[mtlynch]

One of the difficult parts of learning by blogging is that you rarely receive thoughtful feedback from your readers on the craft of your writing. You can look at analytics and comments to see which of your posts are popular, but nobody ever says, "Oh, this post would have worked better had your sentence structure been less repetitive."

I solved this problem by hiring a freelance editor from Upwork.[0] It was a few hundred dollars to have her read a few of my articles. The high-level feedback was extremely helpful and had a huge impact on my readership almost instantly.

Obviously, it's not a magic bullet. I still had to do the work of integrating her feedback and continuing to find ways to improve my writing. But like anything else, expert feedback helps you grow faster than just learning on your own through trial and error.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/editor/

[CGamesPlay]

Loved this post and am reading through some other posts on the site. Do you do the diagrams/images yourself? I'm talking about these kind [0] but I'm also interested in the cover images on the posts.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/painless-web-app-testing/#a-reusable-patt...

[mtlynch]

Thanks! I work with an illustrator on the cartoons and diagrams. I wrote a post explaining how I found her and how we work together:

https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/

Professional illustrations are another thing I think are underused in blogging. It's not that expensive, and it looks much better than stock photos.

[cormacrelf]

I feel a lot better about giving edit feedback ~for free~ unsolicited from time to time now.