the experiments are complete… blogagility.com fails.
Hello everyone! I have made a decision after much thought and quite a few experiments over the past few years. I am setting the blog to free mode and will no longer be posting content on a regular basis. I may still post if there is a topic that is of particular interest or that I’m passionate about. Emphasis on may post. I’ve found LinkedIn to provide access to a bigger audience so I’ll probably post there if anywhere.
Experiments
It has been an interesting set of experiments over the years trying different things to drive product development of the blog. It seems that the primary driver of users are either really good content, or just highly controversial topics. Good content takes time to build and deploy. Controversy is easy and drives lots of discussion but has the negative aspect of also bringing out the very worst in people. I have no interest supporting anything negative or controversy. At this time in my life I also cannot justify all of the extra time and effort away from my family producing good content for free.
Costs
The business plan renewal for blogagility.com is coming up in September. The sunk cost in services every year is around $400 which isn’t much at all. It’s the time involved in maintenance and production of content that is very expensive. Figure $20,000-$30,000 per year.
Outcomes
From a product development perspective the desired outcome of this blog was more engagement from the Lean-Agile community (in context) that would enable more learning and opportunity for everyone. From my perspective, this was a dismal failure. Engagement on the blog and linked articles from social media has been very poor for the most part for the past five years (since 2014). As you can see from the charts there are around 1,500 regular unique visitors to the blog every month. The spikes were either content or controversial content generated. ALL of the bigger spikes in engagement were controversial context related. Which is really sad.
Last year I sent out a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey via article and numerous repostings on social media. The final result was only 10 respondents and an NPS of -30. That is not good.
Thank you to blog supporters
There have been some positive outcomes from the blog. I did send out a few t-shirts and there were a few supporters who provided content and others who sent money. For all blogagility.com supporters, I thank you sincerely!
Pivot or Persevere
Pivot is the clear choice. I am going to invest my time and energy in other ways of engaging with the community. I will still be on LinkedIn and the SAFe Communities, and I will be ramping up my support of various Lean-Agile Meetups across the US.
blogagility.com 