6 ms·

What I learned from a month of blogging and 250k visits

135 points by robfitz 15y ago

sandee 15y ago
"Tweaking a button and seeing conversions increase 8-fold is a beautiful thing. Seeing an hour of work turn into 120k visits is magical." If you are a starter at HN, then do not get misguided by the quote above. If you are aiming for using blog writing as SEO for product marketing and reaching out to new customers then it is good effort. But if you are looking to get eyeballs for adv revenue then stop right there. There are better things you can do with your time.
- babuskov 15y ago
  When is the last time someone earned a lot of money from blog? Maybe five years ago. These days blogs are only used to get traffic, either directly or via SEO, to pages where you sell the real product to the customer.
  - ryanwaggoner 15y ago
    This is completely false; thousands of people are still making loads of money from blogging. It's just not novel anymore, so you don't see any articles about it. And yes, they've also realized that all those subscribers are good for more than just ads, so they're upselling them books and videos and seminars and whatever else.
  - mootothemax 15y ago
    When is the last time someone earned a lot of money from blog Certain blog posts of mine have made several hundred dollars. I refuse to believe that I'm the only one. Edit: I'm talking about blog posts written in the last five or six months, just to clarify.
    - mike-cardwell 15y ago
      I've made a few hundred dollars total over the past year or so. I don't blog for ad revenue, I blog for the fun of it. Basically all I do is stick a couple of relevant Amazon affiliate links on most of my posts. Whilst it's not a lot of money, it more than pays for the Linode server that my blog runs on.
      - babuskov 15y ago
        Few hundred dollars over a year is nothing. Point of my message was that there are only a few people in the world who could live just by blogging and researching topics to blog about all day long.
        mike-cardwell 15y ago
        Yeah, I know it's nothing. That's what I said. However, if I can make that amount of money for very little effort, blogging occasionally; somebody who does it full time, should be able to earn 50 times that. A reasonable salary in most of the World.
  - petenixey 15y ago
    For a long while I actually made about $500/month from my blog, webkitchen.co.uk. That was even 2 years after I wrote the last post. I know this sounds like a "you can too" commercial but I actually did. I posted it on text-link-ads.com and sold a load of text-link ads (i.e. google juice) at the bottom of the page. From that more marketers discovered me and then bought ads direct on a year upfront basis. The amount paid ranged from about $20/month (of which I'd see half) with TLA to $100/month (I kid you not) for direct sales. It's whittled down to nothing now but it worked out about $10k or so of revenue over the two or three years after I finished blogging which wasn't too shabby. Obviously Google could wake up one day and kill you for it but since I didn't have any audience I also wasn't bothered by that. (Great button btw Rob :)
  - acangiano 15y ago
    I make thousands of dollars from my blogs. I wrote a book on how people can do the same (or at least close to it) here: http://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-blogging http://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-blogging
    - simon 15y ago
      A great book and one that I am reading diligently as I work up to re-entering the world of blogging. I stopped blogging half a dozen years ago as I was making no money and using plenty of time. This time I intend to manage the time aspect more carefully and apply some gentle moneytization techniques.
      - acangiano 15y ago
        Thank you, Simon. I appreciate your positive remarks about my book.
- robfitz 15y ago
  Completely agreed. If you don't have a product, the benefits are more along the lines of finding your voice, learning what resonates with the people you care about, and getting comfortable putting content out where people will see it. I mentioned the numbers in the sense that I used to think traffic and on-site behaviour was a magical thing that "happened". It was more about having that "aha moment" of how it all works than about doing anything particularly profitable. Given all that, I think new & future founders would do well to try blogging for a while, reaching out to whoever your future customers would be. It lays a bunch of strong foundational skills that are tough to internalize through reading case studies.
  - sandee 15y ago
    Nothing wrong to marvel about getting 120K readers to your post.But in a startup community like HN, people put much more value on how many conversions happened, or in this case how many real critical comments from which you learnt something , how many new feed subscribers etc
