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37 Comments

Who here has their own blog? Is it worth the hassle?

Hey IH,

I’ve been thinking of redesigning and improving my personal website (braydentw.com) along with adding my own blog for updates on projects and milestones I am working on.

Is there anyone here that have their own blog? How do you mesh it with your workflow and audience?

(feel free to paste the link to your blog in the comments too, I don’t mind)

  1. 7

    I've been writing monthly retrospectives on my personal site since January. Which I guess is a blog.

    Honestly, I mostly write it for myself because of the self-accountability, reflection, and goal setting. And I don't mind if people read it or not. Although I should probably promote it more.

    It depends on why you want to write a blog. Is it to write project updates and celebrate milestones? Or for some other reason (audience building maybe)? Do you care if people read it? Do you like writing blog posts in the first place?

    1. 1

      Can you post the name of the site?
      Having side projects can be a lonely affair, and it would be interesting to read about how other people do it

    2. 1

      Thanks! Well, I’ve wanted to start a blog to mark my progress as an indie hacker and developer. I would share #buildinpublic updates, projects I’m working on, and maybe small little tutorials on how to create something.

      1. 1

        It sounds like you should definitely give it a go!

        1. 1

          Awesome, it’s on my list now!

  2. 4

    I'm almost at my 100th weekly curated newsletter, and I just passed one year of publishing an article (almost) every week.

    I've never been so consistent with writing and it's changed my life.

    This is for rosie.land btw.

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing Rosie! Question: has having that audience resulted in a noticeable, greater support in your other side projects?

  3. 4

    While I’m not doing any “build in public” posts yet, I think it’s useful to have a blog and share what we learn along the way. Some of my posts from years ago that cover very specific problems in a rarely used programming language get visitors almost daily.

    Even if there is not much traffic to the blog on our personal domains, we can cross-post to platforms like Medium and Hashnode and set the copies on our own site to be the canonical version. That way, I can reach my audience where they hang out and still improve my search ranking over time with little additional effort.

    1. 2

      This is really good advice. My son has started an automotive blog - torquedaily.com - and I have been telling him to also post on Medium. Your suggestions are great here to link between them

      1. 1

        Absolutely! Medium and others make it easy to set the canonical URL, which lets us avoid the issue of Google identifying two copies as duplicate content.

        I wrote a little about how this works in one of my articles.

        1. 1

          Good article. I needed something to distract me from some difficult work, so good timing!! I've saved that Dom - like the site also :)

    2. 1

      Nice, thanks for sharing your experience!

  4. 2

    I have also recently rewritten mine (https://rehanvdm.com) and moved away from a WP Serevrless implementation. The new Vue + Markdown framework just makes it so much easier to write. I mention this as that depending on what you want to achieve, you have a few options:

    1. Roll your own blog. This takes more upfront effort but you get that extra satisfaction of being unique. I see you are a front-end designer so that might count in your favor.
    2. I just want to write. Then use something like Hashnode or dev.to

    I was first writing only technical blogs and then retros after starting to build in public. The people that read the retros really love it, it doesn't do much for audience but you build relationships with others that also build in public.

    1. 2

      +1 for just using dev.to , I'm happy I went that way. If someone is just starting out blogging then I think that's the way to go. Start by focusing on good content before worrying about a custom site. If the content ends up well received then you can always migrate it to a custom site later.

  5. 2

    I'm writing mainly to practise long form writing - I code during the day so the longest word I ever write is Exception 😔

    I've merged in some Indie Hacker 'outreach' which has given me some things to write about. For example I write reviews of products being created by IH'ers - I get to practise writing and IH'ers get some tiny exposure on a inconsequential blog ;-) It's fun!

    Eventually I'd like to focus on a particular 'specialist subject' but I'm not too concerned about that right now.

    It's only hassle if you want it to be.

    https://paulcook.com/

    1. 2

      I code during the day so the longest word I ever write is Exception

      Relatable!

      Good for you though! That's a great goal to have in mind and can be very valuable in the long run.

  6. 2

    I have been writing monthly or so on my personal blog and I get some traffic and the ROI has been like quite low, I do get some emails from people who read some of my stuff and want to know more. It's definitely more a place for me to dump my ideas and learn how to write at this point!
    And if anyone cares they can read my stuff, say prospective employers/employees/friends etc

    1. 1

      Agreed! I see a lot of others that think it is more or less a place to brainstorm and document your work rather than to create a big audience. In a way it is better to keep track of your work so you can see where you're going and where you could improve.

      1. 2

        I am sure a lot of people can blog for traffic/work/lead-gen but that's not why I personally do it, it's just a personal choice I guess!

  7. 2

    Although I started my personal blog with the long-term goal of building an audience and being part of some kind of funnel, right now it's a handy space for collecting my projects and notes.

    1. 1

      That's good too! Could you paste the link to your blog so I could take a look?

        1. 1

          Looks like a lot of neat content! Thanks for sharing.

          1. 1

            You're welcome, glad you like it.

  8. 1

    I created a blog for my current project and I've been doing content marketing with it for about 6 weeks. Total unique users driven to my pre-launch marketing site via the blogs is 25k+. To be fair, 20k was from a viral blog post that was my first blog post. But this week I've gotten about 2,000 hits from it. My current idea is to just keep hitting people with content and reminding them about my product.

  9. 1

    Personally, I do it because it helps me share my problems / issues / lessons learned with other founders as I go through my journey of building a founder mentorship platform.

    Only do what you can, without it being a big hassle. Like, 1 article (200-300 words) every few days and if you feel better / get in the groove, you'll naturally speed that up.

    Funny, but I wanted to write one today about why I started the platform. This is for SparrowTheApp.com/stories

    1. 1

      Same here! I plan to do similar to what you have in mind.

  10. 1

    I was in the same shoe sometime back, deciding to integrate blogging into my personal website. I went ahead and did it for 2 main reason.

    1. To write down things for future reference for myself.
    2. Share it with others who might be in similar situation and probably get some idea on how to do it.

    I don't blog a lot but I think it's a good thing to add.

    My blog site can be found here: https://akashrajpurohit.com

    1. 1

      Neat, I plan to do similar.

  11. 1

    Highly recommend reading Show your Work by Austin Kleon if you're considering any kind of blog - it's a really good way to set some simple criteria for yourself and commit to sharing something. I have a blog which has by far been the most successful thing so far in pushing traffic to my website. Although that's not my main form of inbound leads at the moment, it's all contributing to the body of content that is my business so in the long run, there's really no con to getting a blog going even if you're not 100% sure what you'll use it for right now.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the resource! Totally see what you mean. Thanks for sharing.

      1. 1

        No problem! Always happy to help :)

  12. 1

    I have one though I have not done a good job posting regularly: https://nextails.com/blog

    I used a headless CMS called Contentful (Sanity is another option) which makes life much easier. The integration can be a chore but it's a one time thing and you learn a lot.

    1. 1

      Awesome! Good to know.

  13. 1

    Hey! I have my own website (hugomontenegro.com).

    Honestly I'd say it's totally worth it even if I've barely posted anything. It was fun to build, it was my first real project, it's something I can show people when they ask, and people seem to like my writing (My first real blogpost got ~20k views from just one post).

    It's fun, I'd definitely recommend!

    1. 1

      Wow nice! Thanks, I'll check it out.

  14. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      Awesome to hear that! Sounds promising.

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