I spent ~200 hours on blog post and got 3 likes
Hi, I was writing a very important blog post on blockchain programming to grow my audience and share knowledge: https://web3.coach/golang-blockchain-filesystem-and-merkle-trees
It took several weeks and yesterday I shared it.
Result? 3 likes.
The problem I am observing is that the topic is quite hard, the niche is pretty small.
What do I do? Do I change my niche?
I promoted it on Twitter, LinkedIn, HackerNews, Reddit, and via my newsletter of 400 people.
It got few likes here, few upvotes there, and some good feedback from industry experts, nothing more.
Should I continue in the topic or change my product/niche?
Update
Here is the tweet itself https://twitter.com/Web3Coach/status/1290302655231918091, if someone wanna judge it - maybe I didn't write it in an engaging way.
I also talked to 2 "influencers" so the tweet count jumped a bit.
How sure are you the topic you are covering is interesting enough to your audience for you to spend 200 hours on it?
What's worked really well for me: I've started treating content like I would treat an idea for a product or startup. Before committing a bunch of time to it, put out the minimal amount of content you can - a reply on Indie Hackers, a quick tweet thread. If it generates interest, then I make it more long-form blog, or newsletter. If it falls flat, understand why and tweak it, or more on to something else.
I wrote more about this if of interest.
Good strategy.
Came here to drop another example of Matt's great content: https://producthunt.taskablehq.com/Checklist-for-Launching-on-Product-Hunt-c282188c52474d0d9d8c0ffb7e26de64
Umm if you went that indepth...convert it to an ebook and publish that for free. Break up the one post into smaller chunks and maybe do a video summary.
repurposing content is always a great idea
Thank you for engaging @Eharris04 and @valeriefenske, I read though on FreeCodeCamp writing guides that readers like more one big post over a series of many small ones. WDYT about that?
I will follow the advice and I will break it into a Twitter thread tomorrow.
All advice should be applied as it fits. There is no one size fits all. I would recommend leaving it where you have it, and then seeing if you can either create a quick PDF (ebook) or something smaller. As someone who has written blogs and ebooks before I understand wanting to get your work used and viewed. So I'm suggesting more ways to achieve that.
You sound a bit salty. Let me start by stating that success doesn't come overnight, but usually requires continuous effort. The thing is, it's incredibly difficult to invest continuous effort into a topic you do not like personally.
The thing with blog posts is that traffic is drip fed over a really long period. I have had blog posts which suddenly exploded a year after I wrote them. On the other hand I have several blog posts which I invested a serious amount of time into which 'only' get about 60 visitors a week, and a comment every now and then.
If I were you I'd continue to blog about whatever you like, but please don't try to derive a certain amount of self worth from it.
I am not salty at all, but I understand if the title makes it look like :) Just trying to find a pattern or a reason why certain blog posts don'get much value.
In comparison I wrote another blog post in 3h https://web3.coach/golang-how-to-handle-errors-five-rules which generated more than 100 subscribers.
So, yea just trying to find out what to write about and what not :)
Hahaha interesting thing! Just a guess, but I think beginner friendly content will generally do a lot better than in depth explanations. The simple reason is that there are a lot more beginners whom will need to learn the basics, before finding a specialization. Once they get to the point they can go really in-depth the pool will be much more dilated.
This definitely confirms the behavior. Anyway, this tutorial was needed as an extension for my book (beginner friendly) so the students have a place to grow.
Will take this into account for the next tutorials.
Did you promote it with paid advertising? I'm pretty sure that running a Twitter ad to it will give you a lot more impressions/reach/likes/shares for the number of hours you've dedicated to it. Sometimes $10/day can go a long way.
Hi @hvazquez07, nope. I didn't want to engage in paid advertisement. Wanted to build an organic grow first to figure what works and doesn't. I talked to 2 influencers though so the tweet count jumped a bit: https://twitter.com/Web3Coach/status/1290302655231918091
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Definitely good reminder about the effort != reward.
How do you judge if a topic has enough demand? Views count? Do you compare it against something?
The thing is I really enjoy my niche, Go, blockchain and frankly, it's a super important topic underlying the biggest dev protocol out there, so it is a beautiful niche from my dev perspective... just not sure if the niche is big enough, or it's not still too early for it.
It's funny bc I wrote a blog post on a much broader topic Go + Errors in ~3h and it generated 100 subscribers https://web3.coach/golang-how-to-handle-errors-five-rules
Definitely good idea about the book chapter. That was the goal but it would took maybe 3x more so first I wanted to test the interest with a blog post before converting it to a book chapter and do all the coding around it.
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I may experiment with other formats but eventually it will come down to the demand. Wau, that's a lot of Swift tutorials haha :)