Write for your past self: it works!
September overview of akoskm.com
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The internet, your Twitter feed, and your Inbox are probably full of silver-bullet advice like the one in the title.
Write for your past self.
Some of this advice work, and some of them don’t.
The survivorship bias is vast:
Some people would have made it anyway - with or without applying a specific strategy, and some never make it, no matter what smart strategy they try.
In my previous newsletter, I discussed that I’d like to see a better distribution of my Top traffic channels.
The redistribution is already happening thanks to applying the Write for your past self strategy.
Let’s dive into my September stats and the factors that shaped them👇
Stats
In August, my top traffic channel was referrals:
This happened because one of my Electron posts blew up when someone posted it on daily dot dev, and it was driving immense traffic.
September looked entirely different - with a lot less traffic, but I’m happy to see organic search on the list finally:
The drop in Social traffic is expected since I was on vacation for most of September.
Luckily, organic search kept working for me. That brings me to my next point:
What I have changed
From day one, the search query I got the most hits for was comparing different blogging platforms, such as Hashnode, DEV Community (dev.to), and Medium.
Since this post, I’ve written many articles, but I had a couple of - you could say - “reminder articles”.
These blog posts were born out of frustration:
https://akoskm.com/how-to-use-express-session-with-custom-sessiondata-typescript
https://akoskm.com/how-to-add-typescript-types-to-usereducer
I kept running into the same TypeScript issues over and over, and every time I ran into it, I could not find the solution I needed on Google.
I thought, how cool would it be to write to my past self a step-by-step solution on solving this exact problem and publishing the solution?
Last month the keywords finding these articles outranked the blog comparison articles for the first time!
Of course, this wasn’t (only) by chance, and don’t expect to write any tech article for your past self and start ranking.
Despite writing for my past self, I spent lots of time doing the proper keyword research and trying to come up with the correct wording for my article to rank in searches.
I didn’t use any fancy or paid tools for this. I’m running on:
Keyword Surfer - no Firefox plugin, unfortunately, so I have to open Chrome
Google Trends
Google autocomplete - yes, the search input on google.com.
Thoughts
Featuring on daily.dev gave me an insane boost in traffic. Its effect is slowly wearing out, and my blog starts to return to normal view levels (notice the 66% drop in page views, lol)
Looking back on the past three months, from which I have been AFK the last two weeks of September, my daily visits are hitting higher highs and lower lows compared to July:
I’ll keep applying the Write for your past self strategy.
I believe developing ideas for a software engineer is easy because Googling and solution finding is essential in your day-to-day tasks, and you’ll come across blog articles you’re not satisfied with.
Whether it’s the wording, the code samples, or maybe it’s simply outdated - chances are, you’re not alone!
It’s time to write your version of the article!
If you have any comments or questions, I’d be more than happy to answer!
Reach out to me on Twitter @akoskm or reply to this email.
See you in the next one 👋