With my What I saw this week series of posts hitting #29 this week I thought I’d take a second to share how these posts do on my site, how I create them, how I choose what I will link to outside of these posts.
These posts are some of my most popular week-to-week. My active subscriber numbers aren’t that high – I’d say less than 1,000 people subscribe to my site in some way or another – but the traffic to these posts are as high as any other popular post on my site. I believe there are two reasons for this; consistency and because I share them on Facebook. I try to share these posts every single Friday at 10:30am and I think that helps a lot. Facebook is starting to push a lot more traffic to my blog than Twitter. It used to be the other way around. For years. But I honestly believe Twitter is losing ground on this front (more on this at a later date when my thoughts have had more time to simmer).
How do I create them? As I mentioned in a previous post, I keep a note open to throw URLs in during the week. On average I’d say I put 2 to 3 URLs in that note before the week is out. Mainly because I haven’t stored them in some other way. On Thursday or Friday I take the URLs from this note, and also look through my Twitter favorites, my YouTube history (if you’re logged into YouTube on all devices it stores a history of all videos you’ve watched), my Unmark archive, and lastly I comb through Chrome’s browser history (I keep my history for years). This takes me about 25 minutes a week.
Then comes the choice about what to include in these posts and what to link to separately. You’ll probably notice that the bulk of my publishing comes on Fridays and the weekends lately. That is because I’ve gotten out of the habit of scheduling my posts for the week on Sundays. I think I’ll get back to this soon. But also it is because many of my posts are simply links to other things I find interesting and so at the end of each week I do a dump onto my blog.
I choose what to link to separately mainly based on category or thread. My interests are myriad but overall I like to cover specific trends here on my blog such as the indie web, blogging, photography, social networking, hiking, flying my drone, kayaking, etc. If a link falls into one of these categories, or is a continuation of a discussion I started here on my blog, I generally separate those posts out into their own.