I’ve been checking the analytics the way I check email. Quick look, number, close tab. Not reading, just confirming that the number exists and moving on.
Tonight I actually read them.
The total is small. I expected small. I don’t have an email list, I’m not running a newsletter, and I post to the same LinkedIn account I’ve been largely ignoring since 2023. Small was always going to be the number. Small is fine. What I was not prepared for was where one particular person came from.
One visitor did not come from anything I shared. They did not follow a link I posted. They searched for something, and whatever search does with whatever it does, it sent them to one of my posts. A stranger found me through the open internet, which sounds obvious until it actually happens.
It was not the post I would have guessed.
I have written here about the performance review that started all of this. About the conversation with Doug, which I had to push myself through like something physical. About the attorney’s office. About the thing Zoe said on her way to bed Thursday night that I am still turning over. I think those are, in some order, the most honest things I have written. The posts that cost me something to get right.
The post that brought the stranger was the one about health insurance.
Day 28. I sat down and wrote out what I had actually found when I looked it up: COBRA at approximately $1,840 a month, the ACA marketplace at roughly $1,100 depending on the plan and the subsidy thresholds. What those numbers actually looked like in the spreadsheet I had built, against the monthly expenses I had already calculated. I wrote it because I needed to figure it out and writing is how I figure things out, and I put it here because I was putting everything here. It did not cost me anything. I was doing math and I wrote the math down.
Someone searched for that information. At night, probably, the way I had searched for it, when I was trying to understand whether any of this was financially possible. And the result they found was my math.
I have been sitting with that for about an hour now.
Here is what I keep coming back to. The principle I give to client teams, the thing I have told account managers in some form for close to fifteen years, is that you don’t win the renewal by talking about yourself. You win it by being present at the problem before the client has to come looking for you. Know what they’re trying to solve, and be the person who already understood it. You don’t get chosen because you announced yourself. You get chosen because you were where the need already was.
The COBRA post did that. Not because I was trying to be findable. Because the question was real and I wrote down the answer I found and I put it somewhere visible. And the effect was the same either way: I was where someone’s question already was, and they found me there.
I am, as I write this, a little annoyed that I had to learn it twice.
I want to be careful here, because I can feel where this leads and I don’t fully trust it.
The obvious conclusion is: write more posts like the COBRA post. The practical ones. The stuff people are actually looking for when they’re in the middle of something hard. Write for being findable.
I don’t like the word “findable” when I say it that way. It makes it sound like a project with a goal that is not the same as the goal I started with. And I have watched people try to make themselves findable, optimize themselves for being surfaced, and the thing that happens is they start editing before they write. They write for the search and not for the question. And gradually the writing stops being writing and becomes a document that looks like writing. I don’t want that. That is not what this is.
But.
What I wanted from this blog, from the beginning, was to write the thing I couldn’t find when I was looking. Someone actually in it, not someone who had already made it out. Someone doing the math in public, for whoever needed the same math. The COBRA post was that. Not because I was writing for a stranger, but because I was writing from the middle of a real problem and I wrote it plainly and the stranger found it.
Those two things, the writing I wanted to do and the writing that is useful to the person searching at night, I cannot make them fall apart cleanly into separate categories. The ones that are supposed to be the same turn out to be the same post. The ones I was proud of for different reasons brought no one I didn’t already know.
I don’t know what to do with that. Not tonight.
What I’m going to do, and only this: try one practical post. Written the way I write anything here, not to be found, but about something that someone might actually be looking for when they are in the middle of it. Not the performance review, not the fear. One of the things I had to go find for myself. I do not know which one yet. I am not writing it tonight.
I am going to see if it still seems like the right call in the morning. I’m suspicious of ideas that come from analytics. Even when the logic holds.