How to be a Sort of Successful Software Blogger

Show & Tell - May 25, 2020

Michael Lynch (@deliberatecoder)

https://decks.mtlynch.io/show-and-tell-2020-05/

Biggest bang for your buck:
Pay for one professional review

• You’ve got lots of blind spots that a professional editor can identify.
• A good editor costs $75-150 to review 2,000 words.
  • Benefits compound for all future writing.
• I still work with my editor about once a year for tune-ups.
• Details: Why a Freelance Editor Was a Gamechanger for My Blog

Picking topics:
start at distribution

Search

• Continuous stream of new readers
• Relies less on luck than landing a hit on social media
• Not as exciting
  • No rush of going viral

Reddit (Pros)

• Less reliant on luck in my experience
  • If I have a post that matches the subreddit, it does well.

Reddit (Cons)

• Seemingly well-matched subs have many pitfalls
  • How many subscribers?
  • Do they accept external links?
  • Can I submit links to my own blog?
  • Do blogs like mine ever make it to their front page?
• Discussion quality varies by subreddit
  • Some are filled with armchair experts

Hacker News (Pros)

• The startup holy grail!
• Huge amount of readers
• Intelligent, professional discussion
  • Mostly
• Causes big names to see and tweet about my posts
• Broad range of interests

Hacker News (Cons)

• Luck is a huge factor in hitting front page
  • Some posts get ignored for multiple submissions then hit top spots on the front page
  • See Victor Zhou’s post history
• Hard to predict what they’ll like

Twitter

• Never been a big source of readers for me
• Sometimes my posts do well there after getting exposure on Reddit / HN
• The dream: snowball effect
  • A 10k-follower user RTs, then a 100k-follower, then @BarackObama
• Reality: Never happens to me
  • Probably the exception rather than the rule

This is why I can’t blog about blogging

• There are forums and social networks for bloggers, but…
  • They don’t accept external links
  • They don’t want people popping in to promote their own posts
• Difficult to rank for almost any search term related to blogging

Posts about software / technology are easier to share

• Example:
  • GreenPiThumb: A Raspberry Pi Gardening Bot
  • Suitable for:
    • Hacker News
    • /r/programming
    • /r/raspberry_pi
    • /r/homeautomation
    • Raspberry Pi forums

Traffic != success

I blog for a few different reasons

Why I blog:
Clarify my thinking

• Writing out a post forces me to organize my thoughts
• The clarity changes my future behavior and strategy

Why I blog:
Lead people to my products

• “Content marketing”
• Resurrecting a Dead Library
  • Low traffic but leads people to Zestful
• My Second Year as a Solo Developer
  • Led to a surge in What Got Done signups

Why I blog:
Improve SEO for my products

• mtlynch.io
  • Ahrefs DR: 53
  • Moz DA: 46
• Any project I start has a decent backlink out of the gate

Why I blog:
Establish credibility

• I get good response on cold emails
• I think it’s because my email signature includes my blog
  • Not a random, faceless stranger

Why I blog:
Vanity

• If I’m being honest
• Fun to have people discuss my work
• Nice to get feedback

Posts that did well

Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

• Unique pageviews:
  • First week: 339k
  • First year: 449k
• Why it did well
  • People are interested in Google
  • People related to frustration with corp bureaucracy
  • Story with a beginning, middle, and end

How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human

• Unique pageviews:
  • First week: 62k
  • First year: 123k
• Why it did well
  • Taught a skill that’s widely useful
  • Different angle from most articles on the topic

Building a Homelab VM Server

• Unique pageviews:
  • First week: 923
  • First year: 75k
• Why it did well
  • Approaches building homelab PC as a beginner
  • Easier for the reader to follow along than similar articles

Commonalities of the hits

• Tell an engaging or fun story
• Teach something broadly useful
• Repackage existing ideas in a way people enjoy
• Topics matches social media channels that accept external links

Posts that performed poorly

Note: The majority of pageviews come from visitors who arrived at my blog from another article.

Retrofitting Apps for Cloud Storage with Zero Code Changes

• Synopsis: Forcing cloud storage backends onto legacy apps.
• Unique pageviews:
  • First week: 300
  • First year: 1.6k
• Why it performed poorly
  • Topic is overly narrow
  • People would never find it via search

How to Hire a Cartoonist to Make Your Blog Less Boring

• Unique pageviews:
  • First week: 274
  • First year: 5.9k
• Why it performed poorly
  • Blogging about blogging is too oversaturated for search
  • No viable social media channels to share it

How to Grow Quickly and Never Turn a Profit

• Synopsis: Why I gave up on Is It Keto
• Unique pageviews:
  • First week: 586
  • First year: 3k
• Why it performed poorly
  • Social: Not exciting to read about failure unless it’s spectacular
  • Search: Wouldn’t rank for any useful queries

Commonalities of flops

• Teach something overly specific
• No social media channel that will accept them
• No path to discovery through search
• Title is not self-explanatory

Tracking article ideas

• When I get new ideas, I write a title and shortform notes
• I reorder the list based on what I’m most interested in writing
• Topics can spend years in my queue

How I rank ideas

• How excited am I to write this?
• Do I have something unique to contribute?
• Is there an audience interested in the topic?
• Do I have a viable a channel to reach that audience?

Writing my first drafts

• Just get all my ideas onto the page
• Add headings if I can think of them, but don’t worry about structure
• Just keep writing continuously and don’t stop to look anything up
  • I put TODOs in places where I want to add a link, look something up, or add an image.

Editing

• Takes the longest time and is the most mentally taxing
• Good writing crystallizes ideas, explains them clearly and succinctly
  • This is really hard!

What it looks like

Why so much time editing?

• Results are not linear with effort
• 10-100x difference being on front page of Google/Reddit/HN
  • Another 5-10x difference being in the #1 spot

Other tips

The hook: why should people read it?

• This is the most common mistake I see.
  • Bloggers assume people have infinite patience to read their post and find the value.

The hook: why should people read it?

• Establish in the first few sentences:
  • What is this post about?
  • What value will they gain by reading it?

You have two or three sentences to hook them. A paragraph if you’re lucky.
-My editor

Original artwork:
criminally underused

• Immediately makes your post stand out
• Costs $20-60/image
  • Depends on artist and level of detail
• Make a cover image that’s 1.91:1 aspect ratio
  • Displays nicely in Twitter, Facebook, and (sort of) Reddit

More details: How to Hire a Cartoonist to Make Your Blog Less Boring

How hard is it to broaden accessibility?

Small changes often make my posts accessible to a much broader audience.

I stored the files on S3.

vs.

I stored the files on S3, Amazon’s cloud storage service.

Read your post aloud

• You catch so many more errors this way
• Run your post through a grammar checker / spell checker
  • Grammarly’s good, not great
  • Don’t blindly trust your grammar checker

Questions?

• I love talking about this, so feel free to ask me after too.