I’ve been trying to follow through on some personal publishing goals I set for 2019. Like many people, I face the challenges of a day job, gym time (circuit training addiction), and freelance work.

Here are some steps I’ve made to become a better personal publisher:

When it comes to social media, I’m trying to use the #IDGTechTalk Twitter chats to engage more. The chats bring together a group that’s smart about technology, the market, and social media so I continue to learn a lot. I’ve also started to use HootSuite and TweetDeck to schedule posts. It’s something I once said I wouldn’t do but I’m seeing some interesting (yet early) results.

I’m making it a habit to publish to Medium when I can. Interestingly enough some of my older posts are still getting engagement. Looking over my stats, when I write about Atlassian Confluence, Microsoft Teams, or Dropbox Paper I get numbers. Publishing a personal post to Medium certainly gains me more numbers then if I published the same post to LinkedIn.

My personal blog now contains many revised and updated posts from a previous generation of said blog. It was equal parts educational and cathartic to look back over some of my older writing especially during the time period of my Thyroid problems. This exercise gave me the opportunity to rethink some of my positions on things. I also got to see how some of my personal and professional thinking has changed and evolved over time. Most importantly, I saw how my writing style had matured as many of the posts predated when I broke out as a published writer. The next step is to publish more original content to this blog.

I still go back and forth over continuing to publish personal articles to LinkedIn. On one side, a friend and colleague challenged me to capture some of my views around thought leadership, knowledge management, and enterprise collaboration. LinkedIn feels like the right channel to me for that content (at least for now). On the other side, are the anemic reader numbers. It’s up to me to figure out how to improve my LinkedIn article engagement but I’m just not there yet.

Challenges and decisions remain

I still face challenges around keeping a cadence because personal writing projects are the first victims of my billable work historically. On a positive note, I’m well on my way to adapting the process I use to write bylined articles to my personal publishing work.

Stopping to think about my personal publishing for this post reminds me that I’m fortunate to have a job that I can do all day and then come home that night and do for pleasure and relaxation.

How are you managing your personal online publishing?