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Blogging for 70 days got me 14K unique pageviews. Looking to improve further

Hello Fellow Hackers!

I have recently started blogging. Mostly writing about productivity, self-improvement, and learning.

What I Have

So far I have published 15 posts (I publish once a week on Monday with an occasional Thursday post). There are three categories of post lengths: 2K+ words, ~1K words, and ~500 words. I do research and write high-quality articles on the aforementioned topics.

I share my posts on:

  • Linkedin (~1,1K connections) - usually I get around 10-15 reactions and an occasional comment;
  • Facebook (1.2K friends) - I am not very active and usually I get around 10-20 reactions with 1-2 comments;
  • Twitter (91 followers) - the highest engagement in comparison with the number of followers - I get around 5-10 engagements when sharing my articles;
  • Hacker News - I made it 3 times to the first page of HN and the biggest amount of traffic came from it.

Infrastructure setup:

  • I have a statically generated blog based on hugo;
  • I have a newsletter with 46 subscribers on MailChimp at the time of writing;
  • I use Google Analytics (so far 15.7K pageviews out of which 14K are unique);
  • I configured Google Search Console as well (org. search show poor results though: 2.7% CTR, 28 clicks at 1.02K impressions);

My Background:

I am a full-stack software engineer with 10+ years of experience and a data visualization engineer (7+ years) and I have a passion for psychology.

What I Need Help With

1. Blogging engine

I am using a statically generated site as it was fast to set up and offers me a certain degree of flexibility (e.g., I can add interactive charts written in D3.js into my articles). However, I am not sure about the scalability and maintainability of it when having 100+ articles. I have recently found out here on IH that there are such alternatives as Ghost and Substack, but haven't wrapped my mind around them yet. What would you suggest here?

2. Growing My Audience

Do you have any suggestions on how to grow my audience and the number of subscribers? Don't get me wrong — I am very grateful to have 14K views and I realize this is a lot (an avg of 200 views/day), but I'd like to reach a bigger audience.

I can allocate a budget of around $100-$200 for some FB or Google Ads once a quarter, but I am not sure that will help. I was thinking to generate more content and then do something about it.

Also, maybe you have any platforms in mind where one can promote through qualitative content?

3. Any other things you think are worth mentioning?

EDIT: my blog is at https://iuliangulea.com

  1. 3

    Loving the simple design! A few of the posts seemed interesting so I've bookmarked your blog to check them out later.

    Have you thought about "rebranding" from a personal blog to a blog specific to productivity, self-improvement and learning?

    1. 1

      @giall thank you so much for your feedback and I'm glad you liked it!

      Regarding the blog rebranding — that is an interesting idea to think about. I was planning to have a personal blog to strengthen own brand and I'll have to do some research on the Pros and Cons of such a rebranding. Thanks for the idea!

      1. 3

        To present a counter argument to that idea; I just read this yesterday.

        https://www.nateliason.com/blog/start-a-blog

        Should You Pick a Niche?

        I don't recommend picking a niche for a personal site. This site talks about the most random assortment of topics possible. There's marketing, writing, reading, productivity, finance, psychology, hunting, a card game, dog training, drugs, sex, it's varied to say the least.

        1. 1

          Thanks for the article! Nat's story is inspiring and he provides some nice points on the topic.

  2. 2

    Can't agree more with the value of blogging. It's why I created this: https://contentkoala.com :D

    Could be useful for you?

  3. 2

    I used Ghost for years, Wordpress, and now I use Hugo.

    Generating HTML can be a bit slow since the engine needs to convert every markdown pages to HTML page. You might feel it with thousand of pages. You can always implement some cache, though.

    On the other side, there are many advantages to statically generated websites:

    1. It can be a pain in the neck to update whatever else: Wordpress, Ghost, CMS.
    2. It's way more secure. Wordpress is so used, it's very often attacked. I remember having requests to websites trying to hack wordpress admin, even if the websites are not even wordpress-based.
    3. HTML without backend is very fast, if you don't go crazy on the JS side.
    4. Hugo, in particular, is fast, partly because Golang is fast.
    5. A static website is simple. It means, in my experience, less bugs.

    I love Hugo. By far the best blog engine I used.

    1. 1

      @MatthieuCneude thank you for your elaborate perspective on the blogging engine topic!
      I agree with all your points and some of those even helped me decide in favor of a SSG in the first place.

