For my 2020 New Year’s Resolution, I set out with a friend to write an article a month. For this last one of the year, I’ll go over all the numbers and set some more goals for next year.
Goals for 2020
In the beginning, I took this on as a way to improve my writing, share some of my musings with friends and challenge myself to think deeper about certain issues.
In hindsight, I should have set more concrete metric-based goals, since it’s really hard to say whether or not I actually met them. Here’s a look though at all the stories I’ve written.
The Good:
- 📖 High read ratios — typically 20–50% is considered good. Overall the stories, the read ratio averages out to about 50%!
- 👀 ~ 2,300 views (or ~ 200 views per story)
The Bad:
- 📞 No change in followers — Since most of my readers (~80%+) are among my Facebook friends, it’s challenging to expand the audience
- ⏬ Low engagement — Some of the articles perhaps weren’t targetted for the intended audience or weren’t as enticing
The Non-Goal:
- 💸 Revenue — I made about ~$15 from articles over the last year. After Medium removed the tie between internal recommendations and the paywall, I’ve since demonetized everything (and was sharing friend links before) so no more paywalls!
Of all the stories I wrote, the ones that were more popular effectively focused on “Lessons learned from Tech Experience.” I’ll try to hone in on that more next year.
Goals for 2021
- Increase page views to ~500 per article. I’m planning to do this with meatier articles that dive deeper into tech that I’m intimately working with.
- Increase organic traffic to ~ 300 per article. Medium recommendations seem to be pretty hit-or-miss, but more focused articles should help.
- Maintain 30%+ read ratios
Thank you
It’s thanks to readers like you that inspired me to write! As always, I’m always available if there’s something you read that you like, disagree with, or want to talk about!
