In this blog, I would like to share with you some tips and tricks on running a personal blog. I also want to share potential trade-offs and problems that I encounter along the way. My goal is to help you learn from my mistakes and avoid common pitfalls.
Before you proceed, I also encourage you to read my Blog opening post here, and remember to Act Not Overthink.
Lessons Learned
Start with personal
Right away start with your own blog, not some big site like Medium. Register your own domain and host your blog there. It is easier than it seems, you do not have to have your own code for the blog, plain old WordPress will do just fine. Besides, it is ready to go in almost no time.
As to the picking of hosting providers, there are multiple articles that compare different providers. Try taking some time to read about them and pick whichever suits you the most. However, remember that for most of them, the first year payments are greatly reduced. Thus extending your domain for the second year may be quite painful – read the rules carefully. Pay attention to rules regarding migrating out to another hosting provider. Some providers have strict rules on that and may try to block you from moving out.
I am personally using CyberFolks, a company from Poland, and I can honestly recommend them. Their offer seemed the best out of the ones I was checking when setting up my blog.
Cross-posting
Cross-posting or syndicating is crucial to get more interactions with your posts. It also helps to build authority of your site, and increase outreach. Start it from day one, but do not overstretch, pick two maybe three sites that you want to cross-post to.
I recommend Medium and DZone. You can also set up Substack; I am not familiar with how it works, but I see a lot of people using it, so I believe that it may be worth trying.
Read the rules and recommendations for the pages you choose on how to get your posts promoted. I know that DZone has both MVB and Core programs. Check them, and if the rules make sense for you, try to join them. Enroll in a Medium Partner Program right away; now you do not need to have 100 followers. It probably will not earn you much, but something is better than nothing.
Just remember not to overstretch, 2 to 3 platforms is max in my opinion.
Setup target
Think in advance on what will be the main point of focus of your blog. It is probably the most important decision to make. While having all types of topics on your blog may seem like a good idea, I strongly believe that it is counterproductive.
It is easier to reach recognition if you are consistent in one or two fields, not pursue everything possible. Unless, of course, it happens that you are pursuing a very specific set of topics, then it is a very good idea.
Besides, as long as you are working alone, you will have a very limited time to write. There is one more thing to consider here; you must like the topic you are writing about. In any other case, it will be pain, not joy, to run the blog.
Be consistent
Blogging is usually not a sprint but a marathon. While you may generate viral content right away, it is usually not the case. Focus on being consistent, you do not have to generate a blog per day, start with one per month and keep doing that. You can always increase the volume if you have time.
However, it may be good to prepare a few posts before going public with the blog and post them more frequently, at least in the beginning. To encourage people to visit your blog and generate some incoming traffic.
Use Grammarly
While some of you may prefer ChatGPT or other LLM for proofreading, I still prefer plain old Grammarly. From my perspective, it provides a better user experience while delivering at least comparable, if not better, results. My main pain point with LLMs is that they tend to change the content of your text, sometimes even against your orders.
However, this seems to change lately there is a very usefully ChatGPT prompt I am using all the time. It goes as follows:
Check grammar and spelling but keep original
While Chat is still sometimes trying to add sth from itself, more often then not the output is as I expected it to be. Additionally, the changes are easy to pick up, although it is important to mention that I am using o1 or o4.5 for this task.
No Gen AI
Well, do not use LLM-based tools like Chat or Claude to write your posts. While you may use LLM for proofreading, do not copy and paste anything directly into your texts. The whole concept of blogging is based on sharing your insights and knowledge, not copying LLMs’ outputs from one place to another.
It is easily noticeable when not done correctly, and search engines attempt to penalize generated content. Thus, relying on it can hurt your blog’s SEO scores. Besides LinkedIn is doing the same and I think X/Twitter as well.
On the other hand, using GenAI for images in your texts may be an interesting experiment.
Learn basics of SEO
SEO is very important if you want to grow and gain more recognition. I recommend at least learning some basics on how SEO works and how to structure your blogs for them to be displayed higher.
It is definitely not an easy topic, but there are multiple free resources on that. While I cannot honestly recommend a particular tutorial or course, I think the Yoast blog has some reasonable content for beginners.
If you are using WordPress for your personal blog, then I recommend installing this plugin right away. It is free and should be more than enough for anyone looking into the basic SEO optimizations.
Read about sites that may help you boost your SEO score. Google Search Console and/or Bing Webmaster Tools are absolute basics. There are other similar sites, better sites, like Ahrefs or SemRush, though they can be rather pricey.
Don’t Get Discouraged
Care about honest and reasonable feedback, but ignore pointless trolls. It may be hard to find which is which in the beginning, but it will come with time.
Do not focus on small failures or temporary downs, focus on long-term trends. If you are unsure if your text is good on either a technical or conceptual level, ask a friend (or friends) for a review and have an honest talk about their feedback.
How to get new Ideas
Well, this one is the hardest, I think it really depends on a person and your unique traits, like when you are focused, what is interesting for you, and how you learn.
However, I think there are a couple of ways that may work for most of you:
- Share insight from your job – Your job may have insights worth sharing, remember not to breach any NDA, that would be rather counterproductive.
- Follow your curiosity – Think of what is currently interesting for you, and try to share your perspective on the topic, or share your research/learning path.
- Reflect on past experiences – Lessons you learned may help others, just as I believe this text will.
- Engage with books and articles – Have unique thoughts on something you have read, forge them into a post, and share with others.
Keep the document/documents where you store all the ideas somewhere so as not to lose them in the caverns of your mind.
Improving your craft
As with every skill, blogging can also be improved.
Here are some tips on how you can do that:
- Start adding images. If you are doing it already, try to work on their quality
- Experiment with the structure of your content and storytelling.
- Improve the SEO score of your blogs
- Try writing different content types (beginner guides, tutorials, opinion pieces, etc.) to see which one suits you the most
You can also try to read various blogs and texts to find the ways of storytelling that suit you the most. Then try to apply it to your blogs. Of course, keep track of feedback from your readers.
Summary
That is all the lessons I wanted to share with you for today. Remember that the most important thing in blogging is: having fun, joy, and taking pride in what you are doing. Without this, it will be a nightmare and pain.
Thank you for your time.