5 mistakes I committed while blogging

There are many articles out there on why and how to start a blog. There are advice on tools, on writing and almost on every other aspect of the topic. I started my blog in March 2017, I’ve been running it for one and half years and I thought it was time for some reflection.
As the title of this write-off suggests, I’ll be mainly focusing on what I identified as sources of my failure. As I cannot recite exact measurable goals from that era when I started, I also cannot clearly state if I succeeded or failed. Nevertheless, in my view, being in that situation is a token of failure anyway.
I don’t feel I would be able to give anyone some genuine advice on how to do blogging the right way, because I don’t think I’ve found my way so far. Thus, I confine myself to factually summarize what I did in the last one and a half years and what lessons I learned from that.
Okay then, let me briefly summarize what my blog is about and why I created it in the first place. On the about page, there is the following piece of text as an explanation of the why.
I’d like to share and pass that knowledge on what I learned as a software engineer and help others to boost their carriers by learning Spring which is the most popular Java framework out there for creating enterprise software.
If you’re not a software engineer, it isn’t important what Java or Spring is, so it’s suffice to say the original intention was supposed to be knowledge sharing on a specific technical topic. The goal is simple enough, but execution somehow got derailed by various distractions I created for myself.
Inconsistency
It’s been an early decision that I would be posting articles weekly on Friday. Since the 16th of March, 2017 there have been 75 weeks, which means that I should have had roughly ~70 articles by now. In contrast, at the time of writing I have got only 22 published and further 4 ones as drafts have fallen into oblivion. That’s approximately the third of the original target, hence I have to admit that I was clearly inconsistent in writing.

Inconsistency also leads to low traffic, which in turn leads to being unable to figure out what my audience would be interested in. In a broader sense, the consequence is that I cannot claim that I have an audience at all. As you can see on the following chart, taken from Google Analytics, there are only a handful of people, approximately 2% of all visitors on the site, who are returning. That’s 15 people, out of which 2 subscribed to my mailing list.

Lesson learned: Inconsistency is accounted for the lack of engagement on the site and also for the lack of validated learning on what folks are interested.
Okay then, but why was I unable to do that? I’ve managed to identify three reasons, let’s have a closer look at them.
Premature Optimization
Donald Knuth wrote once the following in Computer Programming as an Art (1974).
The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
This is quoted and referred to by software engineers quite often and that’s not without reason. What does it have to do with blogging anyway and why do I bring this up? Well, I think that premature optimization is the root of all evil in other areas of life also, if one (me in this case) is allocating time and resources to solve problems which currently don’t exist or even if they do exist, their impact on the goal to achieve is marginal. In my case, I wanted to be there where those people were, who have been blogging for 5+ years and of course I wanted to do that in literally no time.
Marketing
I thought that the key to reaching success, comparable to established blogs, would be picking up marketing and social media skills. I’m not saying that understanding them was a waste of time, but it took me approximately 4 months to take the Social Media Marketing Specialization on Coursera and during that period of time, I published only a single article. Also putting too much stress on marketing made my mind attached to the idea of monetizing my blog. It’s simply too early to think in terms of a business plan.
GDPR
GDPR came into force May 25, 2018. At that time, I might have had 20 articles and approximately 20 subscribes on my mailing list. Had I just downloaded a privacy policy template and filled in the blanks, that would have been perfectly acceptable. Altought I don’t think that anyone would have cared even, if I hadn’t done anything. I did of course updated my privacy policy and let my subscribers know about the change and asked them to re-subscribe acknowledging the new policy.

