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I started blogging a week ago, I have already hit 10,113 visitors and got featured on 4 websites, here's how.

Header

Hi there everyone 👋

Around a week ago, I shut down my side project Good Code for reasons I listed on my IH post here. I don't really like sitting around doing nothing, so I thought why not start blogging and grow a personal brand, it's something I've never tried before.

I publish my first post on the 29th of October, a case study for my personal portfolio that you can view here, the purpose of this post wasn't to rank or receive traffic, it was just for my personal portfolio, so we'll remove this one out of the equation.

Moving to the my first 'real' post, How I Failed 2 Startups In Under a Year and Lessons Learned, 684 visitors in one day.

visitors

For those of you who don't know, I use Hashnode for blogging. I have been enjoying using it a lot. You can point a custom domain completely free of charge, and your posts are automatically posted on their feed.

Traffic Sources for My First Article

  • Dev.to:
    👁️525 views

  • Reddit
    ⬆️ 19 upvotes on /r/SideProject (considered good for the subreddit, was on the front page for ~2 days)

  • Hashnode
    ✨ Featured on Hashnode.

Now this article was when things got really interesting, a case study I wrote about Notion's onboarding experience.

Views

Traffic Sources for My Second Article

  • HackerNews:
    ⬆️ 33 upvotes, enough to get me 4.9k visitors just from HN.

  • Sidebar
    👁️ 416 views

Now I can analyze every post with the traffic sources, but I'll keep it short. My articles were featured on websites such as daily.dev, webdesignernews, Sidebar, HackerNews, Reddit, and many more.

On websites such as Reddit, I posted the entire article with a link to my blog at the end, whereas websites such as daily.dev and Sidebar, they handpicked the article and featured it themselves.

To offset the huge boost in short-term traffic, I chose keywords that will help me rank in the future. Google hasn't indexed all my pages yet, but my average position on Google at the moment is 33, for only 5 articles so far, that's pretty great!

Let me know if you guys have any questions in the comments below and I'll be happy to answer them!

  1. 2

    Nice work! Thnx for sharing! It might be a stupid comment, as I don't know Hashnode or your personal expertise, but it's quite easy to get your page indexed by google manually.

    1. 2

      Thank you for taking the time to read :)

      Google has disabled the 'Request Indexing' feature recently if that's the one you're talking about.

      1. 1

        Ah okay, I wasn't aware of that. Thnx. I usually just upload my sitemap for indexing.

  2. 1

    Moemin - sent you an email about something unrelated.

    1. 1

      Just sent you a reply.

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