Write like nobody’s reading
Giving yourself a break from tracking your story stats
I love writing. I always have. I have ideas for books, article, stories, spewing out of my head practically 24/7. But something happened when I started posting stories online. When I started my first blog I had access to some rudimentary analytics that showed me how many people were reading my articles and from where. It was so cool! There were the predictable places, where I lived, where I had friends and family who knew about my fledgling blog. But there were other places, remote and exotic. People I had no connection to were reading what I wrote.
It’s addictive. You know it is. How often do you check for Likes or Shares or thumbs up on your social media accounts? It’s a warm fuzzy feeling of appreciation. As a writer, that’s important, though you swear to yourself that it’s not.
It gets worse when you have a “hit” article. Whether through luck or sheer perseverance, you have that article or that day when your views go through the roof. It’s like a shot of pure adrenaline coursing through your veins. You thought you were hooked before, but this is something entirely different, a whole new “high” that is intoxicating.
I remember the day that my website suddenly had like 18K hits on one day. I couldn’t believe the numbers. After all, I was on vacation when it happened. After doing a little research, I discovered that it had been featured on Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites blog. A single, less than 200 word informational article about my website had sent my website hits through the stratosphere.
As exciting as that was, however, I started realizing that I would modify my writing, to include high ranked SEO phrases, reference high impact personalities, cater to what I thought readers wanted to read, writing that would be virtually applauded and make me feel a temporary high.
With highs come lows, however. For every piece of writing that did well, another tanked and I would surrender to that self-loathing that every writer knows so well, sure my writing career was finished. Eventually I would pull myself out of my wallow and write again.
Medium puts a new spin on the vicious cycle. For every article I post, I spread links around on my various…
