4 reasons you should not start a blog
What I learned from keeping a personal blog
When I started my blog, my second post went viral on Hacker News.
I had spent over five hours wring a technical tutorial on web scraping with a popular python framework called Scrapy. The post was getting a lot of engagement on Hacker News and my personal blog received over 35k unique visitors in 24 hours.
Only there was one problem. The people who visited my blog did not subscribe and never returned. Now I know there is a better way, writing to social websites like Twitter / X is a much better way to grow as a digital writer. Here are four reasons why.
Reason #1: Posting to a blog will not give you feedback
When I posted a new article to my blog, I expected to see a bump in traffic.
Only there was no bump. The monthly active users trend was a flat line for years. It made me wonder if anyone was even reading it. (spoiler: it was mostly bots based on the logs.)
The problem was no one was able to find my blog.
Even if they did, I had no engagement features e.g. likes, comments, share buttons. The only metric I was tracking was impressions. Since impressions were flat, I wasn't getting any information about how readers felt about my writing.
Frustrated, I started promoting my posts on socials. Only then I started to get reactions: people were pointing out typos, suggestions, and giving me follow-up questions. It was great!
Improving at anything requires feedback in order to see what resonates with your audience.
Reason #2: Don't waste effort on posts no one will read
Feedback is so valuable because it allows writers to avoid wasted effort.
I would spend hours on long posts, only to find no one was interseted in them after I published them. That's because I didn't have any data on what people wanted to hear from me. I thought if I wrote about whatever interested me, then it would interest other people too.
You should only commit time to writing a long form piece if you know people are already interested in.
The reality is people are really bad at being able to tell what people will or will not like. By doing many small experiments, you can figure out what people are interested in.
Then once you have a sense of what you like to write about, and what people want to hear from you, you can start adding more specificity to your writing on that topic.
Reason #3: You need a library of content to retain users
I only had two articles on my website when my post went viral. Out of the 35k people who visited the page, not a single one signed up for my newsletter.
If you want people to follow you, then you need to have some actual content. Readers are looking for a library of evergreen content posted on a regular basis. If you post sporadically, readers will never build a habit around reading your stuff.
Building a library requires a combination of short form, long form, and longer form posts. With long form posts diving deeper into an area where you have proven there is interest from your audience.
Reason #4: You are not writing for an audience, you are writing with your audience
In the traditional publishing world, a book undergoes a lot of editing and revising before it's published. It feels like it has to be perfect before anyone can read it.
I was writing to my blog in hopes that one day I would feel "ready" to start publishing to more public places.
Here's the thing. I was really using this as an excuse to procrastinate. I would think about what I wanted to write about, which topics, what word counts. It was fun to think about, but it did not bring me any closer to my goals.
Really I was afraid that I wasn't good enough. That people would call me out for being bad at writing or not being knowledgeable about a topic. I would see posts on hacker news where users would nit an article for technical accuracy, or not exploring a specific solution.
The reality is that we are all learning, nobody's perfect. Perfectionism prevents us from moving forward and improving. I am not writing for my audience, I am writing with them. We are all learning together from each other. And that's OK!
Those are the reasons I've decided to stop publishing to my personal blog and start publishing to Twitter and Substack. It has only been one week, yet I have already noticed a sense of momentum that was missing when I published sporadically to my blog.
For those who want to get started, try posting short posts every day. The key thing is to form a habit around writing and shipping your work. You can figure out the rest later!
So if you are planning on starting a blog for technical writing, consider writing to social platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter / X to get started.