What Posting Content Every Day Did For My Brand

I have been self-employed for over six and a half years. I started my business about six months before the pandemic shut everything down (wild times!) and experimented with different platforms and content styles before I landed on my industry and niche. Since 2020, I’ve supported SaaS and tech companies, and largely generated new clients and income through referrals.

As a result, I let my own content creation and audience building languish for some time now.

But I feel like I’m at a bit of a transition point right now. I have some room in my schedule to devote to my own library of content, I want to launch some products, I’ve got ideas for a book, and a little side project focused on disengaging from big tech.

So for the first time in years, I produced a bunch of blog posts for my various projects this past month. Plus I made social media (LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon) posts and fired up my YouTube channel again.

And no, this isn’t a “How Posting Every Day Gave Me a Seven Figure Income From Courses” story. It’s a realistic story.

What Content Did I Create?

In the past month I published the following:

  • 32 blog posts across my business and personal sites plus my Medium account (I’m not double-counting content posted to more than one location)
  • Two new YouTube videos

How Much Time Did I Spend on This Content?

I spent about 15 hours a week on this. I have designated every Monday my “business admin day” in which I do various tasks including writing blog posts and filming videos. I do a full seven to eight hours of this on Mondays, then I spend about an hour a day the rest of the week maintaining it.

I expect to whittle this time down a bit going forward; I was figuring out what I was doing as I was doing it this month.

What Kind of Results Did I Get?

Over the past 28 days, I saw the following results.

On LinkedIn, I:

  • Got a cumulative total of 17,929 impressions
  • Reached 7,999 users
  • Generated 42 link clicks from posts
  • Gained 144 new followers

On YouTube, I:

  • Gained four new subscribers
  • Got 156 channel views

On My Websites, I:

  • Gained a net total of two new business newsletter subscribers
  • Reached people in four countries with content on my personal site
  • Reached people in seven countries with Tiredof.Tech
  • Got new business website traffic from traditional search, Perplexity, and ChatGPT

On Other Channels, I:

  • Gained seven Medium followers (brand new account)
  • Saw pretty static performance on Mastodon and Bluesky, though I don’t do much with those accounts (and the Mastodon one is brand new)

Between all channels I got a total of 157 new followers. That means I spent about 40 minutes of working time to gain each new person’s follow—plus I saw gains in my organic search traffic, too.

How I Feel About The Results of My Efforts

I’m totally fine with this. I’d daresay I’m pleased for my first month of really dedicated content creation in a long time.

I haven’t looked up what a “good” threshold is or what I “should” expect because honestly, I’m more interested in building an audience of people who really give a shit about what I’m saying. I’ve gotten some great comments and engagements on my posts, too, which is lovely—I like hearing from people.

So I’m going to keep it up. I already have a nice slate of content prepared for next month, and am actually excited about creating it, too.

Build With Me: Zine Project

Last year I started to make small, single-page zines that could be folded into an eight-page booklet. I made these zines in both full pages on my iPad (using procreate) and in single panels using my Supernote. They are a mix of:

  • Typing
  • Handwriting
  • Collage (icons, an old copy of a Letraset catalogue, doodles)

My goal was, and really still is, to produce easy guides to things that a lot of people don’t know much about just yet—ideally, things that could help to keep them safe online.

I think I’d like to rework some of them a bit and then continue with expanding my library of zines; perhaps engage in some zine swaps and zine fests to get them out there in the world more broadly.

So far I have placed one longer booklet (it’s 16 pages) up for sale for actual money — this one explains how generative AI works in detail but also in easy to understand language. I decided to charge for this one because of how large it is and how much layout this entailed:

https://egcreativecontent.gumroad.com/l/ai-guide

I’m trying to decide how I’d like to share my library of smaller zines online once I have a few more created. I’m considering selling them as PDF downloads for a buck or two, perhaps “pay what you can” or for a “buy me a coffee” donation. I want the cost of access to be low and affordable. But online distribution incurs labor and fees, so a small monetary exchange will be helpful.

