Memberships

Almost one year ago, I run an experiment to see how donations work on a small website. Long story short: they don't, I got only one donation in ~8 months.

Anyway, If I take a look at Google Search Console, the traffic has been stagnating for a while:

This is interesting. Growth from April 2020 until November 2020 was consistent and quadrupled in this period time. During these months, I began to publish daily, so I figured out that writing every day helped to increase traffic.

It does, but there are more factors; I've been publishing daily after November 2020 and traffic stopped growing at the same rate.

Downhill

After November 2020, things have gone downhill, even if the content strategy was (and is) the same: publish what you have learned during the day. Writing helps other people working on the same problem as I'm at that time. If I wrote about a problem after I don't have it anymore, I'll miss the pain points that I was having during that day.

The conclusion is that publishing daily makes MY problems relatable to OTHER's problems.

Being discovered

One of the goals of publishing was to be discovered. I'm an introvert and very shy when you meet me for the first time, job interviews give me anxiety and I always perform badly if someone is looking or judging how I do things. Furthermore, my curriculum is far from impressive, so when I send it to tech companies, it goes directly to the trash.

I thought that showing what I knew and being discovered organically was a more healthy approach for me. But I'm not sure it will work, because I haven't gotten a single offer. I was thinking: "Maybe if some random engineer at Google comes to my site, solves a problem thanks to the article, and recommends me to the project manager, maybe I'll have a chance in there."

In retrospect, it seems stupid that this event chain could happen.

Dreaming bigger

Dreaming bigger, I thought that if becoming an engineer on a tech company didn't work out, I perhaps could make some money and survive as an indie developer, doing what's interesting for me at any time. Honestly, that would be better. I've had three engineering jobs in the past and it's very difficult for me to stay 8 hours straight in an office every single day.

Some days, I don't want to work that much, and I feel demotivated. And some days I'm full of energy and have a lot of ideas to implement. Expecting 8 hours from top work from me every single day is foolish. I can't offer that.

Anyway, as I posted before, this year I quit my job as a software engineer and was determined to make this work. If donations don't work, let's try memberships. I only need 200 devs paying $5 per month to make it.