In my case, it’s true, honestly. I like attention, I want my blog posts to sometimes show up in Hacker News or get shared on big social media sites (despite the aftermath of random people who don’t know me hating on it), I want people to comment on toots linking to my blog posts, I want people to send me an email sharing their thoughts or opinion on it, I want people to contact me on Signal or XMPP and have a random chat, I want to get invited into a podcast despite how terrible my spoken English would be, I want people to know me?
It’s kinda funny to think how I went through my own blogging journey — such that it is. Honestly, I got into blogging because I too wanted the attention. Seeing all these others online express their opinion and show off their expertise was something that looked like it was worth having. Of course it was never like that at the start, and I had to grow to like writing for myself.
Although once you find solace in writing only for yourself, you begin to notice that people are paying attention. You do get invited to podcasts, people do reach out to you via email, your posts do show up on another blog or Hacker News. You may even get people at work discover your blog organically1. How do I know? Because all this happened to me. I didn’t expect it, but I was delighted when it did.
So I think getting into blog writing for the attention is fine. We all want a bit of attention: we wouldn’t be writing in public if we didn’t. But true happiness in the art of blog writing comes from not expecting it. Feel comfortable writing for yourself first.2 Most of your posts won’t resonate with anyone. And that’s fine. As long as they resonate with you.
Via: Kev Quirk
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Well, as organic as one can after visiting your LinkedIn page and following the link you added to your profile. ↩︎
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In fact, it’s the posts that you write for yourself that tend to get attention from others. People can smell when a post is genuine, or if it’s a manufactured attempt to go viral. ↩︎