logoalt Hacker News

jreynaryesterday at 12:29 PM1 replyview on HN

My two cents here is that if you're trying to growth hack yourself, you need to be on a platform that's also growth hacking. Building an audience anywhere is genuinely hard. Algorithmic feeds like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. force you to play a game they control and that may not align with your content. Medium, substack, etc. will build your audience only to the extent that it aligns with their goals. Hosting your own blog means somehow getting traffic to it -- which might mean playing the google search game, which then depends on aligning with user queries and getting your site ranked. Or it may mean somehow driving traffic to your blog, such as from a newsletter or social site. But that brings us back to either algorithmic feeds or newsletter products. Don't think there's an easy answer here and I bet YMMV depending on the type of content you have, how much of audience you already have, etc.

I tried the reverse -- syndicating content on medium that we publish on our blog. 0 impressions, literally, for 5 posts that got some readership on our blog.


Replies

weppleyesterday at 12:37 PM

It sounds like you’ve given up on an open web. Possibly the rational thing for you to do in your circumstances, but nonetheless a sad place we are in.