Writing every day in June | #30
Writing every day in June | #30
A reflection on writing every day for a month and what comes next
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30 days ago I started this newsletter. I wrote an article everyday for the month of June and sent it out. The only condition I put on the posts was that I had to be able to answer the question ‘So what?’, as I described in the first post. The intention being that everyday I write something that’s going to be interesting or useful to somebody. On top of that I decided to make the posts on Tuesday and Friday more focused, they specifically be about technology, product management or climate change. Well, I did it, achievement unlocked. And so I learned some things.
Lesson #1 - Doing justice
Coming up with something (that I thought was) interesting to write about everyday was surprisingly easy. And I enjoy writing so actually writing everyday was easy too. But, these two things together, writing something interesting everyday was hard.
Sometimes I ended up spending way too much time fleshing things out and burning a number of hours on the newsletter, or I ended up with something that I could have done a better job of. I don’t like either of those feelings.
Lesson #2 - It’s not just about the words
Along the way I received some surprising feedback that someone who had read a article couldn’t work out how to subscribe. This was nice and frustrating, I think I fixed it. But I wonder how many people may have run into the same problem and not hit sign-up.
Lesson #3 - Audience
I thought that by doing this and sharing it with my own network I might see a network affect and start to grow a small audience. And I thought that with each newsletter if I shared the post in ‘relevant’ places online (group chats, forums, slack channels, etc) the same would happen.
This did happen to an extent. For the articles I ‘boosted’ in this way the views are significantly hire but they didn’t translate at all into sign ups. I think if I want to make that happen I have to focus on specifically making that happen. Whether I want to do that is another question.
Some observations
There are a number of things I could have done better than I knew I could have done better from the beginning and a number of things I did that I knew would be good. Some of the perhaps more interesting ones are thus:
Use high quality images in your writing, it breaks it up, helps the reader with visuals, and lends more credibility to a wall of text
The x.substack.com URL hurts organic traffic. I have run blogs before that I’ve build myself that index far better on Google than this Substack URL.
If your audience is varied so too will be your engagement. I knew by sharing within my network the majority of my subscriber base would not be interested in a lot of what I have to say, especially the more serious posts. But, I knew this ahead of time of course.
It’s a lot of fun when someone comments, tweets, or talks about what you’ve written to their inbox.
What comes next
I want to write the stuff I’m interested in writing that I think others could find interesting. Long form opinionated articles about Product, Tech, and Climate Change. But, my reservation is that that’s not a lot of fun to read, and it’s not exciting to write. So instead for July I’m going to commit to 1 long form articles a week, so four in July, and write more fun/silly articles without a specific cadence when I feel like it. Hopefully by having the more serious cadence set I’ll be able to create the headspace for the sillier stuff.
Oh and I’m also going to spend some time to work out how to index on Google better and re-work the ‘branding’ and boiler plate stuff.
Thanks for reading 😊
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