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
This is a good article. I liked and upvoted it. Nicely done. Having said that, I feel as if I must in a good-humored way poke fun at this type of article. The vast majority of the articles I see on HN talking about overnight success at something (How I made 30K my first month! How I turned 40K visitors my first week into $3000! Etc) are actually using HN as a marketing channel. So when I see articles that are 30 minutes old with dozens up upvotes, and some kind of promise to tell a tale of high traffic, it makes me laugh. Yes, with that kind of market traction I'm sure you had that many visits. Next month we'll be reading about the really cool traffic stuff that happened this month, and this article is part of that. It's actually pretty cool if you think about it: by providing us with something we want (advice on blogging) the author is actually becoming a better blogger. Lots of nice recursion there. Please don't take that the wrong way -- I mean no disrespect. I'm certain everything is on the up and up, and like I said, great article. I just think that readers can easily get mixed up, that's all. As a reader you could start thinking that HN was primarily a marketing venue. While I love HN and love promoting my own stuff and seeing other ideas (Need books to learn marketing and start-ups? Try http://hn-books.com http://hn-books.com), HN is essentially a one-shot deal. As one other commenter pointed out, there are probably better things to do with your time than chase an audience on HN. Blogging is a great activity. Chasing eyeballs, at least to me, turns blogging into something a lot less fun.
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  "Chasing eyeballs, at least to me, turns blogging into something a lot less fun." An important corollary to this is: chasing eyeballs without any way to retain them is neither fun nor productive. The article -- which I quite enjoyed -- does a nice job of pointing that out. And, while the point may sound obvious, it's certainly nontrivial and not immediately intuitive. And even if you have nothing tangible to sell, you're still "selling" your blog. So you've got to make it consistently engaging to the people you've decided to target. The first mistake many bloggers make is to write for themselves. They assume that an article they found interesting to write will also be interesting to read -- or worse, that an overarching blog topic they love is interesting to a big group of people. Not always the case. You can write about your passions, and you can always lure in a bunch of outside readers with a well-marketed post. But don't expect everyone -- or even 99% of those whose attention you got -- to stick around if they don't care for the rest of the material on your blog. I'm not advocating that everyone write big, general-interest, broad-topic blogs. The internet has enough of those. So writing about a niche domain is fine. Just be consistent, and stick within that domain. Deviate every now and then if you have something amazing to say. But don't be one of those blogs that's ostensibly about X, but veers off into Y and Z greater than 50% of the time. If I came to your blog to read about startup marketing strategies, I really don't care what you have to say about college basketball, or Call of Duty, or the pricing of the Harry Potter Blu-ray set. Don't write just anything that comes to mind. Have the discipline to stick to a domain and a "brand." Joel on Software is about Joel on software; it's not "Joel on Software and Kittens and Foreign Film Reviews and Fixed-Gear Bikes and What He Saw at Starbucks The Other Day."
Peroni 15y ago
I'll weigh in with some context to back up your traffic stats. My blog is basic and I don't have a product to sell. Generally just me ranting about stuff that winds me up. http://www.voltsteve.blogspot.com http://www.voltsteve.blogspot.com The post with the most views was 'My experiences as a recruiter on Hacker News'. Now, granted, a post with that title is going to attract a lot of views but the HN post had almost 400 upvotes and to date, that particular post has had 21k Pageviews and approximately 90% of that came directly from HN.
robjohnson 15y ago
Good article about getting at the core of what users ALREADY want. I think that this is the crux of the confusion for most people. Many startup entrepreneurs want to make vitamins when they should really be making aspirin.
ofca 15y ago
I have had the same experience when my 'Is tumblr a bot fest?' post got #1 on HN. I went from 10 views a day to more than 1k a day. Those types of things are crazy. My only advice is - dont let it go to your head. Keep writing. Keep thinking. Keep hustling.
jccodez 15y ago
250k visits, did you get any customers? I could not tell a quick scan of the article.

