Real-world experience won't grow your blog by itself

I'm starting a new category here called Opinion. The idea is simple: I find a question someone else asked publicly, and I answer it the way I'd answer it at a bar, not the way a content strategist would.

The first one up is a question from Reddit's r/Blogging: does real-world experience actually help a blog grow, or does search intent matter more?

My answer is: there's no black-and-white version of this.

Experience makes the writing easier, not the ranking

Without real experience, it's harder to write properly about something you're supposedly passionate about. That part feels obvious to me.

If you're genuinely involved in a topic, writing with search intent in mind becomes a lot easier too, because you're not reverse-engineering what an "expert" would say. You already know what you'd say.

The old SEO playbook stopped working

There was an era where anyone could write about any topic, dress it up with bells and whistles to look like expertise, and land on page one. Those posts were calculated.

Uber-scientific-sounding titles, tailored to whatever freakin' SEO trend was working that quarter. I think that era lost its value, and generative AI search finished the job. When a search engine can summarize the internet's consensus in three seconds, "sounding like an expert", then the music stops.

I asked Google's AI about my own approach to blogging at one point. I told it plainly: I don't care about SEO. I just want to write down what I've lived through, what I'm currently building, and where that's taking me.

The answer? It's a better approach because I would write naturally about my journey, and I can focus on long-term growth without pressuring myself.

I trust bloggers who've actually done the thing

I'm a fan of bloggers who write from experience, because that voice can't be matched by an AI agent or a search algorithm.

If I wrote about indie hacking or building a startup without ever having attempted either, it just wouldn't land right. You'd feel the gap even if you couldn't name it. You can't pretend to be someone you're not, or you can't pretend what you do but never fucking did.

Bloggers who build trust over time, through real experience, get to be more selective about how they use search intent to bring people in. That combination, real experience plus intentional search intent, is the strongest one I know of.

I could lean harder into that side myself. Chase low-competition keywords, tighten my titles around search volume. I don't think it's the right time for me to do that yet. I am simply focused on building a journal first.

The accidental proof

Here's the ironic part. Two of the posts that got the most impressions and clicks on my blog were ones I never wrote for traffic. One was about the new High&Low movie. The other was about switching between iCloud Mail and Google Workspace.

Both were purely accidental hits. But they still fit the overall narrative of what I write about, which I think is the actual factor that matters.

You can chase traffic with random topics that have nothing to do with your blog's DNA, and sometimes it'll work. But if the post doesn't belong to the story you're already telling, I think it's mostly useless, even if the numbers look good for a week.

My verdict

For me, it comes down to trust over gaming the system. I'd rather trust bloggers who've lived the experience and use search intent to bring the right people in, stick around, and come back.

Bloggers who are only optimizing for search results with no real experience underneath it will eventually crash and burn. One builds a readership. The other just rents attention from an algorithm, and the rent's due again next month.