Got my first 10 email subscribers

For the past few years I have had a website where I tried to teach people how to program using the Swift programming language. I only wrote about two or three articles and stopped. About a 1.5 years ago I started writing about Swift on Medium.com and slowly but surely my traffic has grown.

At the moment I am on around 10.5k monthly views on Medium.com for my programming publication. Unfortunately with Medium there is no way to get direct access to your audience, so I started writing my posts GitHub Pages, but that turned out to be far too manual, and I was only getting 5 or so people per day to my site, even with links to my website from all my Medium.com articles.

On the 14th of July this year I decided to use the domain I bought years ago and move all the content from GitHub Pages to this domain, I am now using Ghost for my blog, and I host it on Digital Ocean because Ghost premium is far too expensive for such low traffic. I am still cross posting to Medium.com and things seem to be going better. I now get around 20-25 people per day and it seems to be growing slowly but steadily.

On the 9th of August I decided to add an email subscription form to most of my blog posts and surprisingly, 10 people, as of yesterday, have signed up. I am quite shocked by this as I thought that the conversion rate would be very low, less than 1%, but it turns out to be around 3%.

3 of the 10 have come from a link in my Medium articles and the rest have been from my website. What surprises me about this is that my Medium traffic is many times higher than on my blog, but it only accounts for 30% of the email addresses.

A lesson that I have learned from this is that one needs to take advantage of other platforms. My Medium.com stories do not convert, but they tend to bring a decent amount of traffic and a small following. If one can grow this following I believe that it will start paying dividends.

For now, I will keep cross posting but I will also start sharing my content on social media.