There’s a post that’s getting shared around right now, Blogging for traffic not design.

I want to be clear that this isn’t intended as a dig at the author. Different bloggers obviously have different reasons they write. Some do it to build a following, others do it because they enjoy designing their own space on the web, and still others write for no reason other than to organize their thoughts. And I’m sure there’s a bunch of other people I’ve left out.

The problem is that the original article is based on what I believe to be a misconception about modern blogging.

Assuming you want more traffic, optimizing your site for ingestion by machines is entirely the wrong way to go about it in the current decade. Google will never be a meaningful source of visitors to your personal website, and in fact they have their own reasons why they would want to make it difficult for people to find. I wish this wasn’t the case but that’s sadly not how the web works anymore.

So what can you do instead?

Share your writing

Yeah yeah, I’m starting with the obvious. Just hold on, I’m going somewhere with this.

There’s a lot of good spaces out there for sharing your posts. I usually stick to Mastodon and it’s been working well for me I think. Adding hashtags is pretty helpful for discovery too, at least on Mastodon.

If someone enjoys your writing, social media makes it pretty easy for them to keep up with your posts as long as you keep sharing.

Wherever you share to, it needs to be somewhere that you can also find others sharing their own writing, because…

You need to start conversations with others

Personal blogs don’t keep well in a vacuum.

There’s so many reasons why you should want to talk with other bloggers that I won’t even bother trying to list them all here. But doing so will, most importantly, make you part of a community.

Because that’s how people find blogs today. Communities.

If you take an interest in what other people are writing and creating, other people will take an interest in you.

Some resources

I’ll end with a list of resources that might be helpful for anyone trying to connect with other bloggers.

• Blogroll.club — A large directory of blogs. Add yours or subscribe to others with RSS.
• Fediring — A webring for personal sites of any member of the fediverse.
• Static.Quest — A webring for static sites.
• Clew — A search engine focused on writing by independent creators.
• Marginalia Search — A search engine that prioritizes non-commercial content.
• About Ideas Now — Find people to talk to or collaborate with by searching across the /about, /ideas and /now pages of thousands of personal websites.
• rss-is-dead.lol — Enter your fediverse handle and explore RSS feeds in your neighborhood.

— JP