Dissecting my first Medium post
I recently posted my first ever blog post ever: Pair Programming a (Semi-) Definitive Guide.
Although I could design and build my own blog, I’m trying to fight my perfectionist tendencies and form a habit of shipping. That’s why I chose Medium: it’s low-friction and allowed me to release my post into the world now rather than wait until I designed, built, and deployed my own blog. It’s the Agile idea of eliminating waste in action. Perhaps that one post would be all I’d write, in which case, why sink several weeks of effort into building my own blog? Better to get something up quickly and learn from the feedback.
So how did my first post do?
The Results
78 Reads. I know I’m behind the times with getting my stuff “out there” on the internet, but I got a real buzz knowing that 78 people — mostly complete strangers to me — read my post. That’s really cool.
42% Read Ratio. This seems a little on the low side, but then — at 8 minutes— my post was not short. I figure with longer posts you have to expect fewer people will persist and read them.
15% Recommend Rate. One in seven people that read the post thought it was worth recommending, and actually took the time to do so. It’s always nice to have your work validated in this way, and the instructional/how-to nature of the post — it’s a guide to pair programming — lends itself to people finding value in it.
Trends. The chart above clearly shows a Power Law Distribution with first day views being very high (relatively speaking) and then quickly tailing off to near zero. There’s a second, unusual spike around the beginning of February, which then follows its own Power Law curve (more on this in a sec.)
Considering this was my first ever blog post, I was pretty happy.
How did I market it?
I’m not so wet-behind-the-ears to think if I just write the post, people will magically come. I knew I had to actively take steps to promote it.
Use your network. Immediately after publishing, I jumped onto a Whatsapp group of former colleagues and politely asked — ok, I begged — everyone to go read it and then like it on Twitter. Only of them liked it on Twitter — can’t get no love.
Hacker News. A great place to get interesting, informative news and articles of interest to the programming community. Why not submit my own article for others? Turns out it’s pretty easy.
Accidental, random promotion. I posted a speculative job email to the London Ruby Users Group (LRUG) mailing list on 4 Feb. I mentioned, in passing, my pair programming blog post, to add some credibility to my pairing experience (not to promote the post.) It turns out that this email cause the spike in views/reads at the beginning of February.
Where did the traffic come from?
Focusing just on the top four sources:
Medium: 31%
Email/IM/Direct: 31%
Hacker News: 25%
Twitter: 6%
It’s clear from this just how good a job Medium itself does at helping people to find your content.
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