The numbers are up a lot.
I have been blogging about 10 years, maybe like 12. Nobody has ever really read my writing.
The last 2 years I changed some stuff.
1. Started posting only about building companies. My blog is a magazine about startups and products and such. So no more random snips – those go to other places.
2. In August I started posting daily. Traffic increased 3x when I did that.
3. Those posts are short not long. Didn’t seem to matter.
4. I didn’t write any hit posts – the Hacker News type of thing that goes insane. I didn’t really try to write such a post either (those are usually epic length).
5. In December I set my blog to re-tweet the archive the way Maria Popova and Ari Meisel retweet their back catalog. That also 3x’d my blog traffic.
6. Since August I have also had some ‘media’ — article in Wired, big talk at Maker Faire, DLD, some other cool stuff. But nothing compared to past media for Peek or Virgin Mobile which were epic. So I don’t ascribe a ton here.
7. The Twitter follower count suddenly increased a lot too from December – the retweeting seems to have done it — about 25% increase in 6 weeks. Perhaps the principles of “write a magazine not a private journal” are relevant here too – if you are reliably posting about startups, say, then people have a reason to follow you. I’m not a celebrity so people don’t care about random stuff I do as much.
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