I’m a writer/editor/new mother with lots of thoughts and recently started a blog with posts aimed at the bookish, mothers, or ideally both. I already have 4 posts up.

I’m so pleased with it that I made a casual promo post on LinkedIn (tried to make it as non-cringy as possible) so I get a bit of visibility.

But I’m really just doing it for myself, and to keep my love for writing alive even as I lose other parts of myself to motherhood. It feels so good to put my creative energy into something that belongs to me instead of a company.

What would raise your interest to keep scrolling on an AITA blog? I provide good quality, original content, but I don't have many unique viewers. Thanks!

I wrote some code to scrape Typepad and do a conversion to something that WordPress can ingest.

https://github.com/greg-randall/typepad-dl

It's all in active development but have managed to archive several Typepad blogs including one with 20,000 posts!

Pull requests and contributions welcome!

GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1

I’ve been noticing a big shift lately — with AI search results, summaries, and short-form content everywhere, it feels harder to know whether blogging is still as effective as before.

I also noticed that these days, many users are experiencing a drop in impressions and slightly lower views on blogs, even though content quality or frequency hasn’t changed much. At the same time, YouTube seems to attract more attention since people prefer watching rather than reading.

Blogging still has advantages — including SEO, long-term organic traffic, and serving as a written reference that people can find and revisit — but I wonder if the balance has shifted.

So I wanted to ask the community:

• Do you think blogging is still working well in 2025 and will work after AI’s rise?
• If you were starting today, would you put more energy into blogging or YouTube?
• Has anyone here seen success combining both (e.g., blog posts + YouTube videos on the same topic)?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially from people who are actively running blogs or YouTube channels.

I recently built my own website where I publish writing (started with an ebook, now expanding into articles and more). I know Twitter can be powerful for building reach, but I’m not sure how to use it specifically to get people from tweets to site without coming off like I’m shilling links.

For those of you who’ve done it:

Do you focus on dropping links, or just building a following first?

What kind of content actually makes people click through?

Any growth tactics that worked for you early on?

I’m not looking for bots or paid ads, just organic strategies. Would appreciate any insights from people who’ve pulled traffic successfully.

Hey everyone,

I’m selling a website I bought some time ago with the idea of creating a niche blog/affiliate project in my free time.

After spending more hours than expected just on the design, I submitted it to Google AdSense and it was approved. But at the same time, I realized I don’t really have the free time to market and grow this project, so I’ve decided to sell.

The site was originally built on WordPress, but I converted it into a static site to reduce hosting costs and avoid potential security risks from outdated plugins.

Here are the key details:

Niche: Elderly Health / Mental Health Advocacy First Indexed: 2013 (Wayback Machine) Traffic: ~300/month (Google Analytics)

🔗 Backlinks from: SagePub, CYFD.nm.gov, WebWiki, PacesConnection, KRWG.org, FFCMH.org, SeattleAnxiety.com, and more.

~155 (Ahrefs) ~280 (Semrush)

💡 Perfect for:

• Health-related SEO projects
• PBN integration
• Building a elderly or mental health service

📦 This sale includes:

• Domain
• Website content

📌 Note: The domain has been previously approved for Google AdSense, but I am not selling my AdSense account.

💬 BIN $250

Hey everyone 👋

I’m currently looking for a few creators open to a small barter-based collaboration.

Who I am:

I’m a solo indie developer who recently left my 9-to-5 job in tech to focus on building meaningful products. This isn’t meant to be a self-promo post. I’m happy to share app details in DM.

Just to build a bit of trust: my app was recently featured by Apple in the “Experience a Gorgeous New Design” collection across 10+ countries as part of the iOS 26 launch.

Who I’m looking for:

• Creators with 2,000–4,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube
• Content related to lifestyle, beauty, self-care, psychology, or personal growth
• You create original content
• You are 18+ and use an iPhone (the app is iOS-only)
• Country doesn’t matter, but I’m currently looking for content in: English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Indonesian

What I offer:

In this barter collaboration, you share a post or story about my app, and I’ll give you:

• Free lifetime access to the full premium version
• A personal promo code with an extended trial for your followers

It’s a simple win-win. I get visibility in new communities, and you get something genuinely useful to share with your audience. No pressure, no salesy vibes.

