I think I can give you my perspective here, since I am part of Monica's community.
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.)
> I of course started researching how to increase my readership
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.
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.