Happy new year!
New plans, new hopes, new structure
Happy new year to you all!
Thank you for being here with me as we are all riding through this wild rodeo of the 2020s holding onto our saddles. It is far from over. If anything, the ride may get even wilder. The most I can hope for is to get control of this blog so that it can make sense to both you and me. That will start with a lot of chores.
The chores
Cleanup and fixing. As I mentioned it here and there, my import didn’t go too well and I have a lot to do on about 300 posts, fixing internal and broken links, tags, SEO optimization, adding categories, formatting, etc.
While I love writing, I am not crazy about the linearity of blogging, the idea that todays’ blog will be irrelevant tomorrow. I want structure, but the menus in Substack are not particularly conducive to that.
I will need to create as set of index pages to make sense of the whole, not just the last few posts.
Much like
When I started my blog on Wordpress in 2012, it was a hobby. I was Just trying myself.
I moved it onto Substack last year saying it is time to take it seriously. I am starting this new year saying I better turn it into a living, treating it as a full-time job.
That starts with a lot more writing. I just have to get the chores out of the way.
The hopes
I wish to start publishing at least twice a week. I want to keep Tuesdays for my serious posts and keep out of there the administrative ones, like this one, or the bitching about Substack support, the limitations of the platform and notes to my readers. I tried for a while to do a short news digest style weekly on Fridays but I gave it up due to lack of interest (reactions). I cannot possibly compete with the
who is clearly putting an enormous amount of work into his perfect digests.I will try to do instead short takes of ideas that I do not have the time to develop into full posts. This will also help me to reduce the incredible backlog I have. I have new ideas at about five times the rate of my ability to write them up.
I have several sets (3-6 posts on specific subjects) planned.
In my debate platform proposal, I suggested a few ideas that I want to develop into actual debate opening statements.
Eventually, in the course of the year I would like to read into a podcast all my posts (340 of them) and from then on, I will do audio in all the new ones.
I was very grateful to Mickey Rothwell for the opportunity to write for his blog
I was so inspired by his idea, that now I have several similar ideas to engage and expose other writers.
I love the community idea and I want to explore the possibilities. Let me surprise you with the details later.
Marketing and other unpleasant tasks
My readership is growing slowly, but steadily. I hate self promotion, what I like is the promotion of ideas and interactions. That is the beauty of the new-media. The ability to provide a measure of the communication. Likes, comments, forwards, shares, restacks and mentions. I wish Substack had a dislike (and maybe even a disagree) button, which I would consider even more important than the likes, but they do not. I will keep asking for it.
The statistics of Substack provide some information, but they cannot possibly measure up in importance to interactions. For me, the number and quality of comments that are the most important indicators of a good blog. What would help me the most are recommendations.
As it is, the number of subscriptions my recommendations generate for others at twice the rate of the invers. I have to thank @gbalfour for all the subscriptions I received from his recommendation.
The most unpleasant task I will have to do this year is the cleanup of my mailing list. I would like to say “my subscriber list,” but there is a point to the distinction.
At this point, still about a third of my readers are personal friends and acquaintances. They are not subscribers, they are getting the notification because at some point I added their e-mail address to my old mailing list that I imported into Susbstack when I moved here.
To be able to like and comment (and the rest…), they would need to create a Substack account. Most do not. I find that extremely disappointing. I have a so-called ‘friend’, who would actively advise other friends NOT sign-up for a Substack account when reading my posts.
At some point this year, when I reach a certain threshold, after giving fair warning, I will remove all addresses from my list that are without a proper Substack profile. I am dedicated to this platform and I want to encourage people to fully engage with it.
When I started, I was expecting faster growth; what I got instead is an increased determination to do my best regardless. The coming year will not be an easy one, but I am ready to face it, and I am most definitely ready to work it.
Thank you for being with me on the journey