One Year of Blogging
This post marks one year of blogging or 52 consecutive weeks of publishing. I’d just like to highlight a few things here based on my experiences over the past year. Thank you all for stopping by and I hope you’ve found something of interest.
Fear
In all honesty, I was scared to start a blog. All the usual self-limiting thoughts flood through your mind when considering putting yourself or your work out in the world.
“Who am I to start a blog?” “Why would anyone want to read my writing?” “They’re going to laugh at you.” And so on.
I am happy to report however, that none of these fears have been realized. In fact, the most common response to my blog posts has been crickets. And this is fine with me.
I never intended for this blog to go viral or to build a business directly upon it. That’s why you see no banner ads here, nor are you likely to in the future.
To anyone else who might be considering starting their own blog, I’d say go for it! The fears running through your mind are most likely baseless and will never happen.
The Benefits of Obscurity
Obscurity has its benefits. Especially when you’re starting out as a blogger and are still overcoming some of the initial fears we face.
Hitting publish on a blog post in the first months can be unreasonably stressful. It’s absurd, but you’re almost hoping that nobody will read it so nobody can pan it.
Our minds can be very silly sometimes. See Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow for more on this topic.
Personally, I’ve found this first year of relative obscurity very helpful. It’s helped me to overcome the irrational fear of hitting publish and being met with a deluge of criticism. That’s never happened, to me at least.
It’s also allowed me to improve my writing process over the course of this first year.
Writing Process
I’ve coalesced on a writing process throughout one year of blogging every week. This is not to say it’s the best for everyone or anyone else, but it’s worked for me. Worked to the extent that I’ve been able to deliver a post 52 consecutive weeks.
- Brainstorming blog topic ideas
- I use Google Drive and Google Docs to collect blog topic ideas.
- By doing this I always have a healthy reserve of ideas in case I get stuck for choosing a topic on a given week.
- This has of course happened several times.
- Pick a blog topic
- I put a reminder on my calendar for 7pm every Wednesday.
- Outline
- I put a reminder on my calendar for 7pm every Friday.
- My outlines are strictly short bullet point lists.
- I just want to highlight the most important topics I want to cover in shorthand and then organize them where appropriate.
- I’ve found this bullet point/keyword strategy provides all the prompting I need to make writing the copy much easier.
- I experimented with more detailed and verbose outlines and found it made writing the post harder. I’d spend too much time trying to recall exactly how I’d meant to word sentences rather than just writing it clearly at post writing time.
- Writing the Blog Post
- I like to write early Saturday mornings if life allows.
- Editing, Review, and Creating Post
- I like to do this early Sunday mornings.
- This includes creating the new post in WordPress. Then formatting it and marking it private until I’ve edited it to the point of readiness for publishing.
- Post Goes Live
- Sunday evening.
To be fair, this is the happy path. Wouldn’t it be nice if things always went as planned…
Unhappy Paths
I’d love to say I repeat this writing process verbatim every week, but of course that’s not always true. As any parent of young children can attest, your schedule is often out of your control.
Sometimes the little ones wake up early on the weekends and so I need to adjust my writing and editing times. Another week I might pick a blog topic, write an outline, and then on Saturday morning decide that I want to write about something completely different!
I’ve found keeping this flexibility very valuable. Rather than forcing myself to never deviate from a rigid plan, the flexibility to call an audible has made this endeavor easier to stick with. After all, if it’s your blog, you can ultimately do what you want.
Traffic
It’s been interesting to see how traffic to the blog has changed over the course of a year. One post in particular has driven the vast majority of traffic, Pluralsight vs O’Reilly Safari.
Google has ranked this post highly for the keywords “pluralsight vs o’reilly safari” so that explains the steady stream of traffic. At least compared to other sources of traffic, which have been very few and far between.
Twitter has been my only source of promotion thus far. Aside from one post, Best Podcasts for Remote Java Developers which was retweeted by some high visibility folks, I haven’t seen much traffic from Twitter.
I also experimented with cross-posting to dev.to in the first couple months. I think it would have been helpful as another source of traffic had I continued. However, I found the additional overhead of cross-posting a little more onerous than was worth it at the time.
Onward
I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with this blog going forward. I’ve kicked around a few ideas.
One would be to post less frequently, but going into more depth on topics. For example, posting once or twice a month, but posts that were more like 2000+ words.
I’ve also thought about doing more technical posts relating to the Java ecosystem.
Another idea is to spend time refreshing my last year’s worth of posts. Specifically by improving their readability by adding images and improved formatting.
If you have any suggestions, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or via the Contact page.
I appreciate all of you who’ve stopped by during my one year of blogging. Thank you and I hope you’ve found a few thought provoking things here.