Not curt and blunt at all - it's a very good question.

Yep I have, though I haven't done any real marketing. Over the past few months I've come to realize that's one of my real hurdles - marketing is just not one of my skills. I'm not sure where to begin with it, though I plan on learning.

I mostly share on sites like this, reddit, and forrst. Next week I'm going to be presenting Whoops in a lightning talk to a local Ruby group, which isn't something I've done in awhile and which I'm very mentally resistant to.

Maybe it's all just a matter of not having the right knowledge or experience. Programming is easy - I always feel like if I can't see the path I'll eventually be able to find it. Same with UI/UX. Not so with marketing, getting feedback, and iterating.

Aaron SW's latest series of articles have informative about tackling the hard problems. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve

Made to Stick is an excellent read on the subject of branding and marketing. http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/

I used to run a blog in 2008 and I got it to 6.5million page views before I quit it and I was featured in the book "Blogging Heroes" along with the founders of Lifehacker, Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Boing Boing.

My key strategy when I was growing my blog was to find existing communities that would like what I was writing and then build relationships with those communities.

Thanks for the leads! I will check those out. If you don't mind my asking, what made you quit your blog?

It was a huge time sink. I stopped blogging when my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and getting away from "trying to be popular on the internet" gave me the distance to see that I wasn't getting anything out of it.

I also changed jobs to something more interesting and now that's where I put my passion instead of a hobby.

Wow - I hope your mom is doing better. Thanks for sharing what you went through and I'm glad you found something better to focus your energy on.