Six-Month Eval

When Things Go Sideways |

By TLS

This is the first of another category, the Big Post (BP). This particular one is mostly just to start the series off, not sure how big it will actually be, but I’m going to include a six-month evaluation of my work and this site. I’m including the eval here because the first real BP will be published at the one-year point. It’s already in progress and will for the most part be about starting Multiple Views and…News?

It’ll be large but not like the size of an encyclopedia. More like two or three times the size of a large Wednesday post. Significantly bigger than normal but not something that will take weeks to read. After all, nobody is even reading the short ones…

Well, here we are, the six-month point. I must say it hasn’t gone quite like I thought.

I’m still plugging away at this and I write when I can. Sometimes I can knock out several posts in a week, other times there’s nothing for several weeks. As a reminder, the Wednesday posts are pretty much all written in advance and then scheduled to publish on Wednesdays. I’m still about seven or eight weeks ahead so I’m doing well there. However, my wife and I have had a lot going on in our personal lives lately, so writing has been a bit of a challenge recently. Also, it’s still completely covert. Nobody I know, knows I’m writing this. I want to give it a good solid year or so, just to see what I can make happen.

So. How is the site doing? (Views & Users) Not like I’d hoped. Six months in and I don’t have one single subscriber. That’s disappointing but really not overly surprising. It takes time to build a base, presumably. To me the surprising thing is the views my site receives. The first few months my views count was skyrocketing. Then it plummeted, now I’m hovering around zip. Almost no views to the site, it’s almost like my site is now hidden by Substack. Or I was blacklisted by the entire internet somehow. It’s quite discouraging.

I’ve been advertising, for the most part, on other social media sites; X and Bluesky. Neither of these have produced any results. I created an account on LinkedIn and that seemed to take off quite well but no more than about a week or so in, LinkedIn blocked me. I’m not really sure why, they don’t have a great customer service process. So I’ve been banging away at the steps to try to get back into the account. I’m still working on it, we’ll see. If I can’t get back in I might create another account and come at it from a slightly different angle.

Moving forward…

Well, I’m going to try to just keep writing. After all, I started this for me (but hoping others would actually read it). It is a little frustrating to create something that I'm pretty sure is at least decent and get absolutely no traction. While at the same time I see poorly written, rambling posts from what has to be 12-year-olds, talking about picking up milk at the store or something equally pointless and it’ll have several thousand likes. What the hell man?! Deep sigh…pinching bridge of nose (Idiocracy anyone?)

Anyhooters, I’ll keep banging away at this, even if I’m still the only one reading it. Considering all the crazy groups one sees out there, there must be at least a couple people who will find this site interesting. Or, maybe I’m simply one of a kind. ; )

If you’ve ever built something that nobody noticed, you’ll understand this one. Subscribe, share, or just drop a note, I’d love to hear your version of the six-month mark. Because somewhere out there, someone’s writing too, wondering if it matters. Let’s prove it does.

Clip art

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