What I learned in ten years of blogging

Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by baby on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @12:27PM (#18717368)

This is not how you get a successful blog.

Look at popular blogs, and when I say popular blogs I mean blogs where people keep on checking your posts, participate regularly in conversations, etc. They are all highly active.

On the other side, blogs that post rarely AND that are famous are very rare. People tend to forget about them. Note that a post that buzzes thanks to a link on HN or reddit doesn't make it a popular blog.

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by heavyset_go on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @12:30PM (#18717416)

This is true.

If you run your blog like a business, as in you have a real need for growth and to turn a profit, you will need to pump out content on a regular basis.

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by ghaff on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @12:57PM (#18717689)

>If you run your blog like a business

That is a big "if" though. A lot of blogs don't try to be businesses. Personally, I use my personal blog to write about things I'm interested in writing about whether it's hobby-related stuff or technology. About a year ago I was thinking about starting a separate travel and food blog I was going to be more serious about and quickly realized I really couldn't be bothered.

If you're going to run a blog as a business, you also probably need to have a clear area of focus and I'm just not interested in doing that. A lot of my tech stuff also ends up running in other places these days where it gets better readership anyway.

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by baby on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @07:09PM (#18721281)

if you're taking advice on blogging, it's to have a successful blog. Otherwise why would you be taking advice? Just write whenever you want and whatever you want.

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by coldtea on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @12:57PM (#18717683)

Well, Daring Fireball hardly writes 1-2 posts a month (and usually small), and yet..

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by heavyset_go on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @01:05PM (#18717763)

Daring Fireball is an outlier and a holdover from another era.

For every Daring Fireball, there are 100 blogs neither you nor I have probably heard of that are profitable businesses.

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by baby on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @07:10PM (#18721289)

That's not true at all. He writes several posts a day.

https://daringfireball.net/

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by coldtea on Thursday December 20, 2018 @09:07AM (#18724954)

That's no true at all. Where did you get that?

He averages about 5 posts a month, and has months where he writes 1 post:

https://daringfireball.net/archive/

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by 1123581321 on Thursday December 27, 2018 @06:06PM (#18773468)

Click the RSS feed or the homepage. The archive is only to essays. The more frequent link summaries keep his audience engaged between essays.

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Re:What I learned in ten years of blogging by rchaud on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @02:05PM (#18718324)

I think you can still have a high-activity blog that publishes infrequently, if you're able to get them to sign up for email notifications.

I don't know if people really check blog websites daily anymore. Stuff like news, sports, Reddit/FB/IG are an exception; people expect there to be updated content daily.

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