Hello!

Welcome to the monthly update for the Insights, Innovation, and Economics blog. This is where I’ll discuss the current progress of running a blog plus some goals and initiatives for next month, ending with a sneak peek at the next blog post.

Blogging is about Exploration

Trial and error is a blogger's best friend. It’s highly unlikely you have the perfect solution the first time, or even the second time. But, eventually you’ll find the right one that works for you. Relating this back to what we’re doing here, I think I’m starting to figure out what works and what doesn’t. It hasn’t been easy, but solutions are starting to be cultivated.

Yet, this isn’t the key part. Trial and error is a fantastic process, but it requires you to be consistent, persevere and explore new ways of doing things. Exploration is powerful.

To quote the famous saying, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” I think this mentality is extremely pertinent here. In relation to blogging, within your niche of topics, you don’t know what you don’t know, meaning that you need to explore around. It may mean reading tens or hundreds of articles that all say virtually the same thing until you find one that brings up a term or viewpoint that you haven’t considered yet (speaking from experience here).

This works for other places in blogging too. Let’s take social media as an example. You might not know where your audience “lives”–for lack of a better word. It might take some time to figure out what platform(s) work best, what communities on those platforms work best, etc. All of this requires exploration–figuring out what you don’t know you don’t know.

As you can probably see, this process works in many other places in life (almost all of them I would argue). What are the different problems that you or others have? What are the traditional solutions? What might people not be seeing? This whole process is facilitated by exploring.

Now, a note here: sometimes you’ll go exploring and figure out that there isn’t a better solution or that you know everything (probably unlikely but it happens). In this case, what do you do? I think a great place to start is to celebrate. Secondly, you should start a blog to teach others your vast knowledge on that subject (this is not me to be clear–my blog is about figuring out what I don’t know I don’t know through exploration).

But, most of the time this won’t be the case. Exploration will lead to new places and those new places will lead to new places and so on. At the end of the day, you’ll be so far from where you started, but you’ll never know until you start exploring, start trying.

I’m a big quote person, so here’s a good one to wrap up this section (and continue our Kardashian+friends theme):

“I feel like this year is really about like, the year of realizing stuff.”

- Kylie Jenner

What’s Happened This Month

Expansion.

People! The Reddit experiment worked!

Earlier this month I started an account for the blog and then started farming karma for the first couple of weeks (Reddit is unique, just go with it if you don’t understand). After I had built up enough karma to post on most communities, I started by posting one blog a week. And….. well, I’ll let the stats later speak for themselves.

Besides that, hopefully you saw the new topic come out last week (hint: Space 101). I’m hoping that in the future I can continue to explore the space as it’s a newer segment for me, but I think it’s super integral to our future (also space TV shows and movies are fantastic).

Yep, that’s really it. We’ll keep it short and sweet so you can get to those Reddit analytics I bragged about.

Stats This Month

For my first month being on reddit, I’d say this is a pretty good. We got over 73 thousand views on the posts, which is crazy numbers. Granted, our data is pretty skewed because one post went pseudo “viral”, getting 69,000 total views. Wild! I’m excited to see where it goes from here.

Our Twitter stats stayed stable this month, which is great. We’re starting to gain some more followers after a little slump. People keep engaging with posts and sharing them with their friends. I hope to continue maintaining and potentially improving these metrics.

Wow, the blog popped off this month. Reddit traffic drove blog views and a couple of subscribers, which is fantastic. Amazing performance this month, and I only hope it continues to exponentially grow.

For the two subscribers that joined us this month, thank you!

Progress on Last Month’s Goals

This segment is where I discuss the goals I set for this month (in last month’s monthly update) and what progress (or not) I’ve made:

1. Continue having fun writing blog posts and running the blog

Don’t worry, this one happened (and hopefully will always continue to happen). It’s been another fantastic month running the blog.

2. Drive subscribers from Twitter engagements to the blog

Overall, this goal is still in the struggle phase. I haven’t quite figured out how to drive subscribers from the Twitter to the blog. So, here’s a great area for further exploration and trial and error (see that connection to our topic above). This month I tried to vary my post lengths which didn’t totally make any magical impacts. I failed to use more statistics, but I did end up pinning the weekly blog post every week which helped get it more interactions.

3. Set up a Reddit account for the blog

Big win here. I can’t wait to see what happens in the future.

4. Continue diving deeply into interesting topics (new and old)

I’ve found some fun new topics to write about and explore this month (you’ll see them coming soon). It’s my goal that this continues to happen every single month as it’ll keep the content fresh and exciting for both you and me.

5. Continue to produce high-quality blog content

This month you can start to see the efforts that I’ve put forward to better the content I produce. Hopefully you enjoyed and thought it was high-quality.

Overall, it was a good month for achieving blog goals (like a 8/10), but there are always things to improve:

Goals for Next Month

This month has seen an expansion of success, and I plan to continue building on this momentum. So, here are the goals for the month:

1. Continue having fun writing blog posts and running the blog

This will continue to be the first goal every month. It’s a good reminder that this blog is purely for enjoyment and education, not to make money or grow a following (become an influencer). If I can make someone’s week a little bit better by reading my blog that week, that's a successful week for me.

2. Figure out how to play the Twitter game for my content

I haven’t figured out truly how to make Twitter work for what I want to use it for, so I hope this month to continue to explore new ways of doing it and see if anything catches.

3. Continue diving deeply into interesting topics (new and old)

As I continue to write about and explore these topics and areas I’m interested in, I always want to take it one layer deeper. A couple of reasons for this: A) It provides a unique lens on content that entices viewers and engagement; B) It keeps it interesting for me to learn and write about, providing a newer perspective on an area that I may not have considered before.

4. Continue to produce high-quality blog content

This goal has persisted since last month. I hope that throughout this process of blogging, I continue to teach you, the reader, about these areas that interest me as effectively and efficiently as possible.

A Little Thank You

Thank you for sticking around. For anyone new here: thank you too. I’m excited to see what happens this next month! This project continues to grow and develop, astounding me every month. Like always, this is purely for fun, and so far it’s been great.

As a little thank you, here’s a tease for the next post:

“People move twice as fast away from pain as they do towards gain.”

Anywho, that’s all for today.

-Drew Jackson