My writing process after 5 years of blogging

I’ve been blogging here on emgoto.com for over 5 years now. I initially began in 2020 writing about programming, but have since pivoted to sharing my experiences on hiking after moving to Japan and falling in love with its mountains. In total I’ve written over 150 posts. It’s been an immensely fulfilling hobby for me, and one that I’m hoping to be able to continue far into the future.

After my previous post around the technical behind-the-scenes of my blog, I wanted to also talk about about my writing philosophy and give some more practical advice on how I write my posts.

Write about something you’ve googled

I remember when I first started blogging not really knowing where to start. If you’re stuck, you can ask yourself the question:

Is there something that I had to Google recently that I couldn’t easily find an answer to?

If you had to search through multiple results to find the answer, or you had to figure out the solution for yourself, I think that is the perfect candidate for a new blog post. Imagine if you had googled the topic and your blog post had been the first result - what would have been the most useful post for you?

Of course, the caveat here is that you could end up writing about a really niche topic that only helps a handful of people. If you care about getting lots of views, you would need to be more selective on the topics you choose.

But I actually find a lot of satisfaction in writing about these little niche things. If I wrote about a popular topic, my blog post has to compete with a dozen others that are all battling for the top positions on Google search - and oftentimes the competition kinda sucks. You can tell they are writing it purely to try and pull in the views and get ad revenue. I feel there’s a certain magic in having a blog post that someone stumbles across because there’s nothing else on the topic.

Finding the value in your writing

There’s also a bit of a mental hurdle to get over when you first start blogging. There can be some doubt in your mind - does anyone care about the topic that I’m writing about? What if no one reads it?

The honest answer is sometimes no one will care, and sometimes no one will read it. Your first post isn’t going to be a masterpiece, and something you thought might be useful to others might turn out to be not very useful at all. Or maybe it is useful, but you just can’t find the audience who would appreciate it.

And actually - that’s totally fine. There’s still value in that post. For one, it’s great practice! The more you write, the better you’ll get. If it’s about something new you’ve learned, you can continue to use the post as a reference in the future. And even if nobody reads it right away, maybe your intended audience will eventually stumble upon that post thanks to SEO (which I’ll touch on below).

I also find a lot of joy in writing about my hiking. I feel like it lets me enjoy the mountain twice - once when I hiked it, and then a second time when I get to write about it! Writing about things you are passionate about or about personal experiences is a good idea too. Even if you don’t get a lot of views, having that record for yourself to be able to come back and reminisce on it later is really nice.

Try a change of scenery

So now that you’ve decided you want to write, and you have a topic in mind, the next step is to sit down and write it. If you’re a super procrastinator like me, getting started can sometimes be the hardest step - it can be intimidating looking at a blank page and thinking of all the work ahead of you. A change of scenery works well for me, so I might hit up a local cafe to try and get into the writing zone. There’s something motivating about having other people around you working on their laptops.

Other times an idea might come to me while I’m zoning out on a train ride, so I’ll just word-vomit out my thoughts into a text file on my phone. Hiking solo has been unexpectedly useful as well. Spending multiple hours without internet and just giving yourself that time to be in an almost meditative state is where I get a lot of ideas. I can’t do much writing on the trail, but I might quickly just jot some topic ideas down.

Either way, I think the first most important thing is to get as many words as you can onto the page. It doesn’t matter if it’s a super rough draft, or if your sentences stop halfway through as your train of thought jumps onto a different topic - you can come back to later. Just write.

Getting your post ready to publish

When is a post considered done? A good place to start is to read your post out loud. I find I tend to pick up typos a lot easier this way than reading it in my head. You can also run your post through a site like Hemingway which will tell you about any grammar or style mistakes that you are making. Nowadays with the rise of AI, you could probably ask it to point out any grammatical errors or typos you have made, although I would steer clear of letting it rewrite anything for you.

Although I consider myself good at blogging, I wouldn’t say I’m good at writing. So this is the section I feel least qualified to give advice on. It might be worth reading a book like On Writing Well by William Zinsser, or by trying to analyse what makes other people’s writing good to see how you can improve your own. But I don’t think you should spend too much time on perfecting your post, or you might procrastinate yourself out of actually publishing anything (which is the most important part of this whole thing).

Release your posts on a schedule

If you’re in the habit of reading other people’s blogs, I’m sure it’s more enjoyable when each time you come back, there’s something new to read. There’s nothing worse than when one of your favourite bloggers suddenly goes silent on you.

Of course, life happens and it’s harder than it sounds to write consistently. I have a habit of writing several posts at one time once I get into the flow of things, and then nothing at all for a couple of weeks. My hack is that although I don’t write consistently, as long as I publish them consistently, it’s the same thing to the reader.

The code for my blog lives in Github. There’s a really awesome GitHub action called Merge Schedule that will automatically merge pull requests at a given time. So after I write a new blog post, I’ll raise it as a new pull request on my git repo, and set a date for it to be merged. When the pull request is merged, it’ll automatically get deployed like magic.

