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If you want to develop a personal brand in some area, such as entrepreneurship, then you need to run a blog focused on that issue. At the risk of exaggerating,

If you want to develop a personal brand in some area, such as entrepreneurship, then you need to run a blog focused on that issue. At the risk of exaggerating, “my whole life” blogs are for young people and for people who don’t care about building an audience. LiveJournal was for teenagers. The more specific the blog, the more you are able to develop an audience for that niche. By contrast, a blog that contains everything in your life will only appeal to your friends. There is a deceptive almost exception: people who are funny. They seem to break the rule. They seem able to talk about whatever they want, and they still have an audience. But in that case, they actually have a niche: humor. Everything they write is funny, so people who like humor read it all. But unless you are reliably funny, stick to narrow topics.

esmeraldametteo 2y ago
[dead]
lolinder 2y ago
Seconded. It might sound shallow, but I've unsubscribed from several blogs and YouTube channels when they stopped consistently delivering the expected type of content. It doesn't even matter to me if the content slows down or pauses while the creator works on other things, what matters is that the signal:noise ratio of the feed is high. Likewise, I've chosen not to subscribe to coworkers' blogs because they were this "my whole life" style blog and I was only interested in their technical observations.
- OJFord 2y ago
  That's hard though, because I agree, but then also some of my favourites do a mix that I enjoy, and it just happens that they discovered the mix before I discovered the channel I suppose. If people followed that as a rule, I wouldn't get to watch Clough42 doing electronics one week, 3D printing the next, and then attaching it to a milling machine or something and testing it out. I wouldn't get to see Marius Hornberger pause woodworking to do a load of electronics/printed/mechanical upgrades to his drill press, or 3D print parts for dust collection, or build a new machine. I suppose there is Matthias Wandel's approach of the 'main' channel being kept mostly pure woodworking (but still machine builds, wood strength tests, wooden mouse maze experiments) and then a 'random stuff' second channel for the electronics, more experiments, Lego, recently metal lathe, etc.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Yeah, this is fair. I do think that changing your mix is much more risky than just having a mix. There is also a difference between what you're describing and the "my whole life" blog, which is that the mixes themselves form a proper category. It's not a woodworking channel that takes a pause for philosophical musings, it's a maker channel that happens to spend a lot of time on woodworking. My guess is that the "my whole life" blog doesn't work well for developing an audience because the sum total of all of your interests is unique or nearly so—there will be very few people who actually want to read about every one of your hobbies and interests. If you want to connect with people you need to identify a subset of your interests that are shared as a set by many others.
  - zrobotics 2y ago
    I would argue that clough42 does fit a niche where all the videos are on a topic, in his case it's doing very ambitious projects/modifications that the average home-shop person wouldn't attempt. Another example would be nighthawkinlight, who does a wide range of projects but with a strong home-shop/diy science bent. If either of these channels started posting stuff like cooking or video essays, I would potentially unsubscribe. Those are both things that I also subscribe to, but having the different things all on one channel makes it too unpredictable what kind of content I'll be clicking on. For a blog, many of the same rules apply. A blog relies on more external links into the content than a YouTube channel, but you still want a consistent theme. If I click a blog from here or another site, if the content is good I'm likely to read other articles and either bookmark/rss/subscribe via email. If the articles are a mishmash of topics, then I'm less likely to want to engage further since I don't know what I'll be getting. And you want that dedicated core group for a blog to be successful, since those people are the ones who will start posting links to your stuff on other sites. An example from HN that comes to mind is brr.fyi, I know I'm not the only person who subscribed to his email notifications, since everytime I've gotten an email I've also seen the article posted to HN, so other people have been following and have been faster at posting the new article as a HN story than me.
- willsmith72 2y ago
  i'd go the other way. you might lose some "subscribers", yes, but in their situation it's less about subscribers and more links and serps. in this case, i'd go the simplest possible, especially with their goals being improving writing and building a personal brand if the goal was dominate seo for a specific niche, yes definitely separate it out. google will reward you for staying on-topic. > most traffic is coming from me sharing links to new content, or people searching for a particular thing that is indexed by Google, thus leading to a specific blog post
- rubslopes 2y ago
  That's the reason I never got much into Twitter. I'd follow someone for a specific topic, but then more than half of their posts was about sports, politics...
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Depends on if you like their personality or not. Twitter was always for the person and eventually other types of accounts focusing on niches came around.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  For this reason, I (want to) implement a tag-based newsletter where I can tag a post as "tech" rather than "lifestyle" and only those subscribed to the "tech" tag will get notified, whether by email or by some other way.
swyx 2y ago
i split my blogs (see my bio) for these reasons. people need to know what theyre getting in order to subscribe. if you have the volume of output to support multiple blogs, then do it (most people cannot)
tharakam 2y ago
IMO, is this Good advice for hacker news itself. It contains diverse topics in one stream, such as history, Botany, and Coding. You can argue it is a feature or a bug.
surprisetalk 2y ago
how do I convince people that I'm funny

