Personal blog on web development
I use the blog to share what I learn about web development. Topics include React and Progressive Web Apps.
I managed to follow up on the success of my previous article that helped me reach 200 subscribers by turning the post into a series.
The second article went more into depth on other aspects of how JavaScript works in the browser.
JavaScript Weekly promoted this article in their newsletter. They also shared this article and the previous one on Twitter, which gave it an additional traffic boost.
Each of the two articles had approximately 10k unique readers, and together they have acquired about 250 email subscribers.
I think the reason for these articles to take off was that I tried to boil down difficult concepts into an easy-to-understand explanation, making heavy use of illustrations and animations.
The articles I'm talking about are the following ones:
The growth of my email list has been steady but never too fast in the last months. With the last article though, I've gained 17 new subscribers in a single day.
I assume this happened for two reasons:
I left out part of the article that wasn't too relevant, but I promised to write one on the topic and notify people via email. I suspect this gave people more of an incentive to sign up.
I had a lot of traffic from Reddit. People that come from social media are more willing to subscribe to an email newsletter because they don't have a fixed mindset. In contradiction to people that come from Google, which want to get a quick answer and leave the page.
After writing blog posts for about 5 months, I reached this milestone of 100 email subscribers.
I didn't offer anything in return to signing up, so I assume that people are genuinely interested in the topics I cover.
Since then, I've been sending out one email every two weeks.
As of October 2020, I've reached 181 subscribers.
I've gained more organic visits, but this traffic doesn't convert so well since people usually want to get a quick answer to their question and then leave.
I use the blog to share what I learn about web development. Topics include React and Progressive Web Apps.