The Success of My Brand so Far
Talking about how my website has been doing, the strategies I've used, and other social media experiments.
At the start of this year I committed to having something posted on every Monday for the entire year.
I’ve been working hard to make sure that I meet this deadline every week as a commitment to myself.
This last week I suffered from pretty bad burnout from overworking myself the week prior.
I’m panic writing this today, because I did want to keep the commitment to myself, and I wanted to share some of my progress so far and talk about how the Substack, and my attempts at other social media have gone.
Substack Newsletter Progress
I have to admit that getting views on my posts is rather exciting. There has been other content I wanted to write about that I’ve shelved in order to continue building a library of searchable articles to increase traction to the site.
This strategy has been a little tiring, but it has also paid off well.
My most popular article is Best City Building Games of 2025 which you can check out down below.
This post has accrued over 300 views since I posted it. This far exceeds any post created both before and after.
I guess the sad thing is… I knew before writing it that it would be the most popular. I felt a little silly putting it out there. Blasé is the word that comes to mind.
I guess we’re all a slave to the system at the end of the day. If I want to write about games this is the price I pay.
Library of SEO content
The greatest epiphany I had over the last couple months was realizing that an individual articles success does not reflect the website as a whole.
The websites total progress comes from having a library of searchable content that attract clicks at the same time.
Having tons of articles all that attract clicks slowly builds the websites visibility rather than hoping for one, single breakthrough article.
Allow me to show a graph:
The height of the numbers is views per day. Notice you can see each Monday as a peak.
Though the peaks of each article have waxed and waned over the months the trend of “views per day” on average has been steadily rising.
I attribute this entirely to google searches. I have another website that tracks what articles are getting clicks on google which shows this much better.
This is a graph from google analytics showing my google clicks per day. Notice this trend similarly goes up. I’d like again to state that this is not because of any single articles success, but because of the library of articles I’ve built.
Twitch Streaming
I also spent a great deal of time livestreaming different things on Twitch.
Twitch is a great source of revenue provided you are able to garner a following. The issue is that you don’t benefit from a growing library of content like I do on the website.
It’s sad for me to say, but Twitch streaming has been a huge waste of my time.
I spent a whopping 74 hours streaming, and averaged 2 viewers total.
I knew this would happen, but it confirmed my bias that Twitch streaming is a terrible option unless you already have a following.
Youtube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Tiktok Videos
Overall I hated streaming on twitch. The experience is miserable and degrading aside from occasionally when your friends show up. Thankfully I’ve had the support of my girlfriend and many of my friends, but it can’t be left up to them to support the show.
The saving grace for Twitch has been the ability to cut streams up into segments to post on social media.
Social media content has been by far the most successful source of views for me so far.
TikTok
TikTok is up there as the main reason I got started posting shorts/reels. These are videos that are cut in portrait and cut to about 60 seconds. TikTok has very good immediate feedback for videos which made it enticing to keep posting.
My issue with TikTok is the slow conversion rate for followers. The videos I posted on TikTok did quite well, but the views didn’t seem indicative of anything.
I’ve stopped posting on TikTok as a result of this. I’m working off metrics, and I have limited time. The opportunity cost of posting on TikTok as a worse platform means better platforms get less time.
Instagram Reels
The second most successful outlet for my shorts has been Instagram Reels. The conversion to followers on Instagram was shockingly high. The videos themselves got less views, and less interaction, but the channel appeared to get more followers on a video to video basis.
The main reason I’ve slowed down posts on Instagram is strictly because getting videos on the site from a computer is a huge pain in the ass.
The only way to post reels is on your phone. Transferring clips from Twitch was very easy, but they were extremely low quality.
When I started editing them by hand I found it impossible to take those videos and put them up. Therefore I stopped caring.
YouTube Shorts
The screenshot I showed above is from YouTube Shorts.
Youtube is my primary platform for consuming content therefore I’m very biased.
However since I started posting I’ve gained 10 subscribers, and 19k views. This is really impressive for only two weeks of posting.
The shorts have come with their own set of problems.
The algorithm that promotes youtube shorts is one of divinity over logic. The rules for “What we bother to show” is not written anywhere, and appears to be completely arbitrary.
For example: those same twitch exports that did so well on TikTok and Instagram, didn’t get any views on Youtube. Youtube seems to be allergic to having content automatically exported to it’s platform despite it also being the easiest to do so.
I found that if I download, then upload the content manually it actually bothers to show it.
Similarly if you post more than once a day, basically all the videos you uploaded that day become shadow banned.
I know they aren’t just doing poorly because the analytics tells me the videos aren’t being shown to anyone.
If I delete them and re-upload them launched spaced apart they do fine.
Conclusion
My primary goal with all these satellite experiments has been “cross pollination.”
Building an audience on multiple platforms, and funneling them into each other seems to be the best way to build a consistent following.
I think the experiments I’ve done with other social media have been largely a success, but the time investment for each of those platforms has taken it’s toll.
While I will continue to experiment with lower effort content on these platforms for the time being, I’ve made a commitment to myself to spend less time overall working on them for my own sanity.
Unless of course one of them take off, then this platform will inevitably receive less time.
Have a wonderful rest of your day.
If you have any questions about the tools I’ve been using or more specific details of my experiments, feel free to contact me in the comments below.
Thanks so much!