The vast majority of my traffic here on Medium comes from people running Google searches for headphone or coffee reviews.
On Prime Day, I got a significant bump in traffic.
Ironic, because I didn’t think any of their headphone deals was that great, except maybe the lower price on the M50X.
That spike in the middle is Prime Day, which is actually held over the course of two days now because apparently we’ve now begun the slow march to the inevitable Prime Week.
If I’d been thinking about it, I should have had a whole slate of high quality content ready to go on those days, enticing new readers to stay for a while and Click on More Things.
Instead, I didn’t even know what was happening until a friend clued me in. And then I was like, oh right. How silly of me to not understand my own audience.
ON THE EDGE OF “MAKING IT”
My biggest traffic ever came last December, once again when people were Googling for headphone reviews and my thoughts on holiday coffee beverages.
I have a hard time holding on to these Google searchers, and I’m not really trying to. I’m not really in this for the traffic or money or anything like that…and when I get some, it’s weird.
You’ve heard the phrase “Dust in the wind?”
Well, I’m like a pea in the wind.
I get enough traffic that I have to acknowledge it, but not enough for me to do this full time.
This whole being a one-man tech website thing spun out of my daily writing habit, that I originally established to write fiction. I never intended to write so much about tech, but it just grew as an extension of who I am in my personal life.
I’m not going to quit my “day job” and become a tech writer full-time, but I am going to start to push and experiment a little bit with my formats and my ideas, now that I’ve proven myself to be a pea instead of dust.
Getting that Prime Day readership bump was exciting, but watching it immediately go back down without so much as a hint of increased engagement was inordinately frustrating.
But that frustration forced me to take a step back, and once again consider what I’m even doing here.
I’m doing this for me, ultimately, and I’m very happy that some of you have given me your time to come along for the ride.
Hopefully one day I can upgrade myself to an acorn.
And yes, I wrote this whole article because I was really excited about the phrase “Pea in the wind.” You’re welcome!
My other internet things:
