We are now three months into the world of being an ‘entrepreneur’ (or as some friends prefer calling unemployment…) and also blogging. I thought now is as good as any to give another update. My last update was from one month in and there were a few important points I realised needed to be clarified.
First was understanding and defining the direction of this blog – a resource and perspective for others who are either considering leaving their jobs or for those who have already taken the jump. I believe my journey in developing Puls8 is the cornerstone of this. As I mentioned previously, this is also an interesting experiment in growing a company in the open/blogging domain. I share with you all my successes and failures. I have to admit there is a lead time between something that happens versus when I write about it, but I try to keep this to as minimum as possible. And it does take time to allow me to translate this onto paper.
The blog has deviated at times from the above aim as it bobs and weaves through topics that naturally align with Puls8. Inevitably this is tied to the tech industry in which my interests lie, but overall I’m happy with how I’ve managed to stick with the goals I’ve set up for myself.
One of my resolutions was in maintaining the two articles per week I currently write. I am (just) about staying in touch with this. There are a few issues I’ve come across outside of just ‘time’ which is worth mentioning. First up, this blog outpaces the progress of business. Business can be a bit of a slow burner with meetings/outcomes taking longer to mature. A big issue was starting a business in Q4 which is a terrible idea – as things ramp up to Christmas and the party season very little gets done. I am happy the holiday season is behind us and I reckon things will pick up. So for the foreseeable at least I do not see any problems. I will be very happy if I look back at 2017 and see my blogging levels have been maintained (the list still has 40 odd topics on it…)
What articles have been the most popular? By far the why i quit leads the way. I guess leaving a big corporate after 10 years arouses some curiosity. The posts that seem to garner most views are the update based ones (the things I learnt is an exception). What that tells me I am not quite reaching my target audience enough. There is also a consideration that the topics are quite heavy to read. But I’ve talked before about needing to define the basics before say discussing case studies or trying to delve into a different range of topics. I hope as the blog progresses this outlay makes more sense.
I have seen a steady increase in my reader numbers in the last month. I am therefore slowly reaching more people and I do believe the regular blogging is the largest contributor to this. Number of visitors/views is a bit of a vanity metric – I do this because I like to write and it helps me to put on paper my theories and thoughts, but how best to increase numbers? I think more ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ will help and I assume as Puls8 grows this blog will also grow.
So far so good then – I’m on track. I still want more public participation, this is probably the biggest weakness of the blog – I need to somehow remedy this and if anyone has any suggestions please let me know.
Otherwise please continue to enjoy the posts – I’ll give another update in 3 months.
J
Junaid Rahim 