The following article was referenced by https://embeddeduse.com/ in his latest newsletter – he plans to discontinue his newsletter and focus on web content.
Why you might want to leave your content ungated
My experience over the last 16 years I’ve been consulting supports this. Referrals and the writing on my blog has been where most of my business has come from. Linked-in has accounted for zero business. Our newsletter has been fun and a good exercise, but is not high volume yet. This forum is a beneficial exercise (kind of an online notebook) for me, but has not generated much interest.
Recently I read that Nick is stopping the Running in production podcast:
It took Nick a full day to put together an episode. Despite getting good reviews, he could never get enough listeners to attract sponsors, so eventually concluded his efforts were better spent on other activities.
So this brings us to the question – why are blogs so effective – even in this age of youtube, podcasts, newsletters, etc? I think there are several reasons:
- writing scales better than other mediums like audio and video. It is faster to process, is searchable, cheaper to store, etc.
- the length of a blog article encourages a depth of thought you don’t get in social media, forums, etc. and often provide insight.
- blog articles are refined - you don’t have to wade through a lot of noise to get to good, timeless content
- blogs are decentralized, and thus scale well
- modern static site generators and platforms like Wordpress work really well
- people who take the time to set up their own blog care about what they do, are generous enough to share what they know, and are often at the top of their field – people you want to hear from.
This all points to blogs being one of the most efficient communication mediums ever invented for good information. There is enough friction in blogging to filter out most of the people just making noise, but yet efficient to distribute quality information to a wide audience over time.
The other critical factor in this success is internet search engines – without these, blogs would be isolated islands. But with them, they are pooled into a vast and valuable resource.
I used to spend a lot of time in my RSS feed reader, but it seems other sources have pushed it aside. Perhaps it’s time to get back to focusing on writing and consuming blogs …