And, we’re back.

You know the drill by now: 6 year anniversary, Blaugust, lessons learned. So far I’ve spoken on how you’re allowed to just have opinions, write for yourself, and the importance of taking breaks. Now we’re into the messier recent years.

2021 was a weird year for me. It’s weird because, until recently, it was the most successful my blog has ever been. At least, that’s true when you go by traditional metrics: views. I don’t run ads on the site, but it’s always cool seeing the little numbers on articles hop up. I like to imagine that people are actually enjoying what they’re reading, and that gives me a bit of an ego boost.

That’s not why 2021 was weird though: 2021 was weird because it’s one of the only times where I actually did serious self-promotion. For a long while I’d thought about trying to promote my articles outside of Twitter. Tweeting whenever I’d published a new article was fairly easy, and didn’t take much effort. It almost never yielded any tangible benefit, but it also didn’t take much effort. That’s to say, the juice was worth the squeeze.

I could never shake the feeling that I was losing out though. That I could reach more people if I just took self-promotion a little more seriously.

This feeling of missing out was further reinforced by a friend of mine: MrMKL. You might recognize his name from an article he wrote for my website back in 2021. We’ve run in the same fighting game circles before, and he has always been very encouraging of the work I was doing. MrMKL even said that I should take to promoting my articles more seriously so that more people could find what I was putting out into the world.

My cats Mea, and Chives.

One day I decided to take that advice at face value, and started trying to promote my stuff more actively.

In hindsight, this shift in focus to self-promotion was a mistake. The bulk of it was done through Reddit. If you’re unfamiliar with Reddit, it’s like a forum from the early aughts crossed with modern day Facebook. They have a very transparent policy when it comes to promoting your work, so it’s a little less spammy there compared to other websites. Basically, you have to engage with the site, and respond to other user’s topics if you want to post a piece of content to promote yourself. If you don’t, then they’ll just shadowban you for spam. The general accepted ratio is 10 comments to 1 piece of self-promotion. Thus, I needed to start actively posting with my Reddit account.

For several months I managed to meet the minimum posting requirements. I wanted to make sure my account stayed in good favour, so I usually had closer to 15 or 20 comments instead of just 10. That may not sound like much, but as someone who wasn’t an active Redditor, it was pretty agonizing to constantly scroll through an endless mountain of mindless sludge looking for something to comment on. It got to the point where I was spending more time, and energy on keeping my Reddit account in good standing than I was blogging. That was a problem.

Shortly after my 4th year anniversary, I called it quits learning lesson 4: self-promotion isn’t worth the effort. I don’t actually need for my work to get viewed. I like when it does, but I’m not financially dependent on it. There’s a world where I maybe built an audience through Reddit, but after several months of trying to keep myself in its good graces, I gave up. It just wasn’t worth the hassle.

As I entered my fifth year of writing, I would come to learn another lesson that related to traffic. This one didn’t involve aggressive self-promotion, and burnout however.

For the longest time, I’d always assume a published article would get all of its lifetime views in the week it came out. This had proven true for a lot of my written work in the first 2 years, but through years 3, 4, and 5 that became less and less true. Increasingly, I was seeing articles that would go out to little fanfare during their original publication week, and would pick up steam over time. These posts never took off in a huge way, but they’d amass a handful of views every month. This helped to bump up my site’s stats, and also introduced new folks to my content. In both cases, I was happy.

Chives playing with a feather toy.

This had been happening for years, but it was only in year 5 where I really started to appreciate the effects of it. There were several long stretches where I didn’t post much of anything. However, my blog continued to cruise along generating more views than when I’d been actively posting in years prior. This was all thanks to my extensive back catalog of posts, which covered a very wide variety of different topics. 

That’s lesson number 5: never assume an article is dead. I’m not going to give you specific numbers, but there are a group of about a dozen different articles that regularly appear in my top 20 articles every year. These posts do better every subsequent year entirely without my meddling. I can’t tell you what will be successful, but you should always respect your older written work. There are going to be hidden gems there, and people will definitely take notice.

Alrighty folks, that brings us up to year 6. I’m going to keep you waiting a bit longer for the final lesson from this past year, but I hope this has been insightful. I know views don’t get talked about a whole lot because that shouldn’t be the primary motivating factor for writing. Counter argument however: monkey brain likes seeing big numbers. I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t get a bit of an ego boost from knowing that people are reading what I’ve written, which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing.

As always, thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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