If you know me, you know I measure things. Not obsessively. I'm not tracking my sleep cycles or optimizing my morning routine. But I've learned that if you don't measure anything, you're just guessing. And guessing gets old fast. This year I rediscovered something I'd forgotten I loved: writing. And that interest pulled me into territory I'd mostly avoided for years. Social media. "Personal branding." I know. I felt the cringe too. But here's the thing about curiosity, it doesn't care about any of that. Once the experiment took shape in my head, I couldn't let it go. The Plan Was Simple Write and publish one article every week. No exceptions. Or at least, not yet. Life has a way of interrupting even the best intentions. The writing part? That came naturally. The distribution part? That's where things got interesting. LinkedIn was always my default. I'd post something, it would disappear into the void, and I'd move on. But this time I wanted to understand how the platform actually worked. So I started reading. And one concept kept surfacing over and over again. Commenting. The Thirty-Minute Comment Sounds easy, right? Leave a thoughtful comment on a relevant post. Show genuine interest. Engage with your network. I thought the same thing. Then I tried it. Finding a post that actually resonated with me. Something worth responding to beyond "Great insights!", took longer than I expected. Sometimes thirty minutes or more. Thirty minutes of scrolling through doom-and-gloom AI predictions and recycled productivity advice, looking for something that sparked a genuine thought. When I finally found one, I had to truly understand it. Then craft something valuable for me and for the person who wrote it. This "simple" daily habit turned out to be one of the hardest parts of the whole experiment. And I have to say, I missed two days when I was sick. The Domain Problem Somewhere in the first week, I realized my blog URL was working against me. https://blog.webtric.be isn't exactly memorable. Try telling someone that URL over coffee and hope they remember. So I switched to joachimz.me shorter, cleaner and actually writable. joachimz.me But now I had a new problem: how do you redirect traffic without breaking everything? If you've ever migrated a site, you know this can be a nightmare if not done properly. Fortunately, Cloudflare's free tier makes it almost trivial. One redirect rule, and all the old traffic flows to the new domain. Done. Cloudflare If you're interested in knowing how, reach out and I'll gladly help you! Actually Measuring What Matters Next step: tracking. I went with Heap, which offers a generous free tier (up to 10,000 sessions per month). For a blog my size, that's more than enough. Heap And if I ever exceed it? That would be a wonderful problem to have. Integration took about five minutes. Add a few lines of code, similar to Google Search Console, and you're capturing data. (No, I'm not sponsored. I'm just showing you that this stuff isn't as complicated as it seems. If you've been putting off starting a blog because the technical side intimidates you, it shouldn't.) The Numbers Now the part you're actually here for. I had no baseline. I hadn't posted anything meaningful on LinkedIn in months. So these numbers exist in a vacuum, but they still surprised me. LinkedIn Performance: LinkedIn Performance: ~8,500 impressions (I'm discounting some repost noise)~4,000 members reachedPosts published weekly, typically Monday through Wednesday. ~8,500 impressions (I'm discounting some repost noise) ~4,000 members reached Posts published weekly, typically Monday through Wednesday. Of course, comparing this to "nothing" isn't exactly scientific. But it's a start. Blog Traffic (since December 21st, when the new domain went live): 213 unique visitors294 page views233 sessions 213 unique visitors 294 page views 233 sessions In a positive way! The last one stings a little. Zero newsletter signups. But it's also honest data. People visited, some of them read, but nobody was compelled to stick around for more. That's useful information. It tells me the content might be interesting enough to click, but not yet valuable enough to subscribe. Another learning. What One Month Actually Taught Me Here's what I didn't anticipate: the hardest part wasn't the writing. It wasn't the technical setup. It wasn't even maintaining the weekly cadence. The hardest part was engaging authentically in a space that is unknown to me for the most part. Thirty minutes to find one post worth commenting on. That ratio tells you something about the signal-to-noise problem on LinkedIn, or maybe my feed is the problem. But it also tells you something about the opportunity. If most people are leaving "Great post!" or AI-generated comments, the bar for standing out isn't actually that high. It just requires effort, most people aren't willing to give. The numbers are encouraging, but ultimately they don't matter too much. Also, one month is nothing. It's a spark, not a trend. The real question is whether I can sustain this through month three, month six, month twelve, when the novelty wears off, and the weekly deadline starts feeling like a weight instead of a challenge. What I can say: I'm writing more than I have in years. I'm thinking more carefully about what I want to say. And for the first time in a long time, I'm actually clicking publish consistently instead of letting it sit in drafts because the posts might not be perfect. That alone feels like progress worth measuring.

The is an opinion piece based on the author’s POV and does not necessarily reflect the views of HackerNoon.

This story contains AI-generated text. The author has used AI either for research, to generate outlines, or write the text itself. 

What One Month of Writing in Public Taught Me

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