Six Months In
A request for you to submit your thoughts. I share some stats, too!
This post marks 6-months of writing on this Substack. (My first post was Wednesday, August 28, 2024). As part of a mid-year review, I’d like to ask you to take a quick survey.
There are only four questions:
Net Promoter Score (NPS). Just rate on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely you’d be to recommend this Substack to a friend or colleague.
Relevance: How relevant and interesting do you find the topics covered here?
Quality: How would you rate the quality of the posts in terms of depth, clarity, and usefulness?
Suggestions: Are there any topics, other content types (e.g., video, podcast), or other ways this Substack could be better for you?
Thank you for your support. I’ve put quite a bit of energy into this Substack, and you as readers play an important role in holding me accountable. For this post, I’m asking for your feedback on what might make this Substack more useful for all of us!
An information trade
I know it takes time for you to fill out a survey, so in exchange for you giving me a little bit of information, I thought I’d give you some in return.
While most of the readers of this Substack are from the US and UK, I have appreciated the contact from other friends around the world who have taken the time and energy to subscribe — even when English is not your native language!
I am also grateful for the coverage of readers across the US. I know there’s a concentration near where I’ve lived in my adult life, with the most years spent in California, followed by Washington, and then Oregon. At the same time, I’ve appreciated how this Substack has served as a platform to help me reconnect with friends and colleagues from other places, many of whom I haven’t been in contact with for years!
Of course, the number of people who know me is finite. While I had an early bump in subscribers when I launched this Substack, the count is growing much more slowly now.
I also believe I’ve exhausted the ability to pull in additional people from my own network. I can see that early engagement from my network prompted the LinkedIn algorithm to put my posts on the feeds of my friends and former colleagues, with a nice bump at the end of August 2024 when I launched this Substack. Now, I no longer really get impressions when I post on LinkedIn.
At the same time, I can now see there’s a gradual erosion in the readership here, even with the slightly growing subscriber base. The number of views and the email open rate for this Substack has been starting to shrink. (The numbers are down 354 in views and down 1.5% in email open rate over the last 30 day period.)
This has been a trend overall. The traffic to this Substack is trending slightly down, even with a slight increase in the subscriber count.
So, while I’m not rapidly driving off a cliff, I can see that I can’t simply keep recruiting new readers if existing readers lose interest. This is why I’m asking for your feedback on how I can do better!
I have followed a suggestion to try Medium to expand my audience, and this is just starting to happen now. Their algorithm favors articles that solicit “reads” from paid subscribers and the ability for an article to convert “views” to “reads.” I’ve also found that the editing process for Medium publications does help to improve the quality of the articles.
Why am I doing this?
I know many have asked me along the way my intention for this Substack. I’ve used the expression “thought-word-deed” to describe the mechanism I’m using to improve myself. The theory goes that better actions (and lives!) require that thoughts first be put into words. A decent piece in Psychology Today also describes this phenomenon.
“Research has shown that writing about your values has a significant impact on your actions as well as on your mental well-being—more than just simply picking values from a list or stating them in a few words. By writing about them, you are less likely to react defensively or to let values become formulaic. You are more likely to become more receptive to information that suggests how you can make effective changes in your life.
If that sounds preachy, please remove any sense of “should” from it. You don’t need a wagging finger from me any more than you need one from anyone else, including yourself. I’m advocating values work because science, the best of our cultural traditions, and our own life experiences show that when values choices are made from the whole of us, and from a psychologically open and aware posture, our lives improve. It’s just the way we are wired.”
— Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Nevada
I’ve known for some time that I wanted the discipline to write down my thoughts and values but past attempts by me to write over longer periods of time weren’t successful. I believe the problem was that I didn’t publicly state my intention and share with everyone I know.
But why involve everyone?
For an interesting statistic, a study demonstrated that people who declared a New Year’s resolution reported significantly higher success rates than those who did not. Six months in, 46% of those who set a resolution were continuously successful compared to 4% of those who did not set one.
Image source: fivethirtyeight.com
By making all of this public, I was hoping to set the stage to be among the 46% that succeed!
Engagement is important
I have really appreciated the text messages, emails, phone calls, and live conversations that I’ve had with friends, both old and new, over this Substack. The discussion is motivating me to write and keep working on myself. I am writing this Substack for myself, but you as readers and participants play an important role in keeping me motivated so I keep doing it!
In the absence of discussion, I have some “engagement” statistics from Substack. The engagement rate on most of my posts is typically 7% (the gray bar below). Last Wednesday’s post on spending, not saving, appears to have hit a 10% engagement rate. I suppose I should be monitoring this statistic, too. However, I think I need to be more qualitative to act on and understand what’s “behind” the numbers in terms of relevance or quality or something else!
Numbers aside
So, for this survey, I ask for a net promoter score (NPS) for just one quantitative metric so I have something to compare against in another six months. However, the other survey questions are just text fields where you can just give me some raw thoughts to help me understand what you like, what you don’t like, and where things can be improved!
I’m all ears! Will you help me?