Tagged: medium
It’s About Time
In 2016 I published just one blog post to my blog.
One. Single. Post.
It’s hard to call that even a post as in January 2016 I was happily reblogging a infographic on connected car hacking. Not much “personal” on this personal site. If you include my very limited series of stories on Medium.com, it’s been even longer (2015) since any kind of public writing has been a priority.
I certainly justified my lack of output with a combination of general dissatisfaction with my previous work, unhappiness with the look and feel but mostly just a complete lack of priority in the process. I’d spend a busy Saturday spending way too much time in research on whether I should move from WordPress.com to a self-hosted site, only to waste more time debating with myself whether to abandon it all for Medium.
Since becoming CEO of ReachNow in spring 2016, I’ve been pretty unable to focus on anything else besides growing our team. Like many startup CEOs everything else outside the team, including my writing, golf, lifting weights, running and photography, was put aside. That’s not healthy in the long term. It doesn’t make you a better CEO when you put so much focus on your work that you lose sight of everything else. It’s certainly not setting a good example as a leader.
Thus my goal in restarting this blog is to be a better CEO. By taking the time to really think through ideas, to learn from I’ve been through and to understand how best to share it, then I hope my performance as CEO will improve too. By not abandoning my other interests I can keep my creativity and energy high to accomplish all the big goals we have for 2017.
In the spirit of a fresh start I’ve updated the look and feel and even dropped in a new TLD domain name, stevebanfield.blog. I’d like to think it’s a better domain than the .net I was using before but that might just be the influence of my old team at Name.com. At the same time I’ve also used IFTTT (great tool!) to connect WordPress.com where my blog is hosted to Medium. I’ll cross post to both and see what happens. Finally while I didn’t publish anything last year I kept more than enough notes and posts to keep me busy.
I promise a lot more than a single post in 2017.
Medium Is Large
Last night I finally made my first post to Medium talking about the Sony hacking situation and their choice to shelve the movie The Interview in the face of hacker threats. At the same time I posted the same article to this blog.
Being both a curious geek for stats and enough of a narcissist to see if anyone was reading what I wrote, I just checked the traffic reads and views.
Wow.
Right now when I’m posting to WordPress I get about 60 to 70 views and 40 to 50 visitors a day. I’ve been more active on the blog this week but the traffic has stayed pretty steady. No big spikes on WordPress and not a big audience (unless I’m writing about crime in the city).
In less than 24 hours on Medium my only story there has gotten 626 views and 418 “reads”! The breadth of the referral traffic on Medium is pretty good too with most of it coming from the Medium platform and less than 5% coming over to Medium from my WordPress blog.
I’m going to keep monitoring this. I don’t think Medium is the place for a post like this one but for those moments when I want to tell a serious story, I might just have to keep big on Medium.
