I have been planning to start a blog this year. So, I checked out some blogs which are already out there and doing quite well. One of the blogs that I came across was Tapas Adhikary's Greenroots Blog on Hashnode. It was quite popular and him having published 150+ articles on this platform, I wanted to learn from him and talk about my aim of starting my blog. So, I booked a time slot on topmate.io/tapasadhikary for a coffee chat with him and this is how it went.

We discussed 5 major points:

1) How can having a blog help?

Layoffs have been happening left and right for the past few months. You never know when you will be laid off. A blog can help me in multiple ways. One is to be able to explain what I know, which can be helpful in interviews. Secondly, I can take up roles as a "Technical Writer" to write paid articles for other blogs or publications.

Writing on Hashnode will help me with marketing my articles and reaching new audiences, which I can also utilize if I plan to sell my books or courses in the future. So, a blog can open up many opportunities for me as a developer.

2) Which platform to write on?

We discussed choosing to create a blog from scratch vs writing on existing blogging platforms like Hashnode, Dev.to, Medium and Showwcase. We concluded that choosing a platform that can help us when we are starting as we can have our entire focus on writing and need not worry about marketing. I chose Hashnode because it also enables us to have our blog on a custom domain.

3) Why write about something which already exists?

Everyone has a unique style and a unique voice. Even if two people are talking about the same topic, they are going to explain it in 2 different ways. With so many readers out there, everyone can find a writing style that they like more than the other.

I talked about my idea of having my blog posts in conversation style between a tech lead and an intern. Tapas told me he also wrote a blog post in a similar style a few years ago. To convince his colleagues to start using react library, he wrote an article in a style where a junior developer and a senior developer are discussing the same thing and the senior developer is explaining why using react will be the correct choice.

4) How to write a good blog post?

He advised me to not worry too much at least for the first 3 months or the first 6 months. Just keep writing and keep publishing your blog posts and you will keep improving if you keep putting yourself out there.

No need to worry about things like SEO right now or how much people are liking it. Improvement will happen gradually. Decide a frequency like weekly, bi-weekly or monthly and stick to it. This will help you to be consistent and avoid burnout.

5) How he blogs?

He talked about his writing process and how he has a whole structure where he researches a topic on which he wants to write a post on. Write a draft and not worry about it being perfect. You can worry about that in the editing phase.

For publishing, publish your post on your main blog, and after a couple of days, republish it on other platforms like Dev.to, Showwcase and Medium using canonical links. For a bigger topic, choose to break that topic into sub-topics and write a series of blog posts rather than writing a long article.

Finally, I thanked him for his time and for sharing his experience with me.