Sharing is caring – Starting a blog

I got featured on Googles Featured list!

As some of you may have noticed. I have started a blog at the start of the year. And I honestly did not expect it to do so well, and I didn’t expect that I would actually keep writing for it.

The blog is a software developer blog, focusing on the issues, challenges, and solutions I face and find in my daily job as a freelance software consultant. So far it has mostly been about technical issues, but I am steering it toward describing some of the leadership-role challenges I face, and what I learn.

I wish to include more stuff about being self-employed and what that feels like, but I am unsure of the interest.

Why did I start the blog, you ask?

I started the blog to challenge myself, to condense my thoughts into meaningful articles. I have always believed, that I am no better than any other developer, but being visible, sharing and participating in the community, I will be able to find more opportunities and have better outreach in my future.

But first and foremost, I did it for my self. I often want to write down solutions to problems that I have faced and solved, not necessarily for others to read, but for myself to find again, if I should ever need it.

A few years back, I was very active on the software developer forum “StackOverflow“, and got myself a decent rank on the site. But the questions and answers were often too narrow for me to really share some of the broader solutions.

Second of all, I have always been glad to be able to share my knowledge. It is no secret, that if people want to listen, I will gladly share. And I find the act of sharing meaningful; especially if the listener is able to use what I teach, and apply it to his own situation.

I have previously had teaching positions at the local academy, and currently part of my consultant job is also being a mentor, so giving back has always been important to me.

A playground to tinker with websites

I also wanted a space, where I could tinker with different web technologies, that I was curious about. I didn’t feel like I could experiment with my business’ website, so I decided to create a blog in my name.

Specifically, I decided I wanted the year to learn about:

1. WordPress
2. Google Ads
3. Google Analytics
4. Newsletter subscription
5. AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages

While keeping the door open for any other web technology that I fancied looking into. Having a blog, with real readers, made total sense for me to experiment with.

So I started.

Expectations exceeded – A (almost) year in review

Creating my own little place on the big World wide web, I didn’t expect to get any visitors at all. But as I added more and more content, the readers started rising.

Positives

I feel like I became a lot better at writing technical articles. And I feel inspired to do more of it.

One of my articles got featured on Googles Featured list, which drove an insane amount of traffic in no time.

From January to ~December 2019 I reached the following metrics:

• 32.846 unique users
• 44.426 unique views
• About ~1.000,- DKK earned in ad revenue.

Negatives

Writer’s block

Finding the motivation to write articles can sometimes be tricky, and something I need to be better at finding. Too often I find the subject too big for me to handle in an article, and it takes me a good while to find the motivation to condense the material.

AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages

I tried AMP out, which is supposed to be the “new web” for mobile clients. I didn’t like the restrictions, so I abandoned it after trying it out for 1 or 2 months.