Coastal Chicago - Year 2: What Did I Learn?

Now that we've celebrated the first year of me being incorporated (by eating a piece of Key Lime Pie and allowing the Florida Gators to win a basketball national championship on my behalf), the obvious logical question (well, for me, but maybe not for you) is - what's next?

I'll start with some lessons learned (as I'm no longer in the corporate world, I won't use the term learnings.  Then again, I never did.  The image it invokes in my head is some professor in a forest squeezing little bon mots of wisdom from his behind.  Hopefully, this grosses you out enough that you'll stop using the pseudo-word too).

First, it's good to have a plan.  It's probably better to have a better plan than I did, but I had a plan - i.e. create a demo site to renew my software skills while also providing proper fodder for engaging others on various platforms.

Second, let the plan guide you, but don't let it strangle you.  As far as my immediate plan was concerned, this wasn't a problem, since my immediate plan was to pivot to something else once the opportunity arose, but I did need to take care not to get too frazzled on secondary goals - 

As I mentioned in my last post, I researched blogging as a primary mode of communication and marketing, and noticed that the recommendation to stay relevant and/or make money was to favor long-form posts of approximately 2K words no fewer than two times per week during the first six months of the blog's lifetime.

Take it from someone who can apparently find endless topics to bloviate on and loves to write (a frequent criticism of my 300-400 word emails were that they were "too long" which really concerns me regarding the attention span and functional literacy of so-called knowledge workers residing in corporatedom) - this is overwhelming.  

Arguably, this volume may make sense if you're headed towards an imminent product launch or going to use a blog as your primary means of income or a healthy side chunk of change. 

However, since neither of these was among my original goals, it wasn't worth expending the energy to meet such a schedule.  I see the worth of blogging (obviously), but for now, settling on a sweet spot of 1 post of ~1000 words per week scratches my writing itch and gets me decent engagement, aligning with my current expectations, which is write (hopefully) engaging content for my current readers and slowly build up a reader base.

I'm taking a similar laissez-faire approach with social media engagement.  I had originally planned to target LinkedIn exclusively (and for now, it is the only platform I've posted on) and researched posting strategies.  If blogging strategies were overwhelming, LinkedIn engagement strategies were a veritable deluge - a similar 2000-word guideline with a balance of images and emojis (but sometimes not emojis).  Post 2-3 times a week, preferably at the same time of the day and in the middle of the week.  Avoid external links (ostensibly because they pull people off the site and reduce their engagement with LinkedIn), and write content original and exclusive to LinkedIn.

Yeesh.

Briefly, I did separate content between my main blog posts here and specific LinkedIn posts.  I also made sure that the content I cared about more originated here.  I was careful to ensure that any link to content here wasn't posted on LinkedIn for two to three days to ensure that Google saw the blog as the originating source for indexing rather than LinkedIn.  I don't know if this is something of consequence or even true, but I still adhere to this rule (it's usually a week later).  Even if it's bunk, it gives readers of the blog a brief sense of exclusivity, and I'd like to provide something to people who go out of their way to support my efforts.

If I followed LinkedIn's guidelines, I'd also be bending to an algorithm for reasons I don't really understand or necessarily champion - more followers and impressions obviously lead to more eyeballs, but to what end?  One goal is to write a viral post that allows employers to take notice and hire you for a full-time job (or a better job).  That wasn't what I was looking for.

The second goal - increasing engagement in order to improve my company's visibility - adheres more to what I'm interested in.  But, given that I have no service or product to sell at this juncture (other than myself), too many leads could be overwhelming, given the high spam rate and that I can only stretch myself so thin for credible leads.

I want to reiterate that I'm grateful for the increase in readership via LinkedIn and the opportunities it's given me, even if they don't necessarily meet the generic measure of success equated with business.  I'd be happy to increase my readership further, if only because it means I'm theoretically adding value to people's lives.

But the difference based on numbers alone between 750 followers and 75,000 followers doesn't move me to alter my strategy.  I've always been one to prefer fewer meaningful connections over sheer volume.  As much as I can respect Taylor Swift for her business acumen and her ability to bring joy to people's lives, it was a little creepy watching her simply point at a section of the Lucas Oil Stadium (which had a record capacity of about 75,000 people) and have that section cheer on demand.  And that was just one venue.  

I think if I reach that number, I'd prefer to have the populace mildly dislike me but find my content engaging.  Being a cult leader would just be too exhausting.

Now, if 75,000 followers were willing to pay me $5/year, I'd feel a bit different, but that's a topic for another post.  

Until next time, my human and robot friends.