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by tekkk 2745 days ago
For anyone wanting to build their own blog and start publishing content, what do you think is the best way to gain traffic? Just share it everywhere and hope it grows or perhaps use a dual Medium+self-hosted thing? (for a time being)

I'm in the process of doing that, and oh man the amount of minute details that I have had to solve just to get things running. Granted, I did it the hard way building everything from scratch with Gatsby but I guess it was sort of an experiment too, so the time wasn't necessarily wasted. Recently I started fiddling with the OG tags, JSON-LD etc, and that was a quite tedious task. Hope it's all good now.
3 comments
tkrunning 2745 days ago
It obviously depend on your niche, but as long as it's not super competitive I've had pretty good success appearing in the top 10 with articles posted on my own (fairly new) domain.

Perhaps the best advice I can give is to don't focus too much on SE algorithms (just make sure you don't mess up any tagging etc), but rather focus on creating very good, well researched content. If you do that, people will share, and Google will notice. Personally, I have had success with writing long form articles. Many of the articles on Nomad Gate is 4-5000 words or more. At that point you will get a lot of long tail traffic as well.

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tnolet 2745 days ago
This times 100. Had exactly the same experiences with some long form posts on a new domain.

- write good, original detailed stuff.

- share on Twitter, Reddit,HN

- reach out to people.

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wolco 2745 days ago
Post meaningful articles and you will get some traffic. Social media accounts should include links to your blog so start sharing.

Go to topic related forums and share.

Wait.

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HeyLaughingBoy 2745 days ago
This morning I listened (again) to a really good IndieHackers podcast with Laura Roeder where she answers this question (thanks Courtland!). Her suggestion was to buy traffic from Facebook, IG, etc. at the beginning. Once you're seeded with some regular visitors, continue to work on getting more organic traffic coming in.

But like everything, 90% of success is showing up, so first you actually have to tell people the blog exists and post stuff!

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