(Maybe I’ll start a zine publishing house! Maybe I’ll design my own fonts for the zines! So many ideas.)

In the meantime, if you’re reading this and want a little zine about digital privacy/phone tracking for free, here ya go — click here to download the full PDF from Proton Drive.

Build With Me: POSSE Plan v3

I’m continuing to explore developments in the IndieWeb and it’s a great time. There’s such a better internet out there that I hadn’t been focusing on in far too long due to my getting sucked into the Algorithmic Corporate Internet. I’m deciding how I want to engage as contributor in the IndieWeb, but I need to make sure I don’t get complete shiny object syndrome each time I find a new tool or corner.

I recently discovered omg.lol which sounds absurd but is a pretty legit service. You can use it to:

  • Maintain a /now page though I’ve added one of those to this site as well
  • Engage with Mastodon social posts in a different way/interface (or keep them off of Mastodon entirely)
  • Maintain a library of permalinks, important for preserving connections online
  • Upload photos to an Instagram alternative called some.pics
  • Verify that your other sites are indeed owned by you, a human
  • Distribute an email alias at which people can contact you, protecting your own regular email

I’ve already found some interesting people and things through omg.lol’s feeds, so I’ve decided to incorporate it a bit as part of my POSSE distribution system. I’ve made some changes from the last iteration, too, including resuming auto-posts of my business blog content to this personal site each time a new biz blog populates in the associated RSS feed.

I’m also enjoying capturing longhand quotes from my current readings on my Supernote Nomad and want to keep uploading those pictures online to share instead of typing out the quote. The Some.Pics feed will be a good spot for these, I think, as I have gotten used to not posting my personal pictures online over the past few years. I don’t want to get back into the mental trap of “will this make a good photo to share?” When I’m out and about enjoying something in the real world.

Therefore, the third version of my plan looks like:

Original content gets posted to:

  1. egcreativecontent.com (business stuff)
  2. emilygertenbach.com (daily writing, non-biz longform stuff)
  3. Medium.com (Tiredof.Tech posts)
  4. Some.pics (book excerpts handwritten as PNGs)

I can then take these manual actions as I see fit:

  1. Share a some.pics link on social.lol (its sister site/mastodon integration)
  2. Share a ToT content link from Medium to emilygertenbach.com
  3. Import an emilygertenbach.com post to Medium
  4. Share any of my longform blogs to LinkedIn as I see fit
  5. Share ToT content on the ToT Bluesky

And automatic actions happen to save time:

  1. Egcreativecontent.com blog posts get shared as a link and micropost on emilygertenbach.com
  2. A link on emilygertenbach.com to my some.pics page keeps that album connection up to date
  3. Anything posted to emilygertenbach.com gets pushed to Bluesky and Mastodon
  4. Anything posted to emilygertenbach.com gets shared to the rest of the fediverse via bridgy.fed so people can find it using their client of choice

The automatic actions always happen; I will probably do 1-2 of the manual actions per day. All of my writing still happens in Ulysses on my desktop or iPad and gets directly published to my connected platforms (ghost, micro.blog, medium).

What’s next?

Hopefully this version of the POSSE meets my current needs. I’d like to start incorporating some of the zines I make (for fun) into my content hub as well. I still need to decide how I want to fit those in and where.

This is not my face.

Even though I created a list of (and use) YouTube replacements in my personal life, I haven’t fully been able to shake it for work purposes. People just don’t browse apps like Vimeo in the same way, and I gotta market my business. So I’ve started planning some more short videos to publish there. 

I went through the YouTube channel settings with a fine-tooth comb and turned off AI features, as I didn’t want the app “improving” my videos with AI. But then I made the mistake of trying out an app called VidIQ. 

I learned about VidIQ while watching some YouTube content creation tutorials. After checking out the limited free version, I decided to pay for one month to see if it would give me any insights that I could use to make my channel better.

Well, it certainly offered up suggestions - including auto-generating YouTube video graphics using my face. The reason? My existing thumbnails feature “expressions that aren’t natural.” Oh, and this is?

