For the last 5 years I posed at least one post per week. I like to take a moment to celebrate this milestone and look back on how I did this and what I learned in doing so.
The NDC 2017 had a long-lasting effect on me. Especially the presentation by
Troy Hunt on “Hack Your Career“ gave me the motivation to blog more and showed me a way to do it.
That way is the “One Input, Multiple Outputs” approach, in which we aim to get multiple results out of the work we do. Instead of just fixing a bug, we add tests to prevent the bug from coming back, update the documentation and refactor the code to prevent others from making the same mistake. Not only does this approach improve the quality of our code, but it will also save us time in the future when we don’t have to fix regressions.
With all the heavy lifting of understanding the problem already done, it only takes a tiny bit of additional time to create a minimalistic example and write the blog post on the technical aspect of the problem.
You need to fix a problem with your user group site? Blog about it. You are learning a new programming language? Document your learning progress with blog posts. Need to do something with MS Office? Document the process to save time for the next time. Whatever task you do, if it takes time and is important, there is probably something to blog about in it. You just need to find it.
If you keep doing that, not only do you get enough ideas to blog about every week. You also create a good documentation of your work that you can share with your team and everyone else.
Measurable effects
Before June 2017 I had weeks where I published multiple posts and then months in which I wrote nothing. Some posts got a bigger audience, but most did not get many readers. The page views stagnated around 3’000 to 4’000 per month.
As I got into the one post per week rhythm, it took 3 months until the numbers started to increase. That increase continued up to the currently 50’000 to 60’000 page views per month (a 15x increase):
The big effect on the page views comes from two main sources:
- Google loves a constant rate of change on your site. Publishing new content in a fixed rhythm got me a much better placement in the search results as when I posted a few posts in one week and then nothing for a month. I settled on Tuesday at 7 pm and kept publishing at that time (scheduled posts are a great help for that).
- A post a week gives you 52 posts per year. In comparison, I wrote 57 posts in total in the 3.5 years before June 2017. Not only leads this to a lot more posts, but it also gives a lot more opportunities to hit a topic that finds its readers.
Readers are unpredictable
I wrote long and detailed posts that only a handful of people noticed, and I spat out posts with only a few words like “Format JSON in Sublime Text 4” that got more than 17’000 page views. It is impossible to predict which post will find its audience.
Many of my posts find their audience only after months. It may take up to 6 months until I see a bigger increase of page views through organic traffic. Don’t give up if your post does not immediately find its audience, it may take time until that happens.
Tips for your blog
Based on my experience I have these suggestions for your blog:
- Write and publish at a constant pace. It does not need to be a post a week but try to find a rhythm and stick to it.
- A queue of a few posts that are ready to publish allows you to keep your publishing pace when something comes up and you cannot write for a few weeks.
- It is unpredictable what posts will get lots of readers. Therefore, do not bother about what may be of interest for others and write about the things you find interesting.
- (Especially for software developers) Spent your time on writing posts and not on writing a blog engine.
Parting thoughts
Putting my thoughts into blog posts is for me a helpful way to better understand the problem and to offload the mental work of remembering details. If something comes up, I make a quick search in my blog to figure out if I already had blogged about that specific problem. If so, I can go directly to a solution, without trying different Google results.
I can highly recommend blogging as a way to share your knowledge. It may help others and more often than not, it helps you to remember how to solve a specific problem. Try it!