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In my first month of blogging, I learned a ton of lessons, that have helped me improve as a writer, as a communicator and as a person....
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Nice! Lot's of good points here. Particularly the section about outlining resonates for me. Wrote something about that as well a while ago: dev.to/kahlil/just-fucking-ship-ta...
Glad you liked it! Saved your post for later.
I like your analysis of audiences on dev.to, reddit, hacker news, and facebook. I've always had a sense that these platforms are different. Seeing their properties written down concisely gave me a deeper sense of understanding of the factors that go into choosing a platform that fits what you are writing, or else choosing what to write based on the platform.
I had never heard of decision fatigue before. I encounter the problem of starting to write something, then getting stuck on a problem and getting distracted, and ultimately not making progress. I'm going to try switching to other areas in my outline if I run into a problem, and come back to the problem with fresh eyes later.
Overall I appreciate your perspective and attitude on writing. It seems a healthy attitude. I learned a lot from hearing how you approach the process of writing :)
P.S. Putting your outline for this meta-blogging post is meta to the extreme ;)
Apologies if I missed this, but what is the metric/are the metrics behind "does well/succeeds" and "doesn't do well/fails?" I'm inferring from the context that you're talking about number of readers and/or engagements?
I'm curious because these days, tech blogs is my business/living, so I've unexpectedly become a connoisseur of methods for evaluating the success of blog posts (at least as they relate to the success of an entire site/blog).
That's a very good question. For me, engagements and views are the primary metric because I don't have a call to action. If I had to a call to action, conversions would be my defining metric. Obviously, the accuracy of your measurement is heavily dependent on how well you understand your content and the market. For example, if I post a machine learning post on Dev.to and it gets 1000 views, that's a pretty good post. If I post the same content on Reddit and it gets 10000 views, that is equally successful (relatively).
With Dev.to it's really hard because they don't really give me a ton of information. With my personal blog site, I have a couple google analytics scripts that present my posts in terms of average read time, % of twitter follow, etc. I think comments are the best way to validate "successful" post because if you get comments but minimal views, it probably means its a good post for the wrong audience.
Thanks for taking the time to ask a great question like this. I should have talked about it in the core post!
I think defining success for blog posts could be its own standalone post, if not series.
Personally, I've developed a content planning system that involves each post having a (usually KPI-driven) mission. So, for me, success is "does it achieve the mission."
Missions might involve raising awareness of a concept (page views), getting people to click through to an asset (CTR), courting buyers (conversion rate), reaching new readers (social shares), or simply hobby blogging on my own site (did I enjoy writing the post). Anyway, it's a big topic.
FWIW, regarding measuring dev.to content performance outside of the medium itself, you can see in aggregate how it drives traffic to your site with your analytics. For instance, I'm attaching an image of referrals for one my sites over the last few days. If you go from there and add the secondary dimension of landing page, you can see which bacaklinks on dev.to are interesting readers the most and driving click-throughs, especially if you use UTM codes in those URLs.
Anyway, if you hadn't seen that before, I've found it's a helpful way to measure potential audience growth potential of share/syndication sites, even when those sites are sort of opaque with internal metrics and analytics. You can't really tell, say, time on page, but you can infer that it's pretty good if you have a high click-through rate on a link near the bottom of the post.
I am the former EIC of Linux Magazine. I've worked with hundreds of writers that never wrote previously. Writing technical articles is not the same as writing a novel; the parameters of what's required is different. However, the writer still needs to be effective.
One critical point: an outline is only effective if you know exactly what important information you want to relay to your audience. Identity the 1-3 points you want your readers to walk away with. (The information is the hook.) The rest of the outline should come along more readily.
You will want to establish context or even define who your audience is and describe what you want to relay and why it is important. Then you can provide your arguments, evidence, code examples, etc. Then close and hopefully you have achieved your goal.
hmmm....i think the hardest is more towards the imposter syndrome in being exposed as a fraud?
I had it every time I post a blog post cause I tend to worry about negative feedback from my post but I do it anyway.
The scariest that I had is probably the one I had written about is Why be a Full Stack Developer that is a bit controversial which during that point of time I was ready to combat any negative comments for it due to the subject matter.
Great points raised above.
I'd like to suggest people spend a bit of time on the title or "headlibne" as this is what first draws people.
Mainly; undersell. Titles or headlines often end up saying things that are not actually in the actually article. If a word is not in the article, don't put it in the title.
Instead?
Seek out the most unusual, eye-catching aspect of your article. For example, for this article, I might have written "Blogging - spending the longest time can bring the worst result", then structured the article around that premise.
Or, more positively, the shortest time brings best results!
I really should have had a section on title, can't believe I forgot. That's also a great tip Jason! I usually try to condense as much value in one sentence as possible.
I can definitely relate! My most popular post thus far I thought was going to be a very niche post. It caught the right eyes at the right time and has been by far my most "successful" post.
It's nearly impossible to guess what is going to stick so the lesson for me boils down to: keep trying and keep improving.
It's hard not to blame it on "luck" but it's really just too complex to analyze. There's definitely a lot of steps that you can take to make things predictable.
That's a great lesson to take away. Thanks for the great feedback!
Another tip, use tools like Grammarly.
To make the text appealing, one should consider all its aspects — from coherence to monotony. What I recommend is to find an excellent service with different writing tools like EduCat. If you're a writer, that platform will come in handy.
Haha. Fun reading. Thanks for publishing. Nice read.
Wow... "lossless blog compression" this term said it all.Great post and meaningful insights.
I’m so glad someone else likes that other than me! Thanks for the kindness, appreciate it.
Great tips Ryland!💯 Thanks for sharing them!😊
This is EXACTLY what I needed to read today! Thank you so much for this and all of the amazingly helpful tips it contains!
Thanks for this awesome post!💪
How much do you think Twitter helps? I've been staying away from it but I'm realising I need some way of getting my content out there.