I’ve now been blogging for five years.
By the numbers, I am pleased to share my Serendipities.blog has now reached the giddy heights of 111 signed-up subscribers. Over five years, I have somehow managed to knock up 92 posts, written over 83,000 words, and last year the blog site was visited 28,900 times from readers in 135 countries. Nice.
To help grow the blog, a couple of years ago, I decided to duplicate my Serendipities posts in a LinkedIn Newsletter, and this has culminated in my last edition being shared with 3880 LinkedIn subscribers and lots of other big numbers (impressions, comments, engagements) that I am not quite sure mean, but which continues to feel like a tremendous privilege.
Some of the most successful posts (in terms of numbers and generating the most discussion) over the last few years include:
- Why Schools Must Hire More Rebels – on the hiring process.
- Self-licking Lollipops – on the self-serving education industrial complex.
- “These Aren’t the Metrics You are Looking For” – on the folly of over-weighting grades and exam averages to measure school success.
- Analogue Struggles and Digital Naivety – on why schools need to pay attention to the development of both analogue AND digital skills.
- Why I (Don’t) Want My Name on the Door – on structural power.
I found this made-up rubric from a great blogger I follow, and I thought, that’s a pretty good yardstick to determine my progress and give me a target to keep writing:
- Tier 0 (1-9): You have a blog! Well done! It’s read by your Mum, your brother and your best mate.
- Tier 1: (10-99): Tribal bard. Your readership is in the tens, mainly people you know and see regularly, plus perhaps a few others.
- Tier 2: (100-999): Small community. Your blog is read by hundreds of people, including many people you don’t know. You’ve broken out of your ‘personal contacts’ space. In the grand scheme of things though, it’s still pretty small.
- Tier 3 (1000-9,999): Large community. Thousands of people read your blog every week. You’re likely to be known and cited within a particular specialism, field or hobby, though probably not outside it.
- Tier 4 (10,000 – 99,999): Global or national reach. Tens of thousands of people ready your blog; it will be shared many times each week. It’s likely that some of those readers are influential, or speak of it to others. Yours is a name that other people may have heard of, in that if someone says, ‘I was reading X’s blog’ to a stranger, they might know of it.
By this highly scientific reckoning, it looks like I’ve made it into Tier 2 (111 subscribers) on my Serendipities.blog and Tier 3 on my LinkedIn Newsletter. That’s pretty cool, I think, although I have no aspirations (or hope, quite frankly) of reaching Tier 4 exposure, which would be so frightening that it would probably put me off writing altogether.
However, to help shift away from social media, I would like to grow my own Serendipities.blog subscriber list. So I’ve set myself a target to double my current mailing list and reach 250 subscribers by the end of 2026.
So, here’s an invitation…
If I can reach this 250 target, I would like to start sharing more unfiltered posts, content, and perspectives than I’ve been comfortable with on social media thus far. I also think that, after five years, it would help keep the joy of writing and sharing.
To that end, I have possibly the simplest and quickest sign-up system on the internet. All it involves is writing your email below and then pressing the subscribe button. You don’t have to provide any other information or verify your email. The friction is zero 😉
More than anything else, it would be nice just to know I am not talking to myself!
Thank you
Damian
Serendipities 