I’m kinda hung up on the idea of beta testing my writing these days.

How does that work? Well, the thing is that each time I’ve written something—anything—and then published it online there is usually a bit of metrics attached to that. Clicks. Read throughs. Search presence. All of those things form a pretty robust picture of what people find interesting.

I’m not here to get rich writing blogs. It’s not in the cards for me.

But I’m also not here to scream into the wind and pretend to have an audience. I really do want people to read what I write and find it useful.

So the idea that each of my posts on this site, for example, are not reambling screeds about my life but instead encapsulated and focused ideas that have been on my mind, each fleshed out in a couple hundred words, means that I can tell from my metrics how each of those encapsulated ideas has tested out in the real world. Are people interested? Do they click? Do they keep reading?

And once one has beta tested something, one then refines and iterates: I write another piece on the same idea, a few months wiser and with some clarity of having written those thoughts out once before, maybe twice before, and again and again. Does the idea get the same broad level of attention and interest? Was it the idea itself or a fluke of word usage or timing?

Write. Test. Repeat.