My real photo, taken by a photographer in my town, is on the left. The AI slop version of me is on the right and looks like this at full size:

It’s mostly lifted my actual image and applied it here but the face is…off. It isn’t my face. I don’t smile with my mouth closed. You either get teeth or nothin'.

I went ahead and allowed VidIQ to generate a few more-Pandora’s box was already open here-so that I could see higher resolution versions. (For science.) 

These are not my eyes.

Who is this broad?? It created this “highly optimized thumbnail” using my appearance in a recent video. Here’s a still of what I actually looked like in the video: 

This is actually me.Are my YouTube thumbnail graphics-the ones I make myself-award winning? No. But my titles and video descriptions are pretty good. And when you arrive on my YouTube page for the first time, you’re met with the video that I’ve screenshotted above playing for you. 

I’d rather see a real person’s animated face than that…dead eyed grim looking broad up there. 

But this ultimately brings me to another point: we’ve reached a place in our tech-society where you can innocently sign up for an app that you heard will help you with a project and suddenly find yourself looking a weird version of “you” in the eye. One that’s got freakishly smooth skin, a weird eye shape, and seems way grouchier than you actually are at the moment. 

In another one of my “ugh I hate it but for the plot” image tests, VidIQ completely erased my tattoos. All of them. No, no I don’t meet the traditional professional standard in the way I look. But that doesn’t matter. I’m self employed. If someone doesn’t want to watch my videos because I have tattoos, well, fine. I don’t care. 

Another image gave me very curly hair. I do have increasingly wavy hair as I get older, but even with a full bottle of strong hold mousse I’m not going to get this level of curl:

It also replaced my glasses with a different color in some, because, well, why not? Consistency is for the birds!

And finally, in one of my personal favorites, it creates an image that sticks my real headshot in a fake google result next to a website that’s not my name:

I’ve canceled my VidIQ account and left a note telling the company exactly why. This level of AI without request is not okay. It makes me nearly as grouchy looking as fake me does in some of these pictures, so, I guess we match now…a little.

Build With Me: Refining the POSSE Plan

After initially launching my POSSE plan, I realized there were some quirks and issues happening.

Problem 1: Bi-directional Bluesky feeds couldn’t be properly filtered

My goal was to publish from any of my domains, feed them into Bluesky, then get all of those blogs’ content minus what I posted at emilygertenbach.com posted back to said domain as a “micropost.”

But because I couldn’t set up filters or rules for this, I wound up with both the original full length post and a micropost for all emilygertenbach.com original content. That wasn’t going to work.

That meant that I needed to change my setup so that all content originated on a Fediverse website and pushed to Bluesky, but Bluesky didn’t loop back to the fediverse sites.

Problem 2: I still wanted to make my own content feed

I still had to address the issue of getting content from my business site, my tech site, and my book blog onto my personal emilygertenbach.com website so I have a complete repository of everything I create.

I also knew that I didn’t want the full text of posts on egcreativecontent.com to sync here because I’d wind up competing with myself in certain search results.

Problem 3: Ulysses supports posting to one blog per platform

I thought I could connect multiple micro.blog accounts, but it doesn’t work that way. I could pick one Micro.blog, one Ghost account, etc.

Problem 4: I was maybe getting ahead of myself with trying to spread out content thematically

This led me to my second configuration. While my initial sync-to-LinkedIn plan worked, I didn’t like how the posts looked, so I took that out of the equation.

Problem 5: I didn’t like how content looks when it pushed to LinkedIn

Self explanatory.

Problem 6: I didn’t want to have to create more accounts to distribute content

It turned out that in this case, I was missing a step in using the Fediverse. By connecting my Bluesky account to Bridgy Fed, people can now find me more easily across other social Fediverse platforms like Mastodon

Problem 7: Medium stories perform better when posted directly to the platform vs. imported from a blog

Or so it seems in my admittedly limited testing so far, and this would track with how content and tech platforms tend to work.