135 points by robfitz 15y ago

"Tweaking a button and seeing conversions increase 8-fold is a beautiful thing. Seeing an hour of work turn into 120k visits is magical." If you are a starter at HN, then do not get misguided by the quote above. If you are aiming for using blog writing as SEO for product marketing and reaching out to new customers then it is good effort. But if you are looking to get eyeballs for adv revenue then stop right there. There are better things you can do with your time.

babuskov 15y ago
When is the last time someone earned a lot of money from blog? Maybe five years ago. These days blogs are only used to get traffic, either directly or via SEO, to pages where you sell the real product to the customer.
- ryanwaggoner 15y ago
  This is completely false; thousands of people are still making loads of money from blogging. It's just not novel anymore, so you don't see any articles about it. And yes, they've also realized that all those subscribers are good for more than just ads, so they're upselling them books and videos and seminars and whatever else.
- mootothemax 15y ago
  When is the last time someone earned a lot of money from blog Certain blog posts of mine have made several hundred dollars. I refuse to believe that I'm the only one. Edit: I'm talking about blog posts written in the last five or six months, just to clarify.
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    I've made a few hundred dollars total over the past year or so. I don't blog for ad revenue, I blog for the fun of it. Basically all I do is stick a couple of relevant Amazon affiliate links on most of my posts. Whilst it's not a lot of money, it more than pays for the Linode server that my blog runs on.
    - babuskov 15y ago
      Few hundred dollars over a year is nothing. Point of my message was that there are only a few people in the world who could live just by blogging and researching topics to blog about all day long.
      - mike-cardwell 15y ago
        Yeah, I know it's nothing. That's what I said. However, if I can make that amount of money for very little effort, blogging occasionally; somebody who does it full time, should be able to earn 50 times that. A reasonable salary in most of the World.
- petenixey 15y ago
  For a long while I actually made about $500/month from my blog, webkitchen.co.uk. That was even 2 years after I wrote the last post. I know this sounds like a "you can too" commercial but I actually did. I posted it on text-link-ads.com and sold a load of text-link ads (i.e. google juice) at the bottom of the page. From that more marketers discovered me and then bought ads direct on a year upfront basis. The amount paid ranged from about $20/month (of which I'd see half) with TLA to $100/month (I kid you not) for direct sales. It's whittled down to nothing now but it worked out about $10k or so of revenue over the two or three years after I finished blogging which wasn't too shabby. Obviously Google could wake up one day and kill you for it but since I didn't have any audience I also wasn't bothered by that. (Great button btw Rob :)
- acangiano 15y ago
  I make thousands of dollars from my blogs. I wrote a book on how people can do the same (or at least close to it) here: http://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-blogging http://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-blogging
  - simon 15y ago
    A great book and one that I am reading diligently as I work up to re-entering the world of blogging. I stopped blogging half a dozen years ago as I was making no money and using plenty of time. This time I intend to manage the time aspect more carefully and apply some gentle moneytization techniques.
    - acangiano 15y ago
      Thank you, Simon. I appreciate your positive remarks about my book.
robfitz 15y ago
Completely agreed. If you don't have a product, the benefits are more along the lines of finding your voice, learning what resonates with the people you care about, and getting comfortable putting content out where people will see it. I mentioned the numbers in the sense that I used to think traffic and on-site behaviour was a magical thing that "happened". It was more about having that "aha moment" of how it all works than about doing anything particularly profitable. Given all that, I think new & future founders would do well to try blogging for a while, reaching out to whoever your future customers would be. It lays a bunch of strong foundational skills that are tough to internalize through reading case studies.
- sandee 15y ago
  Nothing wrong to marvel about getting 120K readers to your post.But in a startup community like HN, people put much more value on how many conversions happened, or in this case how many real critical comments from which you learnt something , how many new feed subscribers etc