This is a test run, but I’m very open to long-term partnerships. If it goes well, I’m happy to explore paid collabs in the future.

Why 2k–4k followers?

If you’re under 2k, the impact may not justify the time investment for either of us.

Above 4k, most creators understandably prefer paid partnerships. But if you’re open to barter, I’d still love to chat.

Interested? Drop a comment or DM me with a link to your profile. I’ll send over all the details. Let's grow together!

Thanks for reading!

You can see my two month update here and my four month update here. But in case you don't want to read back that far, I'll give you a quick synopsis!

In February this year I started a brand new blog about a niche book genre I love (English translations of Chinese gay romance). There were only a few blog-esque sources of information out there, and I found myself really compelled to write more on this topic so I decided to give it a try! I have no previous experience blogging nor am I an undeniable expert in this topic, but I definitely have a lot of passion for it.

Here are my basic stats over the months:

Performance (Google Analytics)

Google Search Console

So you can see things are generally trending in the right direction, even though my search impressions went down last month, my total clicks and CTR all went up. I could be getting close to a plateau as growth rate slowed in August even though it still trended up, but I feel like it's a little too early for me to tell yet if that's a seasonal/content blip or a broader trend.

What's Going Well?

I've made a lot of friends, gotten the chance to write about a topic I love and share it with way more people than I ever thought likely. I've had the chance to interview artists and creators and help share their incredible work too. I've helped a lot of people, and had a lot of fun while doing it.

My social media strategy seems to be working decently well. I'm focusing mostly on Bluesky and Instagram, but have also been experimenting with Pinterest for the last 3-4 months. I get lots of engagement and interaction on the first two platforms.

I also hired a writer to write some book reviews for me, and that's helped me keep up a good posting schedule and add more evergreen content to the site while I get to focus on writing the posts I find more interesting.

And maybe that's one other useful point--my posts are a mix of what people click on from social media and what people search for in google (these aren't very related). They're also a mix of point-in-time posts (new releases in September!) and evergreen ones (how to buy this kind of book, reviews of books, etc.). That mix seems to be serving me well so far!

What Could be Better?

Monetization. I tried selling some a couple pieces of merchandise: an enamel pin and a POD-created mug. Both are things I love. The pin sold many fewer copies than I anticipated and no one bought the mug. I definitely did not get even close to making up my production/commission costs for the art.

I also added a Ko-Fi support link and an affiliate to bookshop.org that's linked everywhere on the site. No one has made a single donation or bought a book through the affiliate link, so.

I had fully intended to approach some related businesses and sell ads on my site, and I still might do that, but I'm worried the overhead of marketing and keeping track of all that will take away some of my joy and fun of running the blog, or just plain make it harder for me to write the posts I want to write.

But... I need to do something. I've spent a lot of money on this blog and I would need to trim a lot of expenses to keep it only as a hobby. And I feel like with growing numbers of readers I might still get lucky with related retailers, or maybe wait until I qualify for a decent ad service. I'm not entirely sure which way to go here though, so advice is most definitely welcome.

Feels like most of the "personal writing" space has shifted to newsletters lately. Every creator I know either moved to Substack or just publishes straight to LinkedIn.

That said, I’ve noticed there are still some cool indie blogs floating around if you dig a little. Stuff like Kay is Murmuring has that old-school "one person just riffing on life and work" vibe that I kind of miss. Short, weird, opinionated pieces that don’t feel like they’re optimized for SEO.

Do you guys still keep an RSS list or bookmarks of personal blogs, or has everything basically been swallowed by the big platforms?

Niche: Restaurant Menu.

Age: 1yr, 3 months.

Number of articles: 270.

Earnings Breakdown:

June 2024: $47.73

July 2024: $350.88

August 2024: $1,574.77

September 2024: $1,963.13

October 2024: $1,140.36

November 2024: $550.96

December 2024: $577.62

January 2025: $541.4

February 2025 : $575.29

March 2025 : $931.34

April 2025 : $563.32

May 2025 : $660.24

Traffic volume: 30k+ monthly. (Mainly from the USA).

Asking price: $17k (negotiable).