    1. 1

      @joshspector thanks for the comment and for the links! Now I have what to read during this weekend :)

  4. 2

    I can't say for point 1, but I could help with point 2.

    Since you are writing high quality posts, I would suggest repurposing said content on your social channels.

    What do I mean by that? Break down the best bits of the articles and share them on your social media.

    For example, on Twitter: make a thread with 3-4 key insights and, at the end, link your article or sign up form. Something similar with LinkedIn.

    But be careful!

    Repurposing does not mean copy-paste from one platform to another. You need to ADAPT the content to make it feel organic to the platform.

    Let me tell you, I have 150 followers on Twitter and this month I am about to reach 100k ORGANIC impressions (not Paid). Imagine if you could redirect just a 10% of that to your blog.

    If you have any questions, I would gladly help you further!

    Best!

    1. 1

      @alexllr wow, that is impressive! And congrats on 100k impressions!
      I am not as active on twitter as I would like to and I understand what you mean by adapting content. It requires also some time to do it right.
      Thank you for the advice, I will definitely try it out!

  5. 2

    Google ads tend to be very expensive but if you can potentially find a very specific and unusual but popular enough keyword that connects to a very specific blog post, that might work. For example in packaging, which is my business, "Bubble Mailer" might be $5 a click but "Pink Metallic Bubble Mailer" might be only $1.01 a click and has better conversion anyway -- given that it lands on a page to buy pink metallic bubble mailers in multiple sizes.

    1. 1

      @duff thank you for the comment. You have an interesting use-case. I will consider this approach in case I proceed with google ads in the future.

  6. 2

    To answer (1), statically generated blogs are very flexible and usually scale quite well even with a crazy number of pages, I'd say 1000 pages is considered low. Not sure about Hugo specifically but Eleventy is very fast!

    Since you're a software engineer you should have no trouble sticking with a SSG instead of using a third-party service or hosting your own CMS. If you have something like Github Pages or Netlify CMS set up to rebuild your blog every time you push an update, you should be all good! :)

    1. 1

      Nice to hear some use cases with statically generated blogs with thousands of pages! Thanks for sharing your experience with that.

  7. 2

    Hi @askanium congrats on your success!

    Beyond pageviews, do you have other success metrics you're looking at? For example, are you using your blog to grow your business, get more customers, etc? And have you looked at the paths unique visitors take to your site once they've landed on a page? Do you have calls to action on your blog post that drive readers somewhere (for example, to your mailing list)?

    Another tactic you can use is syndicating your post on other platforms. Since you're a developer I would consider cross-posting on DEV Community. I've written a blog post that explains syndication if you're interested.

    Re: blogging engine—I can definitely recommend moving to a lightweight CMS if you can. I once managed a company blog that was built with the SSG Jekyll and it had thousands of pages. Depending on the content and if we were using large images, it would take anywhere from 5-15 minutes to deploy a post. That's not fun at all. I've used Ghost and it's a solid choice if you want to continue writing and editing in Markdown. Substack is good if you're thinking about monetizing your audience in the future, but I would highly recommend you continue publishing on your personal blog since you already have invested in increasing your site authority.

    Hope this helps!

    1. 1

      @radiomorillo thank you for your comment! I have read your post a couple days ago and it actually made me consider this approach for some of my posts.

      Re your questions:

      • besides attracting visitors, I am looking to grow my subscribers list;
      • I don't have a product to sell yet, but I have some plans of infoproducts (based on the content I write) and a gift-based product idea that I think I could promote through my subscribers database;
      • I have looked at the user behavior once they're on the blog, but I believe I have to write more posts for some relevant pattens/insights to emerge from that. I am trying to have inner links between different posts on the blog for each article (at least 1-2 links);

      It's interesting how you mentioned syndication as today I started looking into what sites I could syndicate some of my posts. Synchronicity at its best.

      I used Jekyll previously with another blog, but switched from it in the end. I have to allocate some time to read more about Ghost though. The current concern that I have with my SSG is whether it has everything set up correctly for SEO (like SEO "infrastructure," if I can call it like that).

