Stagnation and Transition to Medium

After years of grown, activity here on the blog appeared to have peaked right around the beginning of 2015. At that time, the blog was receiving 6,000 or more visits per day, on average. Since then, there has been a steady decline in visits. These days, I’m seeing under 3,000 visits per day for the first time in a long time. Perhaps, the single biggest reason for this is a lack of content. Or interesting content, anyway.

I suppose this is understandable. With the limited time I have to write each day, my focus has been on getting my fiction-writing done first. If there’s time, I’ll might write on the blog. Might. Because lately, I’ve felt stagnant when it comes to the blog. I used to write whatever came to mind, but I’ve shied away from that lately. In part it’s time, and in part I’ve worried about a lack of interest, and that I might come across as trying too hard.

Then, too, I have felt for a while now the need to move beyond WordPress as the primary tool for my blog writing. I’ve considered changing things up, using a new theme, but really what I need is something entirely different. This feeling of stagnation and the need to break out into something different lead naturally into transition.

Going forward, I will be doing the bulk of my blog-type writing over on Medium. I’ve been impressed with Medium for a while, but I wasn’t sure why I was impressed until recently. I think it comes down to a few important factors:

1. Simplicity. Medium is easy to use, and far easier to maintain than a self-managed WordPress installation. The time I gain back in maintenance can be used to write the kind of things I’m interested in writing more frequently than I have been.

2. Aesthetics. Medium is beautiful. I love reading things there. There is a simple elegance to the design, that makes reading a pleasure. Then, too, those same aesthetics apply to the writing experience. It is easy to write and format stories on Medium. It had interface that makes me want to write more.

3. The right metrics. Monitoring WordPress metrics became a kind of part-time job for me. How many views? How many clicks? From where? Drilling down into Google Analytics data, when I could be writing. And I’ve come to believe that most of those metrics don’t really mean that much. After all, someone can visit a post but not read it. Which is why I like Medium’s approach: They track one key measurement: “read ratio.” It’s a measure of reads to views, and it tells you how many people are actually reading what you wrote.

4. Discussions. Nothing beats Medium’s commenting and discussion system. You can comment on any part of a story. You can highlight pieces, and recommend the story. Like everything else about Medium, it is simple and elegant.

I want to assure folks that this blog here is not going away. However, it’s function is changing. Over on Medium I’ll be writing about writing, and technology, and paperless lifestyle, and productivity, and baseball, and lots of other things. But I won’t be making announcements over there. That’s what this blog will be used for.

I suppose you can think of it as this blog becoming my author “platform” (I dislike the term, but I can’t argue with its appropriateness in this case.) New publications, new stories, articles, appearances, and things like that will be announced here for those interested.

I have built up a wonderful audience over the years, and I can only hope that some of you will be willing to follow me over to Medium and keep up with what I am writing over there. You can even add my Medium posts to your RSS feed, using this link. I understand not everyone will want to make that transition with me, and that this might be a good time to pursue other blogs, or cut back on blog reading. But I do hope that moving to Medium will help rekindle the fires that kept me blogging for nearly a decade, and that the lessons I’ve learned over the years will make me a better writer because of it.

As an example of one kind of thing I am trying to do over on Medium, take a look at the post I wrote there  earlier today called, “Excavating Old-School Self-Tracking.” And if you are interesting in following along with me on Medium, you can find my profile at: https://medium.com/@jamietr.