And now I get to that point which I have been preparing in this section: I started to develop software for handling data erasure requests in compliance with the GDPR (Forget Me). My original estimate for completing the Forget Me app was about 8 hours, while in fact I’ve logged 21 hours to Jira so far and it still hasn’t been completed and deployed. Altought creating this piece of software wasn’t entirely a bad idea and I learned a lot from working on it, I had to admit that I’ve distracted myself again.
Lesson learned: I shouldn’t have tried to solve problems I didn’t have, I had better focus on creating quality content about my chosen engineering topic and listen to my audience’s feedback.
Assumtion
I assumed — and we all know that assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups — that multi-part case-study series were that people wanted to read about. As a matter of fact, that’s two assumptions.
The biggest death march was writing the Deep dive into implementing a user management application with Spring Boot series, which has got seven parts. Altought some parts of this series has been the “most popular” content on my site, it describes and documents an actual software I was working on at that time. As far as my observations go into what content software engineers are really looking for (also observing my own needs), they typically find general purpose examples and tutorials useful. Writing about the concrete implementation of a system is useful primarily only for me, when I want to showcase it as a portfolio item in my CV.
Other than that, my experience with multi-part series is that the first part attracts large number of visitors. Sometimes they’re even re-shared up by key influencers, but then writing the rest of the series leads to diminishing returns. Here we arrive to the the problem of choosing the size of units of work correctly, I’ll elaborate on more that in the next section.
Lesson learned: I spent too much time on writing long article series based on bare assumptions. I’ll test my assumptions systematically and prioritize my efforts more carefully.
Large batch size
By thinking in article series, I committed myself to having to write about the same chain of thought for weeks and that prevented me from experimenting with a broad range of topics. I’ve also observed that I wrote very long articles, sometimes they were around 2000–2500 words (including code samples). Taking a closer look at the articles of other bloggers I follow, I found that the typical size of their articles fell into the range of 800–1200 words (also with code samples).

That makes perfectly sense, as shorter articles make it through the full cycle of publishing quicker than longer ones. They need shorter time to complete and that diminishes the risk of procrastination. Essentially, in blogging I consider the average time required from the first character to publication as being the batch size. I’ve recently read The Lean Startup from Eric Ries and he devoted an entire chapter for advocating working in small batches. Little’s Law even proves mathematically that the reduction of your cycle time increases your capacity/production.
When I opted for writing article series, I didn’t realize that it was a huge batch (7 parts totaling 8K words). I don’t how much time it took to write it and how much time I spent on creating that software the series is about. That’s the next critical point: lack of accounting.
Lesson learn: I’ll write shorter articles more frequently, at least once a week.
Lack of accounting
Eric Ries said in the aforementioned book that something as boring and dull as accounting was going to save your life. I totally agree. I haven’t collected data in a way that I would allow me to draw conclusions. Validated learning is another term he coins and that basically means that assumptions are being continuously tested by measuring their effect.

I’ve got the following questions. Some of them are operational and some of them are related to validating my assumptions.
- How much time do I need to write an article?
- How much time does it take to prepare it for publication (resizing images, fixing misspellings, etc)?
- How much time do I spend on syndicating new content on other sites
(eg. DZone, LinkedIn Pulse, Medium, etc.)? - Does it even worth syndicating content on these sites?
- What was the engagement like on social networks per article?
- What was that topic which attracted subscribers?
- How does bounce rate correlate with the length of articles?
Don’t look at me, I cannot answer them! I’ve got many ideas on content, on how to structure my blog and on many other things. Yet, I have to stop attacking ideas and implementing them immediately when they cross my mind.
Lesson learned: without accounting what I do and collecting data there is no validated learning, it’s just shooting in the dark hoping that I hit a random target.
Now what?
I started this article with the title 3 mistakes I committed while blogging, but have found five so far. If I continued writing it, I’m confident I would find even more. It’s a long enough reading already, it’s time to finish.
All that being said, I making the following mental notes to myself and hope that perhaps they will help others as well.
- Tackle inconsistency: define measurable goals, stick to them and track them.
- Don’t optimize prematurely: unless it’s absolutely necessary to reach the set target.
- Assumption: is still the mother of all fuck-ups.
- Large batch size: one small step at a time.
- Account: everything you do, especially track your time.
That’s it folks, take care!
Cheers,
— László
