Are there specific t
[2023-11-24 04:15:31 AM] : Are there specific tips for leveraging 30x500 with a personal (professional) blog?
1 Reply
[2023-11-24 04:15:58 AM] : I'm still going through 30x500 and I'm in the 3rd part of the course.
[2023-11-24 04:16:23 AM] : So far I've been using it to test the waters with a small site I had already built to help people with locs find a loctician and I have a separate blog that I created for digital nomads with pets.
[2023-11-24 04:16:58 AM] : At the same time, I also created a professional blog separate from all of this. The professional blog seems to get more engagement than the other two, which makes sense because I write about engineering, I'm a software engineer, and my network is full of other software engineers.
[2023-11-24 04:18:28 AM] : My posts so far are not strictly e-bombs at all (you can check them out at https://decembergarnetsmith.com) - I wasn't really thinking of this as a 30x500 project - but it occurred to me that I could use some of the same tactics here. For example, I could create an email list, post about specific topics (stacking the bricks), and eventually release a paid product...for something.
[2023-11-24 04:19:44 AM] : I don't have a specific target audience in mind (I would guess peer software engineers, particularly front-end engineers, if anything?) but was wondering if people had advice for leveraging a personal/professional blog for 30x500. Most of the examples I've seen so far revolve less around a person and more around an audience.
[2023-11-24 04:20:19 AM] : Josh Comeau is so far the only example I've seen of someone who is leveraging their professional blog to sell products.
[2023-11-24 04:26:10 AM] : Or if I combined e-bombs with general posts would it be too cluttered?
[2023-11-24 04:41:27 AM] : This guy has done what you're suggesting with some good success... https://daveceddia.com/
dceddia might give you his perspective on this, as he has other projects now.
In my experience having your site your name can make it more memorable for people. The issue is if you ever switch away from that audience then it might (might) make it more difficult.
Reading your site quickly it looks like you have clear interests and value that you bring to your work. Will be interesting for you I suspect to identify your audience and then see what pains they have.
[2023-11-24 05:09:30 AM] : I write a professional blog under my own name at https://pete-bowen.com
I started it for 30x500 and I’ve used it to sell products (book, course) in the past. It generates a steady stream of enquiries about work / projects which is quite nice.
[2023-11-24 09:32:46 AM] : I started mine for 30x500 too. I started off writing about AngularJS (1.x) back when I was doing that in my day job, and then switched focus to React as Angular 2 came out. My first product was an book about learning just React by itself, then I did a video course on Redux, later turned the React book into a course, and did a bunch of blogging + building an email list along the way.
In the beginning I almost bought a domain and renamed it to Angularity. Really glad I didn’t do that :sweat_smile: Having it under my name was good for name recognition and I think helped with stuff like getting Twitter followers, speaking at meetups and a conference, and generally being able to point to it.
One challenge I’m running into now that I’m focused on Recut is the blog is sitting idle, I don’t see myself going back to making more content, and I don’t really see a way to sell it with it being tied to my name. And the email list is like 32k so the ConvertKit bill is expensive :joy:
[2023-11-24 12:14:01 PM] : i've been writing a personal tech blog for 10 years at https://jvns.ca and it's been a big part of my business. early on i got very into posting my site to hacker news to promote myself (for better or for worse, I don't know if I'd recommend that) and it was a big source of traffic. i think it's useful to think about building relationships over many years, I sometimes meet people who say they've been reading my blog since I started.
[2023-11-24 04:57:50 PM] : How have you all determined your target audience, as well as what (not) to write? Do you only write e-bombs, for example?
[2023-11-25 07:54:38 AM] : not a direct answer but i really liked this talk by vicki boykis about tech blogging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFBHEePW91E
[2023-11-26 01:37:30 AM] : julia Thanks for sharing this, it was really helpful.
[2023-11-26 01:38:26 AM] : For people who come along later and are also curious about this: it sounds like for a technical blog attached to your name where the audience would be peers/newbies in your profession, you can write about a variety of things. Within the 30x500 framework you'll write e-bombs but I think there's still flexibility to write posts that aren't necessarily e-bombs as you become a subject matter expert.
[2023-11-27 02:59:38 PM] : You can always write or create things that aren't ebombs! Those posts serve different roles and jobs.
Ebombs just have a very specific role in building trust. Other kinds of posts don't take away from that and in some cases can reinforce the feeling that people have with you!
Even for both Amy and I, our original blogs where we built our audiences had all sorts of posts on them. Later on we cut stuff that wasn't as relevant or was potentially outdated, but we didn't limit ourselves whole we were creating.
You don't have to limit yourself either, as long as you're making time for ebombs too! :smile: