If you're wondering, the community is a private forum where you can get advice from experienced bloggers, feedback on your articles, and attend workshops and meetups.

No one in there is selling stuff to each other. Actually you may end up getting access to other people's stuff for free exchange for thoughtful feedback :)

Thanks for taking a look and reading, I appreciate it!

As I shared in the breakdown, what your impression is could be why most people who join have done my newsletter first.

Maybe that's something for me to think about, how to frame it for people who haven't read my newsletter or haven't been following me on Twitter for a while.

The content soon becomes more about narcissism than value creation.

"I started from nothing and now I have a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, a beautiful car, and a beautiful boat, as you can see on this beautiful website, and you can too - if you sign up for this free newsletter which will give you some sticky free content and then introduce you to my special Monthly Success Diamond Club Offer which is usually $1000 but for today only...'

And then it turns out all of the above are hired for the photo feature and aren't real. But maybe wishing hard enough will make them so. And so it goes.

I don't think we're close to that limit here, but it does exist and reliably seems to exert a dark gravitational pull on the hopeful and unwary.

I don't want to be rude. We just get so much of this stuff somebody promoting something about talking about building something that helps people build something to talk about promoting stuff. That's so many nested meta levels that I'm as a dev calling BS after about 2 of them and go away.

Unfortunately I read your blog post as something similar. It was about how you funnel people into some community that helps others polish their writings so they get more reach. That's 3 levels right there.

Here is you chance to show that the chain ends after those 3 levels and there is actual non-meta content waiting at the end of that chain.

So I never intended it to be here, just trying to answer some questions as I get that people from HN have way less context about me or the community than people who've been following the community and newsletter for 6 months on Twitter!

So yeah, it's not meant as self-promotion. It's part of my effort to "build in public", as I mentioned in another comment.

My main takeaway in the article is actually that a lot of people skip the step of "providing value first" and jump to something paid.

Whereas I've been writing a free newsletter for 6+ months, which many people have actually offered to pay for and told me are "better than most paid courses". I've done weeks worth of free consulting over email for subscribers and they have had really cool successes.

Anyway, we do have a public events page if you want to see the kind of stuff going on: https://bloggingfordevs.com/events/

As I mentioned at the end of the blog post, I'm personally preparing an SEO Workshop which'll be given in less than two weeks. The membership is literally $12/mo and refundable, and a workshop like that alone would cost 10-20x that if given in a conference setting.

Not sure if this is "enough" for people here, but as long as members who are there are happy and feel like their investment is compounding, that's gonna have to be my metric for success.

Hope that contributes to the discussion.

The public events page does nothing to explain the aforementioned meta levels away.

Effectively a form of information dropshipping.

It also speaks to the fact that over the last handful of years HN has been reduced, in a significant way, from people discussing tech-as-a-means-of-business, to something akin to those “business forums” where people share how they made money doing Whatever, But Online (tm). As if just about any way at all to scrape a bit of money from an online presence is a viable way to create a sustaining business that can generate good profits YoY.

But I digress, here we are.

I started blogging late this summer and quickly found how hard it is to write and be read.

As an engineer I of course started researching how to increase my readership and I ended up down the infinite sewer hole of content marketing and "how to game search engines" aka SEO.

(If you want to understand why the web looks like this and why we are rather searching ddg with !searchr for answers... learning a bit of SEO will be the epiphany you need)

The amount of _crap_ you have to navigate to get some actionable information is insane.

I was lucky to stumble into Monica's Blogging for Devs free newsletter course and it was just the perfect actionable information I was looking for. No need to waste more time scavenging the web for some free answers.

The community is, in my opinion, the natural evolution. A place where I can learn effectively. So far, I've enjoyed it and I think it's worth the money.

I'd just point out that things like Backblaze's drive reliability blogs are absolutely content marketing. There's plenty of low-rent clickbait out there but there's also good material that is ultimately being created and paid for for marketing purposes. (And SEO isn't all black hat. For example, if you're writing about some hot topic, you probably want to mention it in the title and not take forever to get to it in the article.)

Do you mind if I ask why you want to increase your readership?

What is your goal as a dev who also blogs?

I ask because I've spent a decade building my blog and social media following (which I have to say, is pretty decent at this point), but there has never really been a "goal" or "purpose", and I'm really only thinking aobut ways to monetize it well now, after many thousands of hours of work.

1. The main goal of my blog is to help me structure my knowledge and improve my writing. (I am a non native speaker and I am constantly struggling with my comms.)

2. Secondly, related to gaining readership, a goal is to maximize future opportunities: use the blog as a facility to expand my network, and consequently as a way to build a personal brand.

And I got at least three thorough advises from Monica or a community member on how to improve various stuff on the blog, that I could've easily been billed for by a normal consultant.

That being said, he has a set of videos and a webinar about interviewing for jobs which really did help me communicate my experiences in a way that tied in to what the job role is looking for; that's not an easy task, especially if the job is in a different industry. It certainly wasn't the only resource I used, the Interview Guys blog and book are good too.

Seriously this feels like tai lopez.

Possibly the Rich Jerk. I don't know how much money they had, but they certainly lived up to at least half the name.

(Edit: It occurred to me that there were probably loads of these things; I always just assumed, maybe wrongly, TRJ was the original/worst/best.)

The Something Jerk?

Maybe...Circle?