Been having an existential crisis re: blogging the last couple of days. I’m not sure what the “next frontier” of everything is, and it’s making me a little depressed. Let’s say out some basics.
- I’ve been blogging here for about 18 months; I’ve posted about 1,400 times in that span.
- My best traffic months were basically August-October/November 2014; since that it’s been down around 25-30K a month, give or take. (Pageviews.)
- I tend to write 3-4 times a day, although that can fluctuate.
- I’ve been able to repurpose some of my posts on LinkedIn and they’ve been effective there — one or two have had six-digit view counts — but I see that interest starting to wane as well, with more posts showing up as 30 views and the like.
- I tend to write most of the time about marketing and the future of work and organizational development and those posts do OK, but I still get a chunk of my traffic from true crime posts. I’m fine with that, but it’s also not something I necessarily want to be known for.
Should also note this:
- A lot of times, writing this blog is a form of personal therapy for me, so it’s not going to go away or anything.
So … what are my options?
1. Post Less
I was thinking about posting once or twice a day instead of 3-4 times a day. The over-posting (even though I enjoy writing them and I don’t think I’m always throwing out shitty, diluted ideas IMHO) might explain the traffic drop over the last few months. So maybe I’ll start with 1-2 posts per day for a while. That’s one option.
2. Less one-off posts and more deep-dive posts
I write a lot about similar themes as relates to management, communication, work styles, meetings, e-mails, future of work, marketing, etc. But maybe instead of seeing a post out in the world and responding to it, I should gather a few different ideas and write one longer response post on a topic each week. I’m not sure that would resonate anymore, but it might.
3. Write A Book
I’ve considered this a few times. i know about 4,000 books are released every day in the world, or some stat like that, so this might not actually work. If I get about 25K views a month, and you gotta assume a handful of those are passive, then who the hell would buy a book I wrote? I’m not any kind of name. I still have more spam comments on this thing than I do real comments! I can’t see this ending well, but I’ve considered it.
4. Start A Podcast
Seems like everyone and their mother is doing this these days, but I used to have one — did OK, but hardly great, in terms of downloads — and it was fun. If I did a podcast, it would open up a new series of ideas I could investigate here, and open up a new medium.
5. Learn how to use Twitter better
I think I am OK at Twitter, but hardly even approaching “good.” I have about 1,400 posts I could repurpose, right? And I tweet maybe 5-6 times a day? I need to do something more logical there. Part of it is that I don’t often get favorites or retweets, so I make the assumption that people don’t give a shit what I’m putting out there. And honestly, maybe they don’t. But I’ve written 1,400 things. One of those things has to resonate with someone, somewhere … no?
6. Write more personal stories
These tend to do well, especially if I share them on Facebook (where your “actual friends” graph is). I don’t want to prostitute my entire existence for block click-throughs, because that seems a bit shameless (even for my rank ass), but there are things I could explore transparently that others are probably going through and maybe it would resonate. That actually kinda leads to the biggest question.
7. What’s the end goal?
I’m not about to make a mint doing this. I have WordAds on my site (because it’s .com and not .org as far as WP goes), and I make some money from that — beer money, basically, if at all. I do it because I like it and I like writing and I enjoy telling stories and maybe I feel a certain way and I feel scared about feeling that way and I want to see if anyone out there feels the same way. That’s all intrinsic, though. That has value but I wonder sometimes how to make something resonate. Or like, what’s the lasting concept here? Do I want to be seen as a person that can go speak to Microsoft employees about their work-life balance? I’m probably very, very far away from that. So am I just doing this for myself and hoping a few people notice? Is that what all bloggers are essentially doing? Or am I trying to turn it into a career or a monetization thing? I’m not really sure.
If you’re a blogger and have some thoughts, leave ’em in the comments or use the form to message me.
