I write very short form here as you’ll most probably know. In fact my whole blog could be replaced by a tweet or series of tweets so I’m wondering why do I post here rather than just put it on social media?

For me it’s habit of what I know, being in control of my content and not being reliant on someone else’s platform.

I make no income from this venture and see myself as a bit of a failure so no need to keep this going, I’d save myself some money as it costs me to host this.

My monthly views mean nothing really to me in the grand scheme of things and I’d have more interaction on social media. Maybe it’s time to close this down and try something else like keeping to my newsletter or giving podcasting another go.

With money getting tighter and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better I am seriously considering moving to free platforms.

I think though it’s just the usual struggle of the creative person and like a lot of people I’ll stick around.

If you’re working on your own new blog or have an existing one it’s good to write smaller posts like this one, not share on Twitter all of the time. I find that I get more engagement, grow my traffic and more importantly own my content when I simply treat my blog as I want – to share my thoughts, big or small.

Why don’t you give it a go for 30 days? Hide your Twitter app from your main home screen and add your blogging platform one instead.

Like a lot of creative people a new service like Substack comes along and we all jump onto it. We create content for weeks, maybe a few months then we stop.

On the release of their new app I gave it a go and realised, like my use of it almost all of the creators I follow haven’t posted for months.

We all fall back to ours blogs and their RSS feeds.

I have a Star Wars newsletter and I enjoyed writing it at first but with no ability to create content on the app, only read it’ll most probably not move forward.

Any friction when my main platform is iOS stops me in my tracks.

I’m at a cross roads of writing about Star Wars on my blog or dropping it completely.

What’s your feelings on Substack?

With my business account expiring at WordPress I needed to decide what to do next. I looked at moving to Squarespace, going all in with Micro.Blog or looking at Medium but I’ve stayed here at WordPress on a personal account (at £89 a year).

Looking at my options I felt that WordPress was the best option for me, mainly because of the price. Both Squarespace and Micro.Blog were going to be around £10 a month, WordPress works out cheaper for my already established site here.

I took one look at Medium and was reminded why I stopped posting there in the first place. Being recommended posts like “I get up a 1am and I am more productive than you will ever be” or “How I make $10M a year selling NFT’s” etc… was enough for me never to want to go to that site again.

So, for me and my requirements to post from both macOS and iOS staying here at WordPress was the right move for me.

Where are you posting?

I’ve been figuring out what to do going forward with my creative projects and on checking my site this morning I was presented with the above message, it’s been down because I let my business account expire. I couldn’t justify the +£200 a year keeping it going. The thing is that nobody even noticed, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m less active on social media these days or the lack of interesting content but this for me might signal what I end up doing about the blog going forward.

I’m going to investigate a free option for blogging that doesn’t constantly nag me to upgrade like WordPress does, I’m going to look at my substack numbers and maybe I’ll write there, try Medium again or just stop.

I’m at a loss at what to do right now, you may not see much content from me for a bit.

I always like posts like these, where a successful creator shares how their various side projects has done over the course of a year. Matt is a way bigger blogger than me and I have a tenth of his traffic and his blog is still a small portion of his income. This is a good reminder for me as I’ve discovered (especially over the last year) that you can’t make any real income from a blog these days. Any income I have from side projects is from freelance or donations.

But… you shouldn’t get into blogging or any creative endeavour to make make money anyway.

For me as I look to the new year and projects I’m going to go for things where I can learn new skills or push myself a bit. I’m still undecided on what I’ll do but this post was definitely good timing.

I don’t publish much on how the blog is doing over the course of the year but at the end I thought it might be worth sharing some stats. Overall it’s been a down year with about a third of my overall traffic disappearing. I’m not sure if this was a lack of content, blogging in general being down or something else I’m missing.

I’m disappointed not to have grown but given the times we are in I’m a lot more forgiving with myself these days.

As you can see the majority of my traffic comes from search engines. Twitter is where I get the most interaction on what I post, which is the main reason I continue to use the service to be honest.

I could have guessed this breakdown of countries based on who I know reads my stuff (thanks BTW). It’s cool seeing all these different countries and the feedback I get with differing points of view.

Moving forward I’m going to be trying something different, adding a couple of creative projects I haven’t been able to invest much on in the past. I’m still figuring these out but I’ll post once I figure it all out.