Content Finds a Way: Blog Migrations and Failures of Digital Evolution
Lessons learned from being so preoccupied with whether or not I could, I didn't stop to think if I should.
You may not know this about me, but I’m a collector.
From the flagship ryanrcampbell.com to the lesser-known (but fun!) realfakebirds.app, I’ve accumulated quite the cache of dot-coms, dot-apps, and dot-nets over the years, and oh-so-many of them have endured migrations that built them up, spun them off, or reconsolidated them over time.
The catch? I didn’t become a blog shepherd by design.
To tell the tale of how this collection came to be—and the harrowing migrations that led to its advent—we’ll have to go back in time. Way back in time.
As we work our way from the distant past and toward the present, we’ll expound on the lessons learned from these migrations, domain name accumulations, and brand extinction events known heretofore only to the fossilized remains beneath our feet.
Domain In the Membrane: a Geologic History of Accumulation, Evolution, and Extinction
Let’s begin, then, with a timeline separated into epochs and eras. A tour of eras, one could call it.
Oh, and note that the below only accounts for a subset of blog migrations and domain names acquired across millennia.
Yeah, I have a problem.
The Late Triassic
A Brief History of the Epoch
Dinosaurs roam the earth. I begin blogging at rrcampbellwrites.blogspot.com, which, after purchasing the domain from easyDNS, eventually becomes rrcampbellwrites.com.
Highlights of the Time
After a great deal of deliberation and consternation, I realized the only way I was likely to fulfill my dream of becoming a published author was—what a revelation—to start writing.
In pursuit of this goal, I attended a seminar about how the publishing industry works, and one of my takeaways from it was that a solid manuscript alone would not be enough to catch the attention of a literary agent and sell one’s book to a publisher. Platform! You need a platform, they told me, so I built a platform.
After blogging into the abyss for some time, I at least had the wherewithal to get myself a domain name. I told myself this was to make my blog look more official—and it did!—but it had the secondary consequence of providing the makings of a brand around which content could be organized.
Much like how the dinosaurs didn’t know an asteroid would eventually wipe them from the face of the earth, I didn’t know at the time that establishing this brand—one that emphasized the craft of writing fiction—would improve SEO and provide the foundation for offshoots of my writing career down the road.
Sometimes, everything comes up Melanosaurus!
Where Evolution Went Wrong
I’ll say there were a few blog posts from this epoch that survived in some form or fashion—a couple would even become some of my most popular of all time after a great deal of re-work—but the content otherwise failed to connect with a significant audience. Why? Because it was mostly full of personal updates about word counts for manuscripts that would never see the light of day.
Thought I had attempted to embrace the conventional wisdom of “build a platform,” I had done so without ever asking who I wanted to reach and creating content that audience would find engaging.
The consequences of this misstep way back in the Late Triassic would echo throughout eras to delightful and devastating effect.
Lessons Learned
Trust (some) conventional wisdom
Build a brand
Focus on content relevant to one’s audience
The Early Jurassic
A Brief History of the Epoch
More (but different!) dinosaurs emerge. They decide Blogger is no longer fashionable, and I agree. Long live WordPress! rrcampbellwrites.com redirects to a brand new WordPress site.
Why This Worked
Even homo habilis would have recognized moving from Blogger to WordPress as the right choice at the time. The problem? Homo habilis wouldn’t exist for a few hundred million more years, which left it to me to make this choice on my own.
By pivoting to WordPress—a platform that offered the chance to make my home on the web something more than a blog—I kept my options open for the future. Admittedly, I was at the time still years from seeing my goal of becoming a published author come to fruition, but migrating my content to WordPress before I truly needed to made it much easier to create unique hubs in a central location for my books, editing services, and other extensions of my platform.
Like Blogger, WordPress was free to get started with, and though I ended up paying for premium versions of the latter once I added the Writescast Network and an online shop to the WordPress site, the initial choice to move came with very little overhead and a lot of upside.
At this time, too, I really leaned into creating content that would resonate with other writers. By posting fewer personal updates—or at least by drowning them out with writing-related content informed by my relentless reading about the craft of writing fiction—I was able to find and engage with a community of similarly dedicated writers.
In sum, unlike the choice our single-celled ancestors made to squirm out of the primordial soup, this migration remains a good move to this day.
Lessons Learned
Keep options open
Build for the future
The Middle Jurassic
A Brief History of the Epoch
In great news for Atlantis and terrible news for the Titanic, the Atlantic Ocean forms. More importantly, (millions of) years of blogging and working on my books leads to a few book deals.
Somewhere I pick up on the (bad) advice that every book should have its own website. I purchase and create new sites on WordPress for domains like empathyseries.com.
I stand up a separate website for the Writescast Network at writescast.net.
Highlights
In the same way evolving hollow bones did wonders for the avian dinosaurs and their descendants, landing a few publishing contracts in this epoch did wonders for me and my career. It would be poor form to suggest, however, that blog migrations and amassing domain names on their own put me in a position to sign on the dotted line, so to speak.
None of which is to undercut the value of years of dedication to blogging regularly, engaging with a community, and focusing on my work. If I hadn’t been putting in that time, I surely wouldn’t or couldn’t have learned all the lessons I’d need to learn—or met the people I’d need to meet—to position myself and my manuscripts for the attention and trust of industry professionals.
Spinning off the Writescast Network to its own home online was also the right move for the time; by establishing it as an entity in its own right—rather than as an extension of me, the host, back when it was the R.R. Campbell Writescast—I further embraced the vision I had for it as a community-focused enterprise.
Lowlights
Goodness, did lowlights abound during the Middle Jurassic. By creating unique websites for all of my titles, I intended to create content that would resonate with the diverse audiences those books aimed to capture.
The spirit of that idea was righteous. In fact, one could argue