I’ve been blogging since 2002 , more like 2000 if we take hacking articles I wrote on Geocities while playing Yahoo games. Most of blogs I build were out of passion however I sold them all back in 2014 for bit over 6 figures.
Feel free to ask anything around bloggging, yes I still “blog” however not on my own sites.
How long did it take you to develop an organic userbase of medium-large size?
What did you utilize to enhance that growth?
Did you find more traffic/monetization via niche blogs or all-purpose/variety blogs?
How is blogging different in 2018 vs 2008 vs 2000?
Is "freelance writing" actually worth one's time?
1.Usually it took me somewhere between 3-6mo for traffic to start hitting the page.
2.SEO was No.1 and Quality of content.
I monitized blog by selling links and spots on side bar. Adsense a bit but did not make as much as selling spots on sidebar. Tbh I hated ads so stuck to only 2 sidebar spots kind of like DEV, I used that money to pay off servers and my workers.
It is very niche related where before you had more categories of blogs like “food”,”tech” etc.. also blogging these days is very fake. Before you could read articles longer than 1000 words now barely anyone makes it to 500 words and call it “post” , most I hate is where they reference twitter cards and that’s about it with bloated ads of all kinds. Also I started to stop visiting sites with Auto play videos and half way article ads..
I think so. I used to be really bad at writing like suck at it in English ( I write and speak 5 diff. languages). Also it’s something you look into 5y or 10y later and saw wow? I wrote that? Lol!
I appreciate your answers. They'll help in the building of my own brand/blog/presence.
I've been looking at self-hosted analytics (like Matomo), since Cloudflare's is good but not good enough (unless you pay).
Re: 500 word "posts"... lol, I hear you.
Re: SEO... I'll have to start digging. I always see that it's important for webdesign but I know very little about it.
Re: Writing... I've been personal writing for some time (only English), so I definitely know that feeling.
Thank you!
If you want organic traffic from non social signals SEO should be one of the biggest concerns at all times.
Heard that.
A new journey begins.
Almost 20 years ago, obviously, web was so less saturated with information and covered topics than nowadays.
If one would like to start his own blog on IT/learning adventures (asking for a friend), where would you suggest to go:
A) finding niche topics and describing his own experiences in details OR
B) connecting broader things and explaining complex topics/practices/know-hows in simple manner
? 🙃
Quality is what matters most to me. Well written blog posts is what makes you stand out. While I am not best in my English writing, I used to have editors help me achieve goals to put out quality content.
A) I find most topics to talk about tech stuff on sites like reddit, stsckoverflow, twitter.. I see a problem, I know how to solve it and I write about it.
B) passion is what will drive you to more complex and know how’s topics.. so for me it was always a B. Solving problem for readers.
I am definitely following along to see your answers to the other questions too, but did you blog as a fulltime job or did you do it as a sidegig? If as a sidegig how did you balance everything as your blog grew?
I worked as Net Engineer who was traveling a lot. I wrote my articles while on Train,Bus,Airplain.. I would write 10-20 articles and spread them across one week, once my blog took off and I started hiring editors and writers I had more time to focus on my DevOps career. In nut shell, some watch a 2hr movie.. I would use those 2hrs to write 2 articles .. while waking up at 5am go to work.
What sort of connections have you made (b/c of your blog) over the years that has helped your career?
When I was running a C# community site (csharpfriends) I was invited to Seattle to meet the ASP.NET team.
It didn't help me much in career , but made amazing connections with some of the top VCs, Entrepreneurs and Blog owners who were in Tech industry at that time.
Nice, make sure you follow up on your connections every now and then.
How has the concept of blogging evolved? Have any innovations been meaningful?
It changed to “Get famous quick” and while it works for short time.. people stop thinking about how to grow in long term. Just look at the music industry and blogs you might’ve read 5y ago. How did they change?
Tech sites pushing click bait articles about Politics so they can share it to 500k followers and get 3k clicks. While some that are still around produce quality content and authority that still to date get traffic to one post they pushed it back in 2012. What you read today is oldschool tomorrow because some other hot topic took off on social media. Don’t get me wrong I read those short and up to date posts, but I find 0 quality in them that I would go back to it and reference it somewhere else.
If you were to start blogging on your own sites again, what topics would you go with?
True Tech (Details and Quality) No bias paid shit articles that most sites nowadays push tru. Example: Mashable and TechCrunch are not what they used to be back in the days.
What do you think about writing in two languages on the same blog? it's a good idea?
I actually did that, as I speak and write 5 languages.
Had something like de.blogname.... si.blogname... etc.. It worked well to get additional traffic , so if you are to do something like that, make sure its not on same 'blog feed' at least that is my advice to you.
Just for sake of curiosity: what are those languages?
Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian (aka Bosnian,aka Serbian, aka Croatian), English, Russian and German.
Born Slovene.
Fam is Serbo-Croatian Mixed
Learned English in school and live in US now
Learned German while I left the Balkan war (Lived in Germany for 7y)
Learned Russian as I lived in Germany with 600 Russians.. (pretty easy to learn slavic language when you are Slovene and Speak Serbo-Croatian)
If you don't blog on your own sites, where do you blog?
Do you do any blogs/articles for pay?
I blog once a week on two sites that I offer some services, but it's for pure SE organic visitors.
I don't do paid articles anymore as sites I used to blog for are large corps now and I don't have desire to write about "Trump [insert keywords here] said..." 😛
However, I did start peek an interest on sharing knowledge via YT, and most definitely I spend more time on GitHub contributing knowledge and work.