A year of blogging about Classical Chinese Medicine
We’re running up on the one year anniversary of Deepest Health!* Can you believe it? One year and we’re up to almost 250 daily subscribers (thank you!) and a very respectable daily traffic number that averages around 15,000 page views a month. We also recently reached a search engine benchmark - receiving Pagerank 5! All of this despite the toll that my busy schedule has taken on my posting frequency. I want to thank each and every one of my readers for interacting with me, teaching me, promoting the site and just generally being awesome. Thanks!
I’ve been doing some thinking about where I would like the site to be in another year. The fact is that I would like to see more readers, more subscribers, and more conversation going on. This requires MORE content creation on my part, and I recognize that. I’ve been getting plenty of emails from readers wishing I would go back to my super frequent posting schedule of last summer. I’ve been thinking about whether I want to make blogging a priority again.
My posting frequency has plummeted for a variety of reasons, but it comes down to three major problems.
1. I’m way busy.
2. Getting more readers made me a little afraid to “speak my mind” especially when some of my readers are professors and quite active practitioners in the field.
3. I started to become unsure about what readers wanted.
These reasons are bad ones. To address number one - I’ll always be busy. I can’t let that get in my way. We’ve all had the experience of suddenly finding time for something we’re motivated to make a priority (new love, anyone?) just as we’ve all experienced the converse (taxes, anyone?) So, I guess that’s debunked. Number two is just crass fear. I’m a student. In a little more than a year, I’ll be a new practitioner. I’ve never claimed to be anything else, right? I know I’ve said this before. It scares me a little to know that my professors, my esteemed colleagues and practitioners with lots more experience are reading my words. However, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and it seems like folks want to see me writing more often - so I guess I’m going to have to consolidate my Kidneys and get on with it. T
To address the third issue - it is still a problem. Everyone seems to like something a little different. The most significant problem I have is the worry about writing for practitioners and dorky students (like me) and leaving average folks and brand new students without anything compelling to read. I’m just going to have to hope it works out. I’ve tried writing articles for new patients before, and it just didn’t move me very much. Every once in a while I feel like I put out something of interest to the general public, and those posts are rewarded with good traffic, but I don’t want that to be a focus.
In the end the greatest barrier is a combination of all of these. Because of my fear and lack of comprehension about what readers want has led to my spending WAAAAY too much time with each article. This has made it impossible for me to consider fitting posting regularly into my schedule. With these myths busted, hopefully I can get on with producing excellent content for all of you who are interested in reading it.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this public display of what is a private process. It’s like talking to yourself to work out a problem when you think nobody can hear, only I know you can hear. Such is the blogging life.
Eric
*Note: Deepest Health has actually been around in some form for almost 2 years, but I really began writing in earnest in June 2007
If you like what you read here, you may want to keep updated by using my RSS feed. Want to know more about RSS/feeds? - read more here. Thanks for visiting!
Tags: Blogging, content, focus, health, overwhelm, rest, students, summer, tea
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9 Responses to “A year of blogging about Classical Chinese Medicine”
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Happy birthday! :)
I know I’m not the only one who’s happy you’re here, blogging about CM like no other.
You’re a big inspiration.
Yael
Happy one year, Eric! Deepest Health is truly an inspiration and a great resource for TCM.
Here’s to many more years of great blogging!
-amy
I think people read you because of the passion with which you write. Also, you don’t ever represent yourself as anything other than a traveler on a journey to understanding. You invite comment and discussion–it’s not “this is how it is”. That is a wonderful way to engage community which I think is what keeps people coming back.
I recommend you to other acupuncturists who actually know what the internet is ( :)) because as we move on and get practicing we often loose the forum for such great thought provoking conversation. I am sure that is why so many others recommend you as well.
Hi Eric, Congrats on your blogiversary. I vote for less frequent posts that are juicy with thought over more frequent posts that are fluff. Not that you write fluff, but if you begin to care more about what others want you to write than about what you have to say you could be going down the fluff highway, and that would suck.
Congratz on the 1 year anniversary. Your writing is a motivation and inspiration to me. I can understand how stressful it must be to write regularly, especially when you’re a student. But don’t worry, I think your readers can understand. I like how you always apologize to your readers…but it’s really no big deal, really. You just enjoy what you write.
p.s. I use a feedreader, so it’s automatically updated. No need to visit the site every once and while, so no worries! ^______________^ “
Congrats for your first blogiversary. I am a regular reader of your blog, which motivates me a lot towards classical chinese medicine.
The main advantage of this health blog is 250 posts in 360 days (Thats why I are honored with PR-5). All the articles are really worth reading. Please keep on posting…
Congratulations and best wishes Eric!
My Hearty Congratulations to you. It is not an easy task to blog continually for an year especially with 250 posts. Hats off to you…
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