Originally published here

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Hello! I am writing this blog post to share some of the things that I have been doing during this lockdown. Some of you might have heard about the lockdown in Sydney Australia. It’s been 2 1/2 months. This has been extremely hard for everyone. Approaching the vaccination rate of 70%-80%, it looks like we are looking at a few more weeks before we are let out.

Most of us are working from home while homeschooling our kids. I feel fortunate… I still got a job and my kids are adopting fine. However, unlike last year’s lockdown, I decided to do some things that I wouldn’t normally do including writing articles for Medium. I figured there is no point in being frustrated and angry at our politicians for locking us in because they didn’t have the foresight to sign up for Pfizer shots when it was originally offered. So here are the things that I have done in the last 5 weeks.

1. Start writing about work and life on Medium

I have been a paid member of Medium for about two years. Originally I found it through reading Towards Data Science articles (I am a data scientist). I wondered about all the authors writing so many high-quality articles. Where are they getting all these great ideas? My fear was I write 2–3 articles and lose interest because I had no readers. I just didn’t want to feel bad about myself. But I figured, I should do something interesting during this lockdown so I went ahead and published my first article. I didn’t know much about publications and how to get more people to read your articles. I even learned afterwards that I might get some pocket change for having readers.

I have written over 10 articles since the end of August. I found it to be a creative outlet. It has been a great outlet for all the things that are going around and around my head.

It has been a great experience getting views and claps. I even had one article with 10K+ views and people retweeting my articles. Honestly, I needed that.

2. I created a personal blogging website

I have always had a difficult time with understanding how websites are created. Domain names, hosting companies, WordPress,…. No idea how they are all linked and should be used. It seemed too complicated and I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on it. So, what did I do? The only thing that made sense: follow YouTube videos and learn how to create your own website. After two weekends of work, my personal blogging website was done! I couldn’t believe it. I even got it SEO optimized and had my wife’s website listed as one of the sponsors on the site.

3. Pinterest pins for my blog articles

Now that I had 10+ articles published on Medium and a personal blogging website running, I decided to learn about Pinterest. I knew Pinterest existed but I had no idea how it worked. So, I decided to plunge in and learn.

Again, I turned to YouTube for guidance. What is a Pin? It seems simple enough: create an image with some words on the topic of your article. The image is pinned to Pinterest and will link back to your blogging website article with the description of “My writing about _____” where you fill in the blank. That’s all there was to it, create a pin!

I created pins for my blog articles on Medium using Canva. I even learned to schedule pins. The idea was that I can drive traffic to my articles on Medium and my website.

I have no idea where this is leading to. I do not see myself as a blogger…. yet. I am not counting on making a living from the few dollars that you earn from Medium. But it’s been really fun doing all this stuff that I would have never done. Maybe this is the start of something interesting?

Please leave any suggestion of what else I should look into in the comment below.