I want to use Medium to get more eyeballs on Tiredof.Tech, so I might have to exclude some posts from a true POSSE system by publishing on Medium first, then sharing a link to my followers through my federated blog.

A Possible Solution

I realized that the answer to most of my issues here would be to consolidate my content as follows:

  1. All business content published on Ghost website
  2. Select TiredofTech posts published directly to Medium
  3. Everything else on my personal domain

My new POSSE-ish structure

Going forward, I’m going to try:

  1. Posting business content to my business site, then sharing a link on my personal site
  2. Posting Tired of Tech content to my Medium page, then sharing a link on my personal site
  3. Posting any other content, book review, or build in public logs to my personal domain
  4. Auto-syncing all full posts and shared links from my personal domain to Bluesky
  5. Auto-syncing the Bluesky feed to the Fediverse via Bridgy Fed

In this configuration, I’m thinking of emilygertenbach.com as the central distribution hub through which content goes in and out. And because Ulysses posts to Medium, I can set up my content workspace so that:

  • Drafts in my emilygertenbach.com folder publish to that domain via Micro.blog
  • Drafts in my egcreativecontent.com folder publish there via Ghost
  • Drafts in my Tiredof.Tech folder publish there via Medium

All my writing is in one spot and it distributes to the correct location with a click.

In total, the tools I’m now using are:

  • Ulysses for drafting
  • Ghost for my business blog
  • Micro.blog for my personal blog
  • Medium for selected Tiredof.Tech content
  • Carrd for for the actual Tiredof.Tech tool and a book review landing page
  • Bluesky to funnel posts from websites into the Fediverse
  • Bridgy Fed to do the last-mile connection to other Fed sites like Mastodon

And the actual actions I have to take for this to work are:

  • Click publish in Ulysses
  • Copy link from business site or Medium and put it in a short update post on my personal domain
  • Manually copy and paste links to share on LinkedIn and Pinterest
  • Add links to my Tiredof.Tech and book blog homepages as I see fit. (I can do these occasionally in batches if I want.)

Build With Me: POSSE Plan

Post (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere, or POSSE, is an indie web principle that helps you retain control over your own content. Unsurprisingly, as I’ve been building Tiredof.Tech, owning my own content is very important to me.

My SEO writing and consulting business website is built on Ghost, and this site uses Micro.blog—both federated platforms. (I’ll be adding micro.blogs as subdomains to Tiredof.Tech and my sci-fi book list soon as well).

Because Ghost and Micro.blog work with the fediverse, people can find my content from one platform on the other (or on another fediverse site like Mastodon) without creating new accounts.

But not everyone is plugged into the fediverse—it’s confusing! I’ve been dancing around the edge of it for years and it’s just now finally really making sense to me.

Luckily, because you own your own content when using the fediverse, I can easily share what I write out to closed platforms, too. But my content didn’t originate on those proprietary sites—if one shuts down, my content lives on.

My POSSE plan is as follows:

  1. Write all of my content using my beloved Ulysses app, which I’ve used for years.
  2. Publish content directly to the correct Ghost or micro.blog site through Ulysses’ publishing integrations.
  3. My consulting site and articles from this personal domain get automatically pushed out to LinkedIn.
  4. Every site’s content gets automatically pushed to its correct Bluesky feed—again, stuff I’ve preconfigured and was posting to manually before.
  5. My business site, Tiredof.Tech, and book blog Bluesky feeds appear as Tweet-style microposts on emilygertenbach.com, meaning that everything I write can be found when someone searches for me by name. It’ll link out to the original publication site, too, so I won’t be self-competing for SEO.

All of that is supposed to happen automatically based on settings I’ve preconfigured in micro.blog using direct site connections and RSS feeds.

I will then manually post select content to Medium and Tailwind (a Pinterest posting tool).

Whether it works as expected or not, any future learnings I get out of setting up this POSSE process can be found here…or on Bluesky…or on LinkedIn…or on Medium…or wherever you read your content going forward.

Once I get it working, of course!