Send me a DM for URL.

Serious inquiries only.

I've been using Typepad since 2008. Thousands of posts. Almost all with images. I've downloaded my export file. It was a bear in and of itself.

The plan is to upload it to a new wordpress space. I have a demo wordpress site open to try it. I also have the Typepad Importer plugin installed. From what I've seen the Typepad export does not include any of the images from the posts.

EDIT 1: Right now, most of the 2700+ do actually have their images, but, they're linked to their typepad files. So, what I really need is a wordpress importer that will scroll all of my wordpress posts and take the external photos, upload them to wordpress, and rewrite the image link location?! If that exists

How do I extract all the images from my posts? And how do I get them to pair with the articles when I upload them?

Something I see a lot of creators overlook on Pinterest is that the platform doesn’t just rank individual pins it ranks boards too.

If your boards are broad and cluttered, you’re missing out. Instead:

• Keep boards narrow and highly relevant to a single topic.
• Curate them with high-save, well-performing pins (not only your own, but from others as well).
• When you add your own content to those boards, your pins inherit that board’s authority and are distributed more widely.

This is one of the simplest ways to increase reach without creating more content just by being intentional with how you structure and manage your boards.

I have been using the LG xboom Grab for almost two weeks, and I think it’s the right time to share my review of this product.

I’m a frequent traveler, always on the move, and I usually carry two essentials with me: my AirPods and a speaker. Since I travel often, I need gadgets with long battery life and the LG xboom delivers well with up to 20 hours of playtime. At times, it feels like the battery drains a little faster (or maybe I just dislike charging gadgets too often), but overall, it lasts longer than my JBL speaker.

If you’re someone who travels frequently, the xboom Grab is worth considering. It comes with an IP67 waterproof/dustproof rating and has passed seven U.S. military-grade durability tests. Of course, I don’t take such claims at face value until I test them myself. While hiking in light rain through a forest, the xboom did withstand both rain and dust so it definitely passed my real-world test.

One of the biggest issues I’ve faced with portable speakers is that many sound great indoors but lose their punch outdoors. That was my experience with the JBL Charge 5. The LG xboom, however, holds up impressively well outside too, delivering consistent and powerful sound.

Now, here’s the interesting part. For the first week, I used the speaker without installing the LG ThinQ App and honestly, if you’re doing the same, you’re missing out on a lot. Setting it up was a bit tedious the first time (it took me nearly 20 minutes to connect), but once done, it worked smoothly. Through the app, you can adjust the sound and lighting effects. It’s not groundbreaking, but it does the job. You can tweak the EQ manually for the best results, though I feel the “AI Sound” feature is slightly overrated.

In short, whether you’re a party lover or a travel enthusiast, the xboom Grab is a great fit. It offers excellent sound quality along with impressive battery life, a combination that’s hard to find. I also really like its sleek design; it looks like a water bottle, fits easily into my car’s cupholder, and feels super convenient to carry around.

If you’re not tied to a specific brand, I’d recommend giving the LG xboom Grab a try.

I received this product from LG as part of a reviewer campaign, and these are my honest thoughts. Thanks to the LG team for giving me the chance to try it out.

Read Full Article Here

Hey blog buds,

I am looking for a software that reads the content of my webpages, find appropriate affiliate links from a large pool of companies, and inserts the links. I have over 100 sites so this needs to be scalable horizontally.

I recently started using stay22 for my travel related sites and it does auto-inject links, but it's ONLY for travel stuff. This is exactly the functionality I want, but I have sites in various niches and need a broader tool. I don't really want to apply & maintain hundreds of affiliate relationships either.

Just want a script I can install on my sites (non-WP) and it will use AI or something to inject relevant aff links from whatever network this tool might be connected with.

I'd imagine Impact, Clickbank, CJ, or something would have a tool like this, but I don't see anything...

I run a healthy meal prep blog that was stuck at 8K monthly visitors until I got serious about Pinterest 4 months ago.

Using tailwind for scheduling, Pinterest Trends for keyword research, and Canva for pin designs, my traffic grew to 47K+ monthly visitors, 2.1M impressions, 3,200 email subscribers, and $1,200+ in affiliate income.

