My New Approach to Publishing in 2016

I wrote about how I'd be back to blogging more often in 2015. That didn't exactly pan out this year. 

Next year, I'm not making the same commitment to blogging more often. I'm experimenting with how I publish and distribute content next year. 

Brain Wads Stays the Same

First off, I don't plan on doing anything new or different with this site. All of my posts will continue to live here. While some places like Medium are attracting people to publish exclusively on that platform, I don't like to put all my content on a place that I don't own. People  also made a similar move with their blogs, migrating from WordPress to Tumblr. I love Medium and think it has a great future, but I still want my own site that I control. 

What will also stay the same is email subscriptions. For those of you reading this in your inbox, thank you. Since those emails are directly tied to an RSS feed on this blog, nothing should change for you. 

Syndicating Content Elsewhere

I've always shared blog posts on the usual channels - LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. However, I plan on using native platforms where appropriate. Every blog post that I write will also live in its same form via a Medium article, LinkedIn Publisher article and Facebook Note. 

My theory is that people would rather read content in the environment they are in instead of clicking away to another site. This approach could help exposure. Since I don't run banner ads on my site, nor really depend on actual visits for revenue, the extra exposure would help. Any affiliate links I may have in a post (Amazon or otherwise) would easily carryover to posts using other platforms.

What about SEO?

Time will tell on that. It'll be interesting to see how my traffic via search will be affected over the course of a few months. I'll keep an eye on that. My quick, preliminary research on that front shows that the adverse affect shouldn't be all that bad. This article I found on LinkedIn shows a few ways that you can copy/paste content onto other platforms without actually hurting yourself. Provided that I wait a few days before "syndicating" my blog posts elsewhere, I shouldn't have much adverse affect. We'll see. 

I also had a brief Twitter conversation about this idea. It has mixed views but I think there's a way to circumnavigate negative SEO implications.

Metrics of Success

In all transparency, I don't dig into my own blog analytics all that often - which is weird considering my profession (the "cobblers children have no shoes" saying applies to me too). In addition, my use of Facebook Notes will be a bit ambiguous since there are not any real viewership metrics outside of likes/comments/shares available to individual users. So bench-marking will be a bit off. 

However, my one constant variable will be email subscriptions. At the bottom of each post, no matter where I publish, I'll have a link for people to subscribe to my content via email. My guess is that my new-ish cross-platform approach may garner a few more sign ups.

For social sharing, I plan on sharing a link to this site on my first share, then publishing to other platforms a few days later. I don't plan on tweeting links to Medium or sharing LinkedIn posts to Facebook anytime soon. I'll tinker with how social sharing will work over time.  

I'll provide a few updates here and there as I go along. Has anyone else tried re-publishing blog content elsewhere? Moved platforms completely? Would love to hear your thoughts.