What Eleven Months Of Publishing Weekly Actually Taught Me About Audience Building

Forty-seven posts. Eleven months. Here is what the numbers said, and what they did not.

The metric I was watching

Subscriber count. It grew slowly, then in two sharp jumps that had nothing to do with consistency and everything to do with two specific posts.

The metric that mattered

Reply rate. Twelve people replied to almost everything. Those twelve became every referral, every paid enquiry, and both of the jumps above.

What I would do differently

Write for the twelve. The rest is downstream of that.

Consistency was necessary but not sufficient. It bought me the chance to occasionally write something that travelled.