Yup, we’re doing another one of these. For those of you who are new, the State of the Union is my longest-running series, going all the way back to 2014 (though it wasn’t called “State of the Union” until 2015). In this post, I’m going to recap our planned goals for last year with what we hit/missed, as well as go over some goals for 2020.
Our 2019 goals could be summarized as follows:
- WordPress: 550 views, 300 visitors, 70 followers
- Medium: 1,480 views, 820 reads, 30 fans
- Continue releasing episodes of Astukari & Friends
- Get above 200 followers on Instagram
- Get above 200 followers on Twitter
- Finish BDC Season 2
Alright, let’s hit each of these point by point:
WordPress
The actual jacob-robinson.com blog was really the one to hit it out of the park; makes sense, since it has been my main focus the entire year. Every single goal here has been passed; 1,172 views (2x beyond goal!), 836 visitors (2.75x beyond goal!), and 88 followers (wow!). Speaking that we’ve done so well this year, I find a hard time not being ambitious for the upcoming year; however, my more conservative side insists that I don’t hurt my own feelings. So we won’t quite aim for 4x this time around (I did that last year, mostly because the blog was only around for three months at that point). Instead, we’ll aim for a slightly more conservative 2x: ~2000 views, 1600 visitors, and 160 followers (though I’m not sure how well followers will scale, seeing that I don’t actually know if people really use the actual WordPress follow feature).
Medium
Compared to the main site’s behemoth performance, the Medium’s success has been… lackluster, at best. Scoring a much less sexy 189 views, 119 reads, and 13 fans, with the wide majority of posts made in the second half of the year scoring one or zero views (!), this is mostly pretty embarrassing. Given these numbers, I’d honestly just put Medium to the chopping block if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s actually quite easy to import posts to Medium. Perhaps they’re upset that I’m importing from my own site, and they’re punishing my posts due to that; who knows. I suppose I might as well keep going on it though, given the incredibly low maintenance; we’ll be nice to Medium and set its goals for a very modest 1.2x, with ~200 views, 150 reads, and 15 fans.
Podcast
Oh, haha, yeah! I canceled that shit. Still, while grating on my senses, I’d really like to go back to the old podcast formula. If for nothing else, the total of 78 videos in the Podcasts playlist haunts me. Why can’t it be a nice number, like 100? So, I’ll tell you what: my podcast goal for 2020 is to make 22 podcasts. That’s it. Nothing else. Hell, they don’t even need to be in the same series. They don’t even need to be on a realistic time schedule! I just want to make the damn videos so my numbers can be round.
Other Stuff
So, I’ll get BDC out of the way first, since that’s easy; Season 2 was in fact accomplished (yay!), and the project has probably sunsetted (aww). At this point it’s pretty far from what I originally intended on the project, and I’ve also realized that what I wanted to do probably wasn’t sustainable for the long run. The BDC social media and merch will stay up, just don’t expect them to be updated.
As for the social media goals, I… kind of gave up on these early on. I stopped shilling my Instagram posts, and because of this the Instagram has remarkably stayed at a consistent 170 followers. Considering that I only follow four people or so on there, I’d say I’m happy with this number.
For Twitter, I’m trying to be a bit more active, but I wouldn’t say I have too many specific goals for the whole thing. Right now I’m sitting around 105 followers; Twitter followers don’t tend to move much, but I’d be interested in seeing where the number goes if I do end up posting at least once every day (the posts here, like on Instagram, are automated).
The Newsletter
The newsletter is the newest edition of my content lines and I’m quite happy with it so far. Like I said with Twitter I don’t really have any specific goals for it right now, but I’d like to at least break the 10 subscriber mark (right now I’m at around 7).
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