Gone are the days of posting to Medium and not getting any real traffic to my personal site. I have now implemented a blog into my personal site! On top of that I made a few tweaks to the design and also added a mailing list which you can find on the homepage.
Why I moved away from Medium
After writing a few articles on Medium I found that I didn't get much out of it. Once traffic is on Medium it just sort of stays there, so I don't really aquire any traffic to my site from posting there. Not only that but I didn't feel like there was a direct connection from my Medium blog to the rest of my brand. The lack of customization Medium has really put a damper on bringing my personal brand to it.
How my blog is built now
I've decided to use GatsbyJS for my blog which involved a full migration of my site to React. I've been using React on a lot of projects lately, like IronMic and IdeaScratch. I really like the React ecosystem and the ease of use of Gatsby is insanely great for my workflow. Being able to write articles locally in my code editor is something I've been wanting for awhile but just have never gotten around to it. Gatsby/React paired with my host Netlify is like a match made in heaven too, being able to push up on my GitHub and everything just happening by itself is so satisfying
So what can you expect from this new blog?
I plan on utilizing this blog A LOT more then I did my previous blog. I'm shooting to post weekly on here but we will see if that actually happens more or less frequently (hopefully more frequently). I am wanting to talk about stuff I'm building, the maker community, stuff that interests me personally, and probably a lot more cool things.
What's this mailing list you mentioned earlier?
I've been wanting to start up a mailing list of people that are interested in what I do for a while. I would love if you subscribed, I promise I won't spam you and only send you really awesome content ❤️ I want to use this as a springboard for my future projects to get people interested early without having to go and find the people that already follow me!
In Conclusion...
I really enjoyed building out my new site/blog/mailing list and if there is anything you think I can improve on with any of those three things please let me know via Twitter 😊