📢 Original article is available on my website where you can also find my Internship Journal.
In this article, I will share my experience and opinion on how I went about increasing the visibility of my blog.
What I describe here are my personal views which may be different to yours, but that's ok. No need to get angry. You are more than welcome to leave your opinion in the comment section below.
After I posted my first internship blog on How to use GitHub Pages and Markdown to host a website I went on LinkedIn to promote it.
It was very straightforward. I clicked on Start a post, wrote an introduction, pasted the link to the blog, added hashtags and hit Post. Quite easy.
I used hashtags to reach an audience other than just my followers so this can lead to greater engagement. I use only four hashtags.
I read a few articles and some pointed out that tags are important but plastering your post with them makes it look "spammy". That may put off the audience. So I decided to use a maximum of four (if you think that this is a bad idea, please let me know 👇).
I had an exactly similar experience with Twitter. Ease of use, very straightforward.
I will post on LinkedIn my main blogs and maybe 🤔 weekly internship updates.
I am planning to use Twitter for daily updates. Not only I will be sharing my blogs when they are ready but I will add my internship journal news.
My tag "strategy" on Twitter - I am using #100DaysOfCode. This tag refers to a challenge to code a minimum of an hour every day for the next 100 days. More of it 👉 here . Whenever I tweet with this hashtag there are bots that present my content to loads of readers(bots are automated Twitter accounts, programmed to perform tasks such as tweet and retweet content for specific goals on a large scale).
Both of these platforms allow me to analyse how my post or tweet performs. All I need to do is to click on post/tweet and then below the content I can see this:
When I click on the highlighted content then:
LinkedIn provides me with something like this 👇
and Twitter with something like this 👇
As you can see there is plenty of information that can be very useful to verify if I am reaching the right people or do I need to change something to achieve my goals.
I decided to explore other options and I focused on two platforms that were new to me: Reddit and Hacker News.
Signing up for them wasn't an issue, posting either, but everything after that was not as intuitive as Twitter or LinkedIn.
I shared my blog at around this same time and pretty much immediately both were taken down 🤷♂️.
On Reddit, I have received this 👇
When I was trying to re-post it, it was getting blocked. Eventually, I managed to post it but when I checked recently there was no engagement.
On Hacker News, I couldn't figure out why my post was taken down so I am assuming that it is for similar reasons as on Reddit.
I must admit that both platforms are not that intuitive, especially Hacker News. I guess because it is new to me, I need some time to get used to it.
There are a few other things that I observed over the last few days. Mainly, when writing a blog don't try to be perfect 🤷♂️. Up until now, I was trying to be perfect. I was chopping and changing and what I end up with is delay after delay.
Write it down. Run it through Grammarly and then read it out loud. If it makes sense - post it. If you will try to make it perfect you will never finish. If there are any content issues then don't worry, readers will let you know in the comments section.
Another, very important thing. Make sure that your software auto-saves your work. I was testing a new application for markdown and my laptop froze.
I thought, no worries. Well... I lost everything because the document didn't recover. You can imagine that there was a lot of 😡🤬🤬🤬😡.
Aha, if you are blogging for a living I have a newfound respect for you. There is so much to do apart from writing a blog. I didn't even mention Search Engine Optimisation.
As usual, thank you for your time and please let me know what you think in the comments below.
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