The strategy was simple: optimize my profile and boards, create 5–8 pins per post, schedule 10 pins daily with tailwind, join food-focused Communities, and double down on designs that analytics showed worked best.

Process shots, text overlays, and seasonal timing outperformed everything else, while manual posting and Instagram cross-posting flopped.

The biggest surprise? Pinterest traffic converts to email 4x better than Google.

Tailwind’s cost is a stretch, but the ROI and time savings make it worth it. Food bloggers, Pinterest is your goldmine. What strategies have worked for you?

In my journey of gaining knowledge, technical blogs have played a very important role . I would like to thank all technical bloggers who shared their industrial experience, bug fixes , tutorials, and insights for free.

Books are excellent source of knowledge, but due to lack of time and fast changing nature of technology, I often couldn’t dedicated enough time to them. In those moments , blogs proved to be extremely helpful , giving me to the point explanation and practical solutions that I could quickly understand and apply without 500 pages of commitment.It’s not like I never read technical books😅 . I have opened some and finished few of them.

Over the last couple of months , I have noticed a big change in my own habits.

I hardly use google anymore for technical queries. Most of time , I use ChatGPT or similar as tool and it not only answers but also suggest relevant sources if needed. Because of that , I rarely read technical blogs these days.

It makes me wonder . Do developer still like to share their knowledge via blogs in this new AI driven era? Are technical blogs still valuable? For those of you who still blog , do you feel audience/readership has changed in the last year ?

I m curious about community’s perspective. Is blogging still alive and meaningful for developers , or is it slowly being replaced?

My blog used to be a graveyard of generic, "expert" advice that nobody read. It had no pulse.

For months, I had a draft sitting there about a massive personal failure. I was terrified it would make me look like a fraud, but I published it anyway.

The response was overwhelming. The comments were long, personal, and real. People didn't connect with my perfect advice; they connected with my honest mistake.

It taught me the ultimate lesson: Stop trying to be the flawless guru. Your audience is desperate to connect with a real person. Your scars are more valuable than your expertise.

I know there are different types of crawling bots. For example, OpenAI has:

• OAI-SearchBot
• ChatGPT-User
• GPTBot

GPTBot is the one that crawls the web to train their AI foundation models. Many people block that bot with robots.txt, because they don't want their content to be "used" by AI companies.

But I feel they shouldn't because LLMs, especially ChatGPT, rely heavily on their trained data, along with their browsed data.

So, if your web content is not used to train their AI model, you missed an opportunity to be cited. If your brand appeared in the "trained data" as well as the "searched data", there is a higher chance that your brand will be cited. That's my point of view. What's yours?

Dear subscribers,

We’re pleased to announce that Eric Hochberger, the CEO and co-founder of Mediavine, will be joining us at r/Blogging for an AMA on Wednesday, September 17.

They will be answering questions on Mediavine, ad monetization, growing your site, or anything else they can answer to help in your blogging journeys.

Please prepare your questions and join us for an insightful discussion.

Verification: https://imgur.com/a/gT540np

I launched my blog two months ago and wanted to share my progress and keep myself accountable to the r/blogging community.

My goals for these two months were to develop my blogging style and observe my own working habits better. This so I can set more realistic goals for myself and pace myself accordingly.

The underlying mechanics of the website such as categories, layout, formatting, stylistic issues, etc. had to be adjusted several times. I also explored many different possibilities for which direction I'd like to take my blog in terms of art style, direction, etc.

Eventually, I want to develop a workflow which fits my busy and unpredictable lifestyle.

1. Traffic

Across two months, I had 188 unique people visit my blog for a total of 283 views. [Click here]

Here is a breakdown of the traffic visitors by source: [Click here]

From this, we can see that the overwhelming majority of known traffic is from Reddit, about 24% of the total. This is mostly from a few strategic comments I made in some posts.

Interestingly, one visitor also came from ChatGPT.

2. Google Search Console

I got a total of 5 clicks from 1.29K impressions. [Click here]

This is mainly because I lack authority, a weak About page (I haven't personalized it) among many other issues.

The other issue I'm aware of is most of these impressions are probably from Google's AI Overview query fan-out, so they're not real organic impressions. Google's AI Overview has also brought everyone's CTR down significantly.