      1. 2

        That makes sense! Here are some initial recommendations:

        • I would recommend adding a call to action to all your future (and existing) blog posts driving users to your email list.
        • And if you haven't already, set up a welcome email sequence or at least a single welcome email that's triggered once someone signs up. That way you've already nurtured your list in preparation for announcing your info-products, whenever they arrive
        • If you haven't already, in addition to site analytics send an email to existing subscribers to ask them directly for feedback. How can you help them? What content made them sign up? What questions to they have about [TOPIC]? Even if you get a handful of responses it's still more insight that you didn't have before, and it's always good for engagement!
        • Re: SEO infrastructure, I completely understand what you mean. One tool that would help is Screaming Frog SEO, which you can use to crawl your site. It'll search for metadata, tags, titles, etc, and put them on a spreadsheet for you to see. It'll give you a high-level view of your existing SEO architecture as a starting point.

        Hope this helps!

        1. 1

          Stephanie, I am very grateful for such great recommendations.
          And I am looking forward to implement all of them!

  8. 2

    For (1), I would ask yourself "What do I need that Wordpress can't handle?" For the example you gave, there are plugins that can embed d3.js into Wordpress posts. There are tons of excellent caching and CDN plugins for generating static content for each post. What are the specific things that should be easy? Why is Wordpress not the best tool for that job?

    I'm not telling you "you should use Wordpress." I'm just proposing an approach - start with the most obvious answer and invalidate it. The way you invalidate it will help point to the solution you want.

    1. 1

      @jakevoytko thank you for your comment.

      Those are all valid questions and it is a great approach.
      In my case, the most obvious solution was a SSG, and I went with it. For now it works perfectly, but I wonder whether things will change once I grow.

      The reason I haven't considered WP is that it feels cumbersome and it's in PHP, which I would have to learn (but I prefer to spend my time on other things).

  9. 2

    Congrats on the 14k page view. that's really impressive. Can you share a bit your keyword research and selection? Regarding the Blogging engine, Is there any reason you're not considering WordPress?

    1. 1

      Thank you, @auyadhu!

      Truth to say, I haven't done any keyword research. When I started writing, I had in mind a plan for the first 3-4 months of the topics I would like to cover. Some topics I knew very well (I have covered some of those while lecturing at the Technical University in the city I live), for others I only had some ideas. I just wanted to write and so it happened that the ideas I have elaborated on proved to be interesting to others.

      1. 1

        Gotcha! any reason you're not considering WordPress for blogging engine?

        1. 1

          Hey @auyadhu, yes, WordPress feels cumbersome and it's in PHP, which I would have to learn (but I prefer to spend my time on other things).

  10. 1

    Love all of the stuff you have done so far @askanium. I think you could look at Wordpress as the next step for creating a more robust blog and website for your content. As you continue to grow your content library, you can also begin to repurpose some of your content and make it fit for purpose across other social platforms, eg: Instagram or Twitter. You can take snippets of your content and begin to distribute it on these platforms to get more traffic back to your site.

    Let me know if you have any questions.

  11. 1

    Please use all the money you have to target people that will subscribe to you with ads. Add as much people as u want. U can also make a whiteboard video explaining why they should read it and how will it benefits them. Also, tell them why they read from u other than some big website.

    1. 1

      @Simplehacker that is the first impulse that I had, but I would like to make a decision on whether to spend money or not based on some data/information.
      No offence, but deciding to "use all the money I have" based on a comment from a complete stranger on the internete that suggests that without providing some examples/evidence on why it is indeed a good decision is not how I would like to make my decisions. Do you have some examples / use-cases for good ROI after spending money on ads?
      I also think there should be some sort of formula that takes in several factors (e.g., topics, reader persona, etc.) that can influence the outcome of spending, etc.

  12. 1

    Hugo is created in Go language and that makes it the fastest static site generator in the market. You can generate few thousands of blog pages within a second. As the result is static it can scale much better than anything dynamic like Wordpress. You can host the result on Netlify or Vercel. Both use CDN and are very fast. You can also use the headless cms or just use markdown.

    1. 1

      @ckissi yes, I have played with Go itself for some time and I chose Hugo partly because of Go.
      I use S3 + CloudFront for now.

  13. 1

    Wow. Great success.

    1. Check out a headless cms like Contentful. You can add MDX (or whatever type of code you use if you don't do react) with a little bit of tweaking.
    2. Experiment with more aggressive signups by for example placing a signup in the middle of the article (always a balance of user expereince)
    1. 1

      @victorbjorklund thank you for your recommendations! I was thinking that my signup form might be too low at the bottom, so will definitely try tweaking its position on the page.

    1. 2

      I think it would be better if you can add it to the post itself.

      1. 1

        Great suggestion. Thanks @farukaydin!

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