Pinterest is set. What's next?

September is loaded with content creation. But creation is one thing. Distribution is another. Not that I am too worried about it. I wrote quite a bit in August, and I finally feel like a creator.

My titles aren't SEO material, and they never will be. I don't give a fuck about writing the highest-CTR headline some algorithm would reward me for. My content doesn't read the way SEO marketers write.

But after a few conversations with Gemini and Google's AI assistant, I'm convinced old SEO is dead anyway. Narrative and shared experience are what's replacing it. Listicles and standard SEO content have already got swallowed by generative AI search.

Read also: Real-world experience won't grow your blog by itself

Still, every once in a while, a post of mine takes off. Not because I planned it. Because it happened at random, and I was fast enough to write down what I was feeling in the moment.

You can see the spike clearly in Google Search Console. One of them happened because Spacemail had an outage, and I wrote about it fast enough that the post got indexed and pushed into the top 3 results almost immediately.

That's when the traffic hit, tied straight to search terms with my name attached.

Another spike came from an honest review I wrote about Warmwind OS. Those posts, more than any others, are probably responsible for most of the traffic this blog gets.

Read also: Warmwind wrote back, and here's my honest read

That's the direction I want this to keep going. My ideal content creator journey is built around this blog: field notes, a running ledger of my progress, fails included. I wish more people read my experience and findings.

I'm estimating it'll take three to five years before I build enough authority, podcasts included, EchoRoom and my personal diary among them. I'm okay with that. It doesn't mean I get to ignore distribution while I wait.

Medium and Substack, obviously

I have a hard time managing and planning social media as it is. I suck at planning; I know this. So adding more distribution channels was already a thought that had me climbing the walls.

But I can't ignore Medium and Substack. They're solid platforms, and I don't need to write original content for either. I can republish what's already here, and this blog stays the original source.

My first instinct was to panic a little, because it adds workload. I blog at a high frequency already, and I was worried my time would get diluted too thin trying to keep up two more channels on top of everything else.

Then Gemini made a suggestion, almost in passing: be selective about what goes where. An update or a minor idea doesn't belong on Medium or Substack. But something like me being terrified about vibe-coding a Mac app, that's the kind of post that deserves a wider push.

That one piece of feedback made distribution so much easier to handle. I cherry-pick the posts that I think are impactful and republish those.

The goal isn't subscriber counts or follower numbers on either platform. It's building authority for my content and my name, and funneling people back toward this blog, hoping some of them end up on my newsletter I control instead of depending on someone else's platform.

Where I'm leaving it for now

That's enough for this year. I can't go all-in on every social platform when I already know my limits. What I actually need is to experiment more and build a solid workflow around the two I've picked.

Pinterest, Medium, and Substack are already a handful. We're three months from the end of the year, and that's plenty to work with for now.