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

This is a good article. I liked and upvoted it. Nicely done. Having said that, I feel as if I must in a good-humored way poke fun at this type of article. The vast majority of the articles I see on HN talking about overnight success at something (How I made 30K my first month! How I turned 40K visitors my first week into $3000! Etc) are actually using HN as a marketing channel. So when I see articles that are 30 minutes old with dozens up upvotes, and some kind of promise to tell a tale of high traffic, it makes me laugh. Yes, with that kind of market traction I'm sure you had that many visits. Next month we'll be reading about the really cool traffic stuff that happened this month, and this article is part of that. It's actually pretty cool if you think about it: by providing us with something we want (advice on blogging) the author is actually becoming a better blogger. Lots of nice recursion there. Please don't take that the wrong way -- I mean no disrespect. I'm certain everything is on the up and up, and like I said, great article. I just think that readers can easily get mixed up, that's all. As a reader you could start thinking that HN was primarily a marketing venue. While I love HN and love promoting my own stuff and seeing other ideas (Need books to learn marketing and start-ups? Try http://hn-books.com http://hn-books.com), HN is essentially a one-shot deal. As one other commenter pointed out, there are probably better things to do with your time than chase an audience on HN. Blogging is a great activity. Chasing eyeballs, at least to me, turns blogging into something a lot less fun.

jonnathanson 15y ago
"Chasing eyeballs, at least to me, turns blogging into something a lot less fun." An important corollary to this is: chasing eyeballs without any way to retain them is neither fun nor productive. The article -- which I quite enjoyed -- does a nice job of pointing that out. And, while the point may sound obvious, it's certainly nontrivial and not immediately intuitive. And even if you have nothing tangible to sell, you're still "selling" your blog. So you've got to make it consistently engaging to the people you've decided to target. The first mistake many bloggers make is to write for themselves. They assume that an article they found interesting to write will also be interesting to read -- or worse, that an overarching blog topic they love is interesting to a big group of people. Not always the case. You can write about your passions, and you can always lure in a bunch of outside readers with a well-marketed post. But don't expect everyone -- or even 99% of those whose attention you got -- to stick around if they don't care for the rest of the material on your blog. I'm not advocating that everyone write big, general-interest, broad-topic blogs. The internet has enough of those. So writing about a niche domain is fine. Just be consistent, and stick within that domain. Deviate every now and then if you have something amazing to say. But don't be one of those blogs that's ostensibly about X, but veers off into Y and Z greater than 50% of the time. If I came to your blog to read about startup marketing strategies, I really don't care what you have to say about college basketball, or Call of Duty, or the pricing of the Harry Potter Blu-ray set. Don't write just anything that comes to mind. Have the discipline to stick to a domain and a "brand." Joel on Software is about Joel on software; it's not "Joel on Software and Kittens and Foreign Film Reviews and Fixed-Gear Bikes and What He Saw at Starbucks The Other Day."

Peroni 15y ago

I'll weigh in with some context to back up your traffic stats. My blog is basic and I don't have a product to sell. Generally just me ranting about stuff that winds me up. http://www.voltsteve.blogspot.com http://www.voltsteve.blogspot.com The post with the most views was 'My experiences as a recruiter on Hacker News'. Now, granted, a post with that title is going to attract a lot of views but the HN post had almost 400 upvotes and to date, that particular post has had 21k Pageviews and approximately 90% of that came directly from HN.

robjohnson 15y ago

Good article about getting at the core of what users ALREADY want. I think that this is the crux of the confusion for most people. Many startup entrepreneurs want to make vitamins when they should really be making aspirin.

ofca 15y ago

I have had the same experience when my 'Is tumblr a bot fest?' post got #1 on HN. I went from 10 views a day to more than 1k a day. Those types of things are crazy. My only advice is - dont let it go to your head. Keep writing. Keep thinking. Keep hustling.

jccodez 15y ago

250k visits, did you get any customers? I could not tell a quick scan of the article.