| I think I can give you my perspective here, since I am part of Monica's community. I started blogging late this summer and quickly found how hard it is to write and be read. As an engineer I of course started researching how to increase my readership and I ended up down the infinite sewer hole of content marketing and "how to game search engines" aka SEO. (If you want to understand why the web looks like this and why we are rather searching ddg with !searchr for answers... learning a bit of SEO will be the epiphany you need) The amount of _crap_ you have to navigate to get some actionable information is insane. I was lucky to stumble into Monica's Blogging for Devs free newsletter course and it was just the perfect actionable information I was looking for. No need to waste more time scavenging the web for some free answers. The community is, in my opinion, the natural evolution. A place where I can learn effectively. So far, I've enjoyed it and I think it's worth the money. |
I'd just point out that things like Backblaze's drive reliability blogs are absolutely content marketing. There's plenty of low-rent clickbait out there but there's also good material that is ultimately being created and paid for for marketing purposes. (And SEO isn't all black hat. For example, if you're writing about some hot topic, you probably want to mention it in the title and not take forever to get to it in the article.)