This article shares my experiences of launching my blog, the lessons I learned, and some tips that can help you publicize your business and content
On October 1, 2017 I launched this web site. As I stated in my first post, Going Live: Looking Forward and Back, I wanted to show the work I’ve done and give a taste of how I can use my knowledge and experience to help others. According to Google Analytics, over the course of one month my site has grown from zero to 140 users. Following this site’s stated mission to continue to help others, and to thank my readers, I would like to tell you what I did and how it can help you.

Finding your audience

When I started this site, I knew the audience I was trying to reach, but I didn’t know how I was going to reach them. Initially, I reached out to my family, friends, and followers through a combination of email list and social media (Linkdin, Facebook, and Twitter). Even though the initial response was positive, I wasn’t able to grow much beyond my personal connections. Following The Business of Development Part 3: The Serverless Solution, my site’s user base grew rapidly. Part of the growth can be attributed to covering a currently hot topic. The biggest growth was due to Facebook.

Trump card

In the process of building this site, I created a public Facebook page. This was a way of linking to and publicly sharing posts on my personal Facebook timeline to a much larger audience. As a result, Facebook keep nagging to use a number of its advertising products. In the wake of the alleged use of Facebook advertising by various interests in the 2016 US Presidential elections, and after reading The Super-aggregators And The Russians by Ben Thompson, I thought that this was something worth investigating. After a number of experiments and a total cost of nearly of ₪51.00 (NIS) or nearly $15.00, I was able to ran five campaigns and significantly grow my audience.

Medium is the Message

Since launching my site, I have cross posted articles to Medium.com. Even without paid promotion, my Medium stats mirror the growth of my blog.

Looking at the figures for each article, it is clear that The Business of Development Part 3: The Serverless Solution being responsible for most of the growth.

Apart from covering a popular topic, this was the first article that casually mentioned ReactJS or React Native, and was also tagged as a React article. As a result, the post got additional interest from the React Community. This may have also led to the final article in the series catching the attention of cloudboost, a created collection of Medium articles. As the most personal article in the series, I was surprised that this was the article that they wanted to include. While it never became the most popular article in the series, it still did better than The Business of Development Part 2: Call and Response which has attracted no readers.

Moving on

A month may seem like a short amount of time, but much happen in the course of thirty days. In fact, most of my biggest insights happened over the course of five days. So what’s next? Well my data seems to indicate that articles on serverless computing or tagged with React are the way to go, I’m going to write a short series on creating serverless apps with Firebase, React, and React Native. I have done the necessary preparation, and should start posting the series over the next week. Thanks to everybody who has read, and/or promoted this site and I see you in the new series.