Fun experiments that proved costly

On October 1st, 2020, I officially became a full-time writer. During that period, I decided to experiment with a variety of new things. Most of these experiments not only didn’t work, but had a negative impact on my stats.

In this article, I’m not holding back in showing you some pretty bad stats.

1. Publishing two articles a day on weekdays

Tim Denning published 66 articles in August. Other successful writers published a whole bunch of articles as well. I figured, if I publish more articles, surely more people who be exposed to my work. It wasn’t so, I guess with this one exception I received from a reader:

Only my articles showing up on a reader’s home page

With the other experiments, it’s hard to guess if this had any impact, but my views are certainly not higher for publishing more articles this month.

2. Mostly self-publishing

While some of my most successful articles from this month are self-published, they are not nearly as successful as when I publish in Better Marketing, for example. Self-publishing is great for when you already have an audience, but it restricts your visibility for new readers.

This month, I self-published 85% of the articles I wrote, but that doesn’t seem to be a good strategy. Next month, I’ll aim for 50% or less to see how it goes.

3. Removing my Call-to-Action

Instead of a CTA leading outside Medium, I wanted readers to circle back to my Medium profile to read more of my stories. I have no way of verifying if people clicked on that link, but from my stats, it doesn’t seem like it.

Here’s what my “CTA” was for the month:

4. Writing more about writing

The thing about writing about writing is that it’s useful for writers of varying expertise levels, but it doesn’t get distributed, so only my followers saw them. Essentially, writing about writing is a sure way to not get many views. See these stats, for example:

When you have 23K followers, these stats are very low.

5. Writing story-led lessons

I love writing stories that have lessons in-line and are not bullet points of information. I find them fun to write and fun to read. So, I’m not sure if I’m a shitty storyteller or it just doesn’t work as a concept, but my stats are also very low for such articles. Here are some examples:

6. Trying to be funny

Humour is not my forte, but I wanted to experiment with it. I guess it’s not for me. I’ll leave that to Sean Kernan and Nate Miller. Here are stats from articles I tagged funny:

7. Trying to write 10,000 words a day

Ugh… because Nicolas Cole can do it, I thought I could do it. And Tim Denning can even write 20,000 words in a day, so it can’t be that hard, right? I was so wrong. I’m struggling to even write 3,000 words a day.

It’s not because I don’t find inspiration for articles to write, I have plenty of those, it’s just that I found that I’m only able to write between 4 am and 8 am, and from 3 pm to 5 pm. While that’s a big range, I usually can’t write for more than 3 hours at a time, or per day, really. So, to write 3,000 words, I have to do it within 3 hours, which isn’t easy.

I shared some ideas on how to make it happen in these two articles:

8. Building a brand

With the latest changes on Medium about being more “relational” and focusing more on the writer’s connection with the reader, I figured spending time designing my Medium page and creating a consistent style of images would benefit me greatly.

Here are three examples:

Examples of images I’ve created for articles

I wanted people to, at first glance of an article’s image, know that the article is from Danny Forest. I created a unique image style for all my articles. It takes more time, but it’s unique. However, I can’t prove this had any positive impact on my stats.

I’m afraid that combining this idea with publishing too regularly might have turned off people more than it attracted them.

In case you still want to create your own style, I wrote a very detailed guide in this article: Here’s Why and How I Make Custom Images for All My Stories.

9. Writing 10 headlines a day

This one is technically not a failed experiment, but I have no way to tell if it was of any use at all.

For the month of October, I decided to come up with 10 headlines/topics to potentially write about. I thought I’d be able to come up with 10 ideas in less than 10 minutes. I was wrong. It takes me an average of 30 minutes. This takes up time where I’m not writing articles.

Here’s what it looks like:

Conclusion

Over the past 3 months, my stats went down by about 75% of what they used to be. All these experiments either didn’t help or had no impact at all in raising my stats again.

If you planned to try any of the above, I hope you learned something. In my case, I’m not letting that stop me from continuing to experiment. I can’t help it. It keeps things interesting for me and for my reader. I might, however, do fewer experiments at a time going forward so I can narrow down better which ones work and which ones don’t.

— Danny
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