Posted on 22 December 2014

Matt Gemmell:

“Even a year ago, I obsessively checked my follower count on Twitter, and my site’s visitor stats. I looked through my referrers daily. That’s a path to unhappiness. You notice when people inevitably unfollow, and you see which articles are of niche rather than widespread interest. It gets you down, particularly because the niche-interest personal pieces are often the ones that matter to you the most, as their author.”

From time to time I’ve toyed with the idea of making this a more focused site, one that is about something that could develop a specific audience.
The temptation used to be greatest when I’d write something with mass appeal. The visitor and new Twitter follower counts would go through the roof and I’d try to follow-up with something that would be equally interesting.
The problem with that is there’s no point, really. I’m not doing this for a living. I don’t sell ads. I write and I tweet because I find utility in it for myself. When others do, it’s gratifying, but chasing an audience would dilute the point of this, which is having a place for me to think out loud about whatever I want.
Plus, if I only wrote about what got the most visitors, it would just be a whole bunch of posts like this.

Filed under: blogging, links, meta, social media