Hello.
So let’s clarify this. They rarely or ever work if you are a beginner blogger. If you have a reputation it will probably work or people will use it as a reference. But I’m skipping ahead.
Beginnings
When you are a beginner blog writer you want to get out as much content as possible. Write mostly relevant things and interesting information because you need to establish a name for yourself. To get that starting you want to be as interesting as possible and make people leave with the intent to come back for more.
After you’ve established a name for yourself you can do larger, more coherent updates with more information in between the line because people know you and know what you write is worth reading. Also you have to bear in mind that longer posts are rarely read to the fullest. They are skimmed and then if it is good it will be used as reference material or a post to point to. Also people rarely have a lot of time on their hand to read a long post, several smaller chunks can be digested more easily!
Updating frequency
In the age of modern information overload it is hard to be relevant and interesting and keep people to come back to you. Apart from what you are writing about, which is up to you, you have to schedule your updates to a certain frequency. You don’t want people to wait for to long but you don’t want to get them flooded either. Since people do read a lot of blogs they will choose carefully what to read and what to discard. And you might just end up on the discarded list if you already had a post at that moment.
I’m suggesting that you write you post what you would like to write at that moment and then use a scheduler to post it in certain frequencies. Maybe once or twice weekly is good enough. You need to experiment it out.
Write, write, write
The way to success is pawed with writing. You want to be visible and you want to keep people engaged with you. That means that you have to come up with content.
With a technical blog that’s a little bit difficult from time to time since so many people already might have solved your problem of which you are trying to write about. That’s okay. It doesn’t have to be a technical blog where you write about new ideas every day. It doesn’t have to be a troubleshoot blog about how to solve a particular problem.
It doesn’t have to be about showing some people how to write this and that in a completely new environment.
So about what then?
Guess what? It’s up to you!!! If you wrote a script you like and are fond if, post it. If you created an interesting configuration, post it. If you wrote a line of code you find interesting, post it. You’ve read a blog post about something and have an opinion about it, post it. Is it scientific, some discovery, some idea, some random thought, post it! You wrote a particularly ugly script you never ever want to see, POST IT!!
Your blog doesn’t need to be a portfolio of how awesome you are. You are allowed to be human. You are allowed to post some very boring or trivial stuff you came across but YOU find it interesting! You don’t need to be new every day in every post.
So my suggestion is, write, write, write. As often as you like, schedule it and post it in a timely manner. Be responsive if people write you a comment always answer. Nobody likes an anonymous somebody who writes then disappears. People like bloggers who engage them and give a damn about their opinion as well.
Always be yourself. The blog is for you too so retain what ever you want to retain and read back later maybe to learn from it. And of course writing it down makes you remember it better.
Thanks for reading!
Gergely.