One year ago I decided to stop self-promoting this blog.
Previously I would spend a lot of time submitting my links to Social Media sites such as Hacker News and Reddit. It was taking up a lot of my time and attention. I even got a warning from Hacker News admin for repeatedly submitting links to my site.
A year ago I decided to limit my self-promotions to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook – three social media sites where people chose to get updates from me. I also have about 50 email subscribers that get notified of my new posts.
If you look at my traffic stats from 2017, you can see huge spikes where my self-promotion paid off.
2017 Traffic Stats
In 2018 I had two submissions to Hacker News, both done by the same user (thank you, whomever you are). One of them One Year without AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) hit the front page of Hacker News, resulting in the only traffic spike in 2018.
2018 Traffic Stats
That being said, the site did quite well, receiving 340K unique views (mostly from Google). I had 170K less views than 2017, but average time on page went up and bounce rate (how soon people leave) went down.
A few times I was really tempted to self-promote, but I decided against it. My website and social media get enough traffic for something worthy to get noticed. I am not going to self-promote going forward. I will, please check out my post – Work hard and Advertise.
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