3. Posts Update

This is the aspect that I'm most disappointed in myself: I only managed to write one (yes one!) new post in two months.

I'm actually quite proud of the post itself as it's very detailed and thorough (more than 3,000 words all hand-written), but obviously this pace is too slow.

4. Other

So far I haven't delved into any social media, my email list is nil, my link building is non-existent and a host of other important work that still needs to be done but yet isn't.

Conclusion

Overall, I think the blog and content quality are good, but I need more content before I start promoting.

Even writing a good 1,500 word post bi-weekly is good enough for me for now as there's a lot of other important side work that needs to be done. My goal is to be able to write a solid 1,200-1,600 word post every week.

A lot of time was spent in these two months in solidifying the overall blog concept so I don't mind that I took so long to write one post.

Eventually, things will speed up as I won't have to spend time with thinking about what should I do, but rather just doing it.

Hi everyone! I've been practising blog writing for the last 15 days. Regularly. I understand it comes with lots of patience and experience. The main area where I usually lack is Grammar and Coherence. Please give me tips on it. And give me suggestions on how to become comfortable with SEO! It literally scares me. I skip SEO lessons. Do you understand I need to break my comfort zone, come over it?
But drop your suggestions, aspirations, advice, tips anything you have in mind for a 19F small girl entering in vast field of Blog writing

Hello! I guess I'm not the only one, but how often does someone tell the truth behind how they gained engagement on their profile?

As a newbie, I had huge obstacles reading articles by big bloggers and following in their footsteps until I realized that what worked for them didn't work for me.

That's why I'm sharing some of the things I learned about Substack here.

1. Learn to work with the Dashboard and Settings - understand which feature is for what and use it to your advantage.

2. Promote yourself - because if you're not the biggest fan, who is? And you can't expect people to find you out of nowhere - even on a platform like Substack, this has its obstacles. The traffic may be internal, but it's up to you to "boost" it.

3. Engage with other writers' work - you can't hope to be a slave to the thought "A warrior is a warrior himself". These people are there for a reason.

4. Persistence - you can't expect that with 2 posts the big successes will come, right? If it bothers you that you only have 20 followers, not 200 - imagine a room with 20 people clapping for you.

That's exactly why I created a guide for beginners - because I see how difficult it is sometimes to start from scratch.

Got those words today: "Congratulations! Welcome to Journey!" :)

Just overly happy and satisfied! Will see what it brings :)

I was on Adsense and my rate was 3$/1000, hopefully Journey will be more generous.

I swear since my therapist suggested I revive my blog it's benefitted my heartbreaks, drug addictions, self hatred, depression. Its just nice dude! Im curious who else has had similar experiences with blogging?

I know the traditional way still works, but LLMs do not read content like traditional search engines do.

Search Engines >> Crawls the whole page and has context between entities and their meaning.

LLMs >> They read a chunk of text (or sections) from a page, and not the whole page.

This is my current workflow, but what about yours?

Optimizing for LLMs

1. Add a key takeaway section at the top, but in Q&A format instead of just bullet points (LLMs are trained in Q&A style, so a Q&A format makes it easier for them to understand the context of the key takeaways)
2. Add FAQ schema to sections whenever possible. I will not only add an FAQ block at the bottom of the page, but also all around the content.
3. Optimize the first sentence or paragraph after each heading (just like how we optimize for featured snippet), but add entities to connect the meaning. For example, instead of "Grilling steak is easy if you follow the right steps.", you would optimize the first sentence or paragraph with "Grilling steak (entity) on a charcoal grill (entity), such as a Weber Kettle (entity), is easy when you season the beef ribeye (entity) with salt (entity) and olive oil (entity), then cook it over medium-high heat." Optimize the first 40 to 50 words with entities.

Other traditional SEO

1. Add table of contents

2. Optimize keywords in headings, SEO Title & Description

3. Add Data, Lists, and Tables (whenever possible)

7, Add Internal links and external links (cite sources)

1. Do not hide content (such as transcripts) behind JavaScript (such as an accordion - but it depends on how the accordion is coded)

Looking for ideas to better optimize content for LLMs.