Thoughts on Engineering. And Coffee.
You may be one of the people very much like myself who is either looking for the quick and easy formula for writing that is going to catapult you to the top and get you some of that easy writing money. Either that or you have already started the grind and are looking for that edge to get more of your articles noticed by the curators. Read on for some tips to achieve these goals and a big secret to success.
anyone writing for fun or to try and make a living understands the power of imagery in articles. This is one of the key attractors for people in getting attention to your writing and achieving those crucial eyeballs that drive page views. One of the simplest things that you can do is to create your own unique images. It is fairly simple to take free, high-quality images and combine them together into new, unique creations that can help your posts stand out.
Here we are at the end of 2019 and in the past few months the blog and visibility has gone from nothing to nearly 50 postings. The money made from writing has gone from nothing to $0.43. There are now posts on Medium and Twitter about the articles from the blog. Basically, looking back, the past couple of months have served as a launching off point for an online presence and it has been more successful that I ever dared to hope way back in August when I finally got off my butt and started doing something about all of these ideas in my head.
50 already? That is a big number. It is a serious number. A lot of articles on the web state that Google doesn’t get serious about a blog until there are 50+ quality posts on the site. So in some ways, this has crossed into serious territory. In many others, it is still in its fun and wild infancy.
Why are titles so important? The answer is easy. Human nature. Humans read from left to right, top to bottom. The human eye is drawn to bigger text. The title of an article on the web checks all of these boxes. If you want attention, you need to give people a reason to read past that text.
The more I write and have ideas, the more the process needs to change to be more efficient. This is very important because as the number of Posts is growing, and the number of Post Ideas grows, the amount of content, media, and other information grows as well. It is starting to get confusing. So today I am updating and documenting an updated process for the blog around media management for both my future use as well as to educate others on how some of this stuff works.
While reviewing Post Ideas this morning I realized that many of them didn’t fit in with the general categories that currently exist on the site. Many posts are geared towards advice for new engineers (#engineeradvice) or Engineering Managers (#engineeringmgmt) but as I was working on a post around table stakes I realized that a big part of Engineering is around making things and managing the projects that result in these things being made. Therefore, under this umbrella some new categories are needed.
These past few days have been very exciting for me in regards to the blog and I wanted to comment on some of the things that have been happening for the sake of posterity. The first exciting thing that has happened is that while cross posting some of the posts from the blog on Medium, two of the posts have now been curated on that site! The following screenshots commemorate these posts: The amazing thing about these posts is that I wasn’t trying to be curated or have them highlights on different areas of the site. This is my 41st post on this blog and I am still working on getting my feet under me. I really am not sure that I have this whole thing figured out yet, but as of creating this post I have 335 views across the 9 stories that I have posted to Medium.com. That…
Writing is not easy. Wait – start over. Writing consistent quality material can be difficult at times. Wait – still not right. Let’s go back to the first one. Writing is not easy. Not great, but good enough to get going here. The collection of targeted writing that I have produced is currently very limited in scope and quantity. Therefore, the data set with which to draw conclusions from is rather small. Many of the topics that have resulted in something that I would consider to be higher quality have been generated in creative outbursts where my poor fingers felt like they couldn’t keep up with the torrent of words and ideas flowing from my brain to the screen. Then there are days like today where I have a day off, my family has left for school, and I have space and quiet and all the coffee that I can…
Wow… when you reach a milestone or goal that you have set for yourself and you finally climb those last few steps or rungs or handholds and reach that plateau, life feels good. It is also easier than you might guess to surprise yourself. If you had told me that this adventure would lead to me publishing my first post on a site like Medium in the upcoming months I would have thought that you were crazy. But, now, today, I just self-published my first story on the Medium Partner Program. Let’s rewind a bit and I will attempt to show you how I got to this point. Back in August of 2019 when I finally did something about my random and scattered thoughts regarding starting a blog and putting my voice out into the wider world there was always a little voice that wondered what it would be like…
