This is what I used to say last year to whoever kept telling me about using WordPress.
They would spend hours designing their own website, and give up on their blogging venture after a few weeks of months because nobody would read them.
Last year, I kept telling everyone to focus on Medium.
Why? Because Medium is a social media, and it makes you skip all the BS that comes with creating a WordPress blog.
You open Medium, you write, you publish.
Boom. Simple and straight forward, that’s all you need.
I grew a 6,5k following and a 1,800 subscribers list only by writing on Medium during the past few years.
It’s far from the big numbers some writers reach, but based on the effort I had to put in to grow this following, it seemed way worthier than spending hours managing a WordPress blog.
But wait, I said before, I USED to say this, LAST YEAR.
So what happened?
2 things:
– The organic reach on Medium dropped and even my own followers don’t see my new posts
– Medium won’t let me use my own list in the way I want to (and I can’t export it)
This, and a growing desire to completely stop being dependent on any social media at all (I will write more about this later on this week), led me to change my mind.
So this afternoon, I dropped everything I was doing, changed the DNS of my own domain name, and put together quickly a super simple and minimalistic WordPress blog.
WordPress is still awful and the user interface is a nightmare.
But now it’s all setup, I plugged an option for me to post my blogs by simply send an email to a specific email address.
I can now lay down in my hammock, looking at the sunset from my garden, and just share my thoughts by email to post them as a blogpost on my website.
Let’s give it a shot.
It’s still ugly, I still don’t have a logo, I still didn’t share former blogposts…
But you know me, what matters is that it’s done and published.
Check it out here, and don’t be too rude with your feedback, I’m still sensitive from waking up at 5:30AM (4 days in a row now!)
Talk to you tomorrow,
Thomas