esmeraldametteo 2y ago

[dead]

lolinder 2y ago

Seconded. It might sound shallow, but I've unsubscribed from several blogs and YouTube channels when they stopped consistently delivering the expected type of content. It doesn't even matter to me if the content slows down or pauses while the creator works on other things, what matters is that the signal:noise ratio of the feed is high. Likewise, I've chosen not to subscribe to coworkers' blogs because they were this "my whole life" style blog and I was only interested in their technical observations.

OJFord 2y ago
That's hard though, because I agree, but then also some of my favourites do a mix that I enjoy, and it just happens that they discovered the mix before I discovered the channel I suppose. If people followed that as a rule, I wouldn't get to watch Clough42 doing electronics one week, 3D printing the next, and then attaching it to a milling machine or something and testing it out. I wouldn't get to see Marius Hornberger pause woodworking to do a load of electronics/printed/mechanical upgrades to his drill press, or 3D print parts for dust collection, or build a new machine. I suppose there is Matthias Wandel's approach of the 'main' channel being kept mostly pure woodworking (but still machine builds, wood strength tests, wooden mouse maze experiments) and then a 'random stuff' second channel for the electronics, more experiments, Lego, recently metal lathe, etc.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yeah, this is fair. I do think that changing your mix is much more risky than just having a mix. There is also a difference between what you're describing and the "my whole life" blog, which is that the mixes themselves form a proper category. It's not a woodworking channel that takes a pause for philosophical musings, it's a maker channel that happens to spend a lot of time on woodworking. My guess is that the "my whole life" blog doesn't work well for developing an audience because the sum total of all of your interests is unique or nearly so—there will be very few people who actually want to read about every one of your hobbies and interests. If you want to connect with people you need to identify a subset of your interests that are shared as a set by many others.
- zrobotics 2y ago
  I would argue that clough42 does fit a niche where all the videos are on a topic, in his case it's doing very ambitious projects/modifications that the average home-shop person wouldn't attempt. Another example would be nighthawkinlight, who does a wide range of projects but with a strong home-shop/diy science bent. If either of these channels started posting stuff like cooking or video essays, I would potentially unsubscribe. Those are both things that I also subscribe to, but having the different things all on one channel makes it too unpredictable what kind of content I'll be clicking on. For a blog, many of the same rules apply. A blog relies on more external links into the content than a YouTube channel, but you still want a consistent theme. If I click a blog from here or another site, if the content is good I'm likely to read other articles and either bookmark/rss/subscribe via email. If the articles are a mishmash of topics, then I'm less likely to want to engage further since I don't know what I'll be getting. And you want that dedicated core group for a blog to be successful, since those people are the ones who will start posting links to your stuff on other sites. An example from HN that comes to mind is brr.fyi, I know I'm not the only person who subscribed to his email notifications, since everytime I've gotten an email I've also seen the article posted to HN, so other people have been following and have been faster at posting the new article as a HN story than me.
willsmith72 2y ago
i'd go the other way. you might lose some "subscribers", yes, but in their situation it's less about subscribers and more links and serps. in this case, i'd go the simplest possible, especially with their goals being improving writing and building a personal brand if the goal was dominate seo for a specific niche, yes definitely separate it out. google will reward you for staying on-topic. > most traffic is coming from me sharing links to new content, or people searching for a particular thing that is indexed by Google, thus leading to a specific blog post
rubslopes 2y ago
That's the reason I never got much into Twitter. I'd follow someone for a specific topic, but then more than half of their posts was about sports, politics...
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Depends on if you like their personality or not. Twitter was always for the person and eventually other types of accounts focusing on niches came around.
satvikpendem 2y ago
For this reason, I (want to) implement a tag-based newsletter where I can tag a post as "tech" rather than "lifestyle" and only those subscribed to the "tech" tag will get notified, whether by email or by some other way.

swyx 2y ago

i split my blogs (see my bio) for these reasons. people need to know what theyre getting in order to subscribe. if you have the volume of output to support multiple blogs, then do it (most people cannot)

tharakam 2y ago

IMO, is this Good advice for hacker news itself. It contains diverse topics in one stream, such as history, Botany, and Coding. You can argue it is a feature or a bug.

surprisetalk 2y ago

how do I convince people that I'm funny