What I've learnt posting every week for a year.

This week marks the first anniversary of writing on this very blog, almost every week, for the last year. 50 posts (excluding linkdumps). 50000 words. Probably hundreds of hours. I covered last week exactly how I do that in practice, but this week I wanted to share what I've learnt from the process.

When I started to write every week, it was part of a rebrand and repositioning of my services to better target the people I wanted to work with. This was also combined with an effort to lean back into LinkedIn to achieve greater reach. Ultimately with the objective of getting noticed in a competitive industry dominated by some big and incumbent players.

If you've followed since the beginning, you'll notice that things have changed and evolved as I've gone. Figuring out what works and what doesn't.

Here is some of what I've learnt, what I'd do different if I started again, and what I'll do next.

Word of Mouth Is Still King

The number one thing you can do to grow your business is deliver exceptional quality and value to the people you currently serve. Every job I've taken on this year has been either repeat work, or through referral. Sure, the blog may serve as some kind of validation, but it has not directly brought in a single dollar for me. And at this stage I don't expect it ever will.

LinkedIn Is Not Your Friend

I've railed against LinkedIn in the past, and my feelings towards the social network haven't changed in the last eight months. While I haven't been on LinkedIn for a few weeks now, I had been generally trying to make an effort to post something 2-3 times a week.

Having done some experimenting with exactly what I post and following some basic metrics, both on LinkedIn and my web traffic, I do have this to add:

Posts that include links that take the audience off platform, like back to my full article, get fewer post impressions. I also see zero change in my website traffic regardless of if I post my article to LinkedIn or not. I'm pretty confident cross-posting the articles to LinkedIn does nothing for reach.

In the end I've just stopped bothering posting my articles to LinkedIn. What I decided to do was just post 2-3 quick and random posts each week just to remind everyone that I exist. But as I said, for about a month now I haven't even done that.

Organic Growth Is Extremely Slow

When writing previously about LinkedIn, my conclusion was this:

If you want to grow a following on LinkedIn, spend your time prospecting for followers (through comments and DMs), and only the bare minimum on creating content.

Unless you're hustling yourself on LinkedIn, something I don't have the stomach for, your audience will grow very slowly. Regardless of how good your content is. The same is also true for the blog, especially one that requires people to actually take five minutes out of their day to read.

I don't promote my blog. And even when I did, it had negligible impact. The organic growth exists, but it's slow. I now get 200-500 unique visitors a week. Not exactly earth-shattering numbers, but while being small, I think it isn't bad given the type of blog this is. I don't just aggregate stuff from the web, or repost whatever is trendy that day. Instead, it's the blog of one guy writing about his experience carving out a corner of his professional niche. If even 1/10th of the traffic actually read my articles in entirety, I still feel pretty honoured that 20-50 people care enough to read what I write.

I do get quite a few compliments from people that read my articles, so that's nice. But the time cost for that small amount of reach is significant. If I was to measure the blog against it's objective, I'd give it a pass mark.

What I'd Do If I Started Again

The problem with anything you start, is you have to keep going if you want it to bear any fruit.

I knew that going in, but one thing that is always hard to predict is how much time that takes and how much life gets in the way. I see this with some of the design blogs I follow, after a year or so the articles get fewer and further between. Eventually they lay dormant.

With that in mind, would I still start a blog? Probably. The blog has been great for me personally to really help me develop my own identity and philosophy. It truly is my Journal. Though I wouldn't commit to a weekly publishing schedule. Maybe once a month, or even just whenever I felt like it. I would set those expectations up front.

Honestly, if I wanted the fastest growth and widest reach, I'd start a YouTube channel.

I wouldn't bother with LinkedIn at all except to find out where all the design and medtech meetups are. The time freed up by not posting on LinkedIn or writing articles I would spend on getting out and meeting people. Even if it means getting on a plane to somewhere new. As I said, word of mouth is king.

In fact, and this might sound damning, if all you did was get out and meet people rather than post or blog or whatever, you'd probably be ahead.

What I'll Do In Year Two

I've been thinking a bit about where to go from here.

I do enjoy the writing, despite the time it takes. And the weekly schedule keeps a bit of pressure on to get the article done, without making the task overwhelming. I suspect that if I moved to a monthly article, in an attempt to make up the lack of frequency with increased depth I would just put in four times the effort on the Sunday before publishing it.

I've heard somewhere about doing something 100 times to see if it pays off. I figure 100 is a nice round, arbitrary number, so I will go with that. Most blogs that I've followed that are now defunct haven't made it to 100.

I'm under no illusions that this blog will last forever, but I also want to be sure it's worth the effort. In an ideal world my work would speak for itself so I could just focus on doing the best job I can, and the blog is redundant. I'll go another year and make a call then.

I've tossed up whether I keep the newsletter running or not. It's not really much extra work, other than collating a few links and images for sharing. That said, I'm going to pause the newsletter indefinitely. While not much extra work, I also see little value in keeping it going. It does very little that the blog doesn't already do and I suspect most people are like me and reluctant to hand over their email address. I could dangle a carrot like an ebook or something, but I don't have the time to compile that either. If you really want to be notified of new updates, I suggest you subscribe through RSS. Or just drop back in when you have a moment.

As for LinkedIn, I'll likely maintain some small amount of activity there just to show proof of life.

But here, here is, quite literally, my domain.