trying to find a congregation that feels under-represented online and is looking for a home. (It's not a blog, but, e.g., deviantart.)
- rchaud 8y agoThere's also a technical reason for writing the TLDR up top. When a web crawler indexes a page for search results, they capture a snippet of the first <p> tags that follow the <h1> of the title. That snippet is what is shown on the results page, and really is what determines whether a user wants to click the link shown by the search engine.
- CM30 8y agoDon't meta descriptions usually do this? I've never seen people use the post content as their meta description, at least not when they've got access to something like Yoast or the SEO Framework or what not.
- Aardwolf 8y ago"Start a Newsletter." why?
- rchaud 8y agoTo promote new content to an already-converted audience. Compare the site engagement of users who willingly gave you their email address, to a user who landed on your page from a search query, browsed it and left the site. What are the chances that that user will remember the name of the site and make a return visit? Your page could have been one of 10 he looked at to get an answer to his question.
- ghaff 8y agoNewsletters can work for a very targeted topic that has an audience that it equally targeted on that same topic, e.g. AWS. But there's real email fatigue out there. I know some folks who are reasonably well-known in the tech space who have tried newsletters at various times but gave up (as did I) because people generally just don't want another weekly or biweekly email. (And even if they give up their email address, they mostly don't open or read.) It's too bad in a way because a newsletter is a nice format for short form topical news and commentary on articles in a way that blog posts really aren't.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- asciimo 8y agoWhat's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g. disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own feedback facility is risky.
- PuffinBlue 8y agoI turned off comments and allow people to contact me through Twitter or email. That seems to be such a high barrier to entry that the contact I do receive is almost always because someone disagrees strongly or because they are very thankful for something they learned. In either case, it stops pointless crap like 'first'.
- veddox 8y agoJust out of interest, how active was your blog? (hits/day?) I don't have a commenting feature on my blog - partly because I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet, partly because I'm worried about potential spam. But I would like to get some feedback from my readers, so that's a bit of a conundrum...
- KajMagnus 8y agoI built a Disqus like commenting system, where you can configure manual review of [the first X posts a new person posts at your blog]. If they write say 5 make-sense interesting things, hopefully thereafter it's ok to auto approve their subsequent posts. — How does this affect (if at all) how you feel about spam? (Here it is: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments ) If you think someone might become a spammer, and is just posting "I like it" and "Wow great" comments to get past any first-comments manual reviews, then you can mark that user as a possible threat, and forever get notifieid about his/her posts (before they're made visible).
- veddox 8y agoThat looks good! However, I already had my sights set on Isso (https://posativ.org/isso/ https://posativ.org/isso/). My static site generator coleslaw (https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw) already offers a plugin for this, so it is a more natural choice...
- lcfcjs2 8y agoHacker news is for hackers, not for freaking journalists.
- Brajeshwar 8y agoI started writing (aka blogging) in 2002, on Blogger with a custom commenting plugin developed by an indie Russian developer. Movable Type was the in-thing before finally settling down on WordPress. During the early hay-days, my site witnessed million visitors monthly and boasted of Google PageRank of 8. If I can recollect, I'm sure the Alexa Rank was also in one of the top 100 or 1000 for a pretty good amount of time. There were advertisers willing pay good dollars that the site easily earned few thousands each month. There was No YouTube, No Twitter, No Facebook, No Github. My free and open source "downloads" would choke the servers and (mt) would gladly host at a good discount to handle hundreds of GBs of download each month. I used to write anything and everything that fancied me. Readers "Digg" it and many other aggregators love reposting the articles, and the site won enough awards that I stopped adding "badges" to my site. But then, I learned more, realized that many of my articles are shallow and pretty much stopped writing. If I pick up a topic, I research and saw that many have written about it, then I just don't write. I write once a while, sometimes lengthy and personal opinions. Traffic has dropped so much that my current blog is grandfathered by WPEngine on a free tier, shielded by CloudFlare and is just surviving. Here is what I believe one should do; * Pick a niche but don't be afraid to go wide once a while. * Ok to go short (Seth Godin style) or lengthy journalistic style writing. * If it is a personal blog, be personal. * Have a content strategy, plan and just write. * Learn to re-purpose content. Your YouTube video can become a Podcast audio, the transcripts can become a blog post, interesting text/quotes from your post can be fodder for your social media. * Keep Writing.
- jamietanna 8y agoAlternatively [I blog as a form of self-documenting, under the term blogumentation](https://www.jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/ https://www.jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/). My audience is me. Sometimes my audience will be my colleagues, or strangers on the Internet, but it's always written for me first!