(You might have to take a different approach depending on your blogging setup, or even just do it manually by clicking the publish button once a week on one of your drafts).

I find there’s something stressful about being on a schedule where you write a post and then need to immediately publish it - like there’s always that looming pressure that your next post is due, and you need to quickly get it done. I’ll admit sometimes I still write posts the night before or the day-of (I’m not perfect). But I think there’s something very satisfying knowing that you have posts on the backlog ready to go.

Promoting your post

Once you’ve published your post, you’ll need a way to let people know it exists. An easy way is to drop a link on the social media of your choice - Hacker News, Reddit, Bluesky and so on. There’s probably a whole art to social media linking - writing catchy descriptions and titles. I’m not too good at that, although I do at least have some nice-looking social cards set up.

If you want to go more old-school you can set up an RSS feed, or publish a newsletter (mine is here if you’d like to subscribe!)

Another strategy you can take with blogging is the “Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere” (POSSE) approach. Usually Google frowns upon duplicating your content elsewhere, but if the site provides the option to set a canonical URL, this lets Google know that your site is the original and to keep it showing up in the search results.

POSSE can be really useful since these sites already have an audience that you can hook onto, rather than starting completely from scratch on your own. It may be a little hard to find a platform that suits your content, but in my first year of blogging, I would re-post all my posts to the developer blogging site dev.to which was quite helpful.

Tracking page views after publishing

So you’ve published your new post, but it didn’t get many views - don’t fret! From here you can start to play the long game, and wait for the views to trickle in via SEO. People googling for something and stumbling upon a blog post is where I get the majority of my views.

You can use Google Search Console to see what people are googling to find your posts. Since this only tracks users coming in via Google search, I also use a service called Umami to track general page views. Anyone that uses an ad blocker won’t be counted, so it’s not 100% accurate, but good for some rough statistics.

Generally after publishing a post, it can take up to 3 - 6 months for it to start showing up in Google searches. In certain niche cases, if you’ve written about something and there is a strong need for it and no competition out there, it can show up sooner.

Of course, that’s not to say every post is going to start bringing in the views after 6 months. But if you write a post after asking yourself “is there something that I had to Google recently?” you’re bound to have at least someone look at your post eventually.

Tending to your garden (SEO)

So I touched on it in my digital garden post, but I think of my posts like little seedlings. Some of them you plant and they’ll grow without any further intervention. Others are going to need a bit more love and watering to bloom. (Some will just die completely, and that’s okay too).

SEO is a whole industry and topic that’s way too big to cover in this post. But what it boils down to is:

How can I improve my post, so that more people will find it when they Google for something?

Let’s say I wrote a post, and after 6 months I’m finally starting to see the views trickle in. I can take a look at the Google Search Console, and see what opportunities there are to improve the SEO of the post. The sorts of questions I’ll ask myself are:

• What key words are people searching for when they view my post? Does my post answer what they’re looking for?
• If I search for those key words myself on Google, what shows up in the “similar searches” section? Is it possible to update my blog to include information about those terms, so my post is more comprehensive? Should I update the post title?
• Who are my “competitors” (i.e. the other pages that show up when I Google the same search terms). What do they cover that I might be missing? What’s their word count like compared to mine? Can I improve my post content to better compete with them?

From this, I’ll see what changes I can make and update my post. I also make sure to put an “updated on” date on the post so Google knows it’s fresh.

On pre-planning posts and doing SEO research

So if I do any SEO research, it’s always after I’ve published a post. Optimally speaking, you should do all of this before you write the post, so you can focus on finding topics that are going to rank well on Google and get you lots of page views.

This can involve using (paid) tools like Ahrefs to research keywords where the competition isn’t too strong, but there is the opportunity to get a lot of page views. For example, Mt Fuji is a very popular mountain that a lot of people Google for. It would be probably impossible to get your small blog on the first page of Google for the search term “Mt Fuji” since you’re competing with Wikipedia and popular tourism sites, but if you wrote a post about hiking Mt Fuji in winter instead and targeted “fuji winter hiking”, then your chances are improved.

There’s a whole art to this, and it’s what the pros do to make their site get a lot of page views. I’ve tried keyword research in the past, but ultimately this takes some the fun out of blogging for me. I’d rather blog about what I want to blog about, post it, and see what happens.

Have fun!

At the end of the day, blogging is a hobby for me. There are a lot of ways you can try and bring in more views, and it’s fun to see those numbers go up for a dopamine hit, but I don’t think you should let that be the main reason you are blogging.

If you start off writing technical articles, but find it really tiring after a while, feel free to switch it up and write about travel or a new hobby you’ve picked up. If you want to overhaul your site’s design, go for it! You can always write a post about it. Your blog is your own corner of the internet where you can do whatever you want, and at the end of the day you should make it a place you’d enjoy most of all.