Project Exposure: [0] How do I increase my blog's view count

I've been writing this blog for about 2 months now and averages around 4 views per day, which is fair, considering how much competition is on Hashnode. In light of this, I aim to increase my blog view in this project - Project Exposure.

Possible reasons for low viewer count

I start by investigating the shortcomings of my blog, to see how I can improve.

Time on the platform

I've only written several blog posts. There is a small chance in each of my blog posts to be appreciated and attract followers. So the longer I am on this platform, the higher chance this happens.

My writing skills

I haven't written a blog before, and seldom write essays since I study Computer Science. Therefore my writing may wordy, unclear, and unpleasant to read. To fix this, I need to write more, as well as read good blog posts to learn.

My writing topics

Looking at the trending blog posts on Hashnode, it is clear the trending ones teach you something or tell you something you don't know. But the ones I write document a programming journey, so it is not what most people look for.

However, I do not intend to change my article topics, as my blog is for documenting my programming journey and my target audience is people interested or wanting to learn from my experience.

I also notice a lot of popular blog posts have a number in them, like 6 Habits I have picked up from working in tech for 3 years, 15 Common Beginner JavaScript Mistakes. I thought about using AI, feeding in article topics and views, to see if there is any correlation with it, but I'll save this idea for later.

People lack a chance to see my articles

I watched a video from Youtuber How Money Works, called Why Finance "Gurus" Want You To Hate Them - How Money Works. In that video, the author made an interesting point. The reason why fake gurus - people who give bad financial advice, act so unbearable, is because "any publicity is good publicity", working in conjunction with the sales funnel.

The sales funnel

The sales funnel is each step that someone has to take in order to become your customer, as visualised above. Actually, it is more like a sieve or a filter, since a funnel keeps everything poured in, but some customers will be lost in the process. For the sake of recognisability, I'll keep calling it a sales funnel.

Let's say in each step of my sales funnel, I keep 10% of the customers. If I want more people to enter the last step, follow me, I can: a) do better in each stage to keep more customers, such as making clickbait titles and writing a more interesting first paragraph of my article to increase the percentage of people staying in each stage. b) put more people in the initial stage of the sales funnel, so that more people will enter the final stage.

That's why I came up with the idea of making a program which automatically cross-posts my blogs and also creates social media presence to promote my blog to increase my exposure and put more people inside my sales funnel.

Popular blogging sites

To do that I will have to know where should I cross-post my blog, below are websites that I found online.

• Hashnode, where I'm on
• HackerNoon and FreeCodeCamp, have dedicated editors to review blog posts, so I may only submit high-quality blog posts
• Dev.To, simular to Hashnode
• Medium, a website for all kinds of articles
• Google Blogger / WordPress / Wix..., these sites while giving me a lot of freedom, there is no way for people to find me there, as there is no explore button, so I will not consider these, as at this stage, I want to be discovered
• LinkedIn, a place with professionals and experts, so I need to be careful what I post there
• Tumblr, a mini blogging website with built-in social media capabilities

Social media where I can create a presence

• Twitter
• Reddit
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Snapchat
• Youtube and TikTok, if I ever consider making videos
• Pinterest, seems to be image-based but I don't think I have any images to show

Search Engine Optimization

Ideally, my blog posts should be searchable from Google, so there is an additional way for people to visit my blog. But currently, my blogs cannot be searched on Google.

The first reason is that I have an apostrophe in my blog title and that "chit" is usually used with "chit chat", so Google thinks it was a typo. If I force Google to search "Chit's", my blog appears on top.

The other reason is that I recently changed the name from "Chit's tech blog" to "Chit's programming blog" because I realized that a tech blog is a blog that talks about new technology, which is not what I cover.

When I search for the title of my first article, I cannot find the result. It is because the past me thought it would be a good idea to make a custom SEO title. If I have time, I want to edit all my past blog posts' SEO titles and descriptions, for Google to better index my blog posts.

Also, notice that my article published on DevTo was indexed instead. This is undesirable because my articles on different platforms are fighting for views, what I should do instead is to use a canonical link, to tell Google, that the article you found on DevTo, comes from Hashnode, so Google knows where to send people.

When I search for newer articles, they do not appear in the result, I assume it is because it takes time for Google to index my blog posts.

I also designed an image for social media sharing, so it looks prettier when I share my blog.

I have to say, Canva is really easy to use, and has some nice templates.

Now All I have to do is wait for Google to index my new and improved blog.

Action plan

In the next blog, I want to create a social media presence on the above social media platforms, as well as investigate how can I cross-post to the other blogging platforms.