Suddenly started getting traffic & mailing list signups after 12 months of no changes - and no clue what happened!

A year or so back, I got pissed off with Medium's constant changes and started a long-form content site for my passion, which is user experience and research.

I wrote a couple of articles in my downtime, transferred some old content from Medium to the new site, linked up a related video course that I had made the previous year, and pushed it out to the community.

I got busy with design clients since then and have left it for about 12 months without doing anything.

Over the course of 2021, I got a consistent yet tiny stream of users, mostly from Medium, where I have about 500 followers after writing some bigger articles on there. It's difficult/impossible to engage with readers on Medium, so I've been trying to funnel that traffic and following to my own site where I can at least collect emails.

I had a small trickle of people signing up to my mailing list, 80-90 or so over the last 12 months, which I thought was fine because I was not actively contributing to the site, it was just sitting there.

But in Jan '22, that changed and I started getting 2-3 signups a day to my list, instead of 2-3 a month.

I changed nothing. They appear to be real email addresses as well, real names and real companies/domains, some come up in EmailOctopus with people's avatars, etc. From the user inputted "role", they all seem to be "developer" users.

I just now automated the mailing list process (I know, I was lazy when I set it up and figured that I could automate if I needed to), and while it's extremely satisfying and positive to have upped my mailing list numbers by 100% in the last month, I'd love to know what caused it so that I could double down on it!!

Google Analytics isn't much help, I am really struggling to use it these days (despite using it on and off for 10 years). I can't see how to select a page and view the traffic change over time. But from what I can see in the graphs, the increased traffic is "direct" without attribution. There is one article that consistently outperforms all the others but I'm not surprised about that considering the content.

If anyone has any tips for Google Analytics or can recommend a good alternative that is actually easy to use and not incomprehensible, that would be great because it's sucked not being able to really see anything in the stats except for a couple of nice numbers going up.

I'm wondering if there has been someone recommending one of my articles to people in a course or article or similar. Is there any way I can do some kind of reverse search where links to my pages show up? Is this something that an SEO package like ahrefs can help with?

Anyway, I think my next step is to put some fresh content on the site, push an update to the mailing list and see how it goes. But if anyone has any other ideas, I'd love to hear them!!

Cheers gang, go well!!
H