Starting a programming blog
Hi!
I recently bought a domain where I'm starting a website. I'm going to write articles and tutorials about programming. Instead of writing extremely long content posts once a week, I'm going to write short posts every day. My goal is to write one post every day for one year, and see how it goes.
I love programming, learning new things and teach other programming. That is the main reason why I'm starting this site, but I'm also going to make an SEO experiment out of this, because I want to learn more about that too.
I don't have any marketing budget, so I guess most of the traffic will come very slowly. Since I'm doing a SEO experiment out of this and people sometimes likes to follow progress, I'm keeping track here on Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/tim-niets). I created a new product here where I'm going to posts stats like visitors, revenue and so on.
Do you have any experience blogging everyday?
Yep I have a small "blog" or info site called SuperJavascript.com.
This is a programming blog, and it was an SEO experiment. Traffic wise it has done OK considering how little content is on there. I did keyword research to pick the best keywords to write about, I made sure the hosting is fast using netlify and keeping assets down, and got some backlinks by submitting the content about a bit and guest blogging.
The real issue with this site, meaning it is almost impossible to extract money from it, is people just bounce off once they find out what they want to know.
I think a technical-only blogging site is going to struggle. Anything I can write about I can probably find on stack overflow anyway.
My lesson from this is to make a blogging site around a theme/topic where you can build a brand. Look on Hacker News for what gets people riled up!
Do something original, that people will come back to check addictively. If I do another blog it would be based on that kind of idea.
Nice site :-)
Thanks for the great advice! What you are saying makes good sense. Since I'm also doing this to learn and become a better programming I think I'm going to stick with the original idea. But I'll keep this in mind in case I need to pivot :-)
What is your end goal with this? Are you trying to build an audience to try and sell a product or a service in the future? In that case:
The problem with the blog approach is that no single blog post these days is going to be powerful enough to convince people to sign up and leave their email.
My 2 cents:
Instead of spending time and ultimately money building up a blog over the period of a year, why not build the product or service you want to sell now?
Then, when it's time to sell it, calculate the actual cost of running a blog for a year (your time + opportunity cost), and put the same amount of real cash into buying a thing that usually people have to pay for to get, and then give it away for free with a simple landing page.
One focused high value item is way more likely to get people excited to leave their emails and potentially start following you or start using your product.
Ironically, I've written a blog post about this. 😂 But since, I've stopped blogging all that much, and have focused on building stuff that I want to sell.
Please take this as just an opinion. In no way am I suggesting that your blog will not be cool or interesting. It's just that people's threshold these days for what is "interesting enough" or "worth paying attention to" is way skewed towards instant gratification.
Hi and thanks for answering!
My goal is to build an audience yes. I haven't thaught too much about monitization yet, because that is not the main objective here. I'm tired of trying to build something for the money, so this time I'll just try to create good content to help people learn programming.
Maybe I'll create an introduction to a programming language and if you like it, you can pay a couple of bucks for the last parts or something like that.
But the main goal is just to create content and hope that someone will like it. I feel like I'm becomming a better programmer my self when I write down what I know and what I learn, so it's a win for me anyway :-)
Yes, writing down thoughts is one of the most beneficial things to do all around! I'll be sure to check them tutorials out! 😊
Teach people programming and sale it
If you are getting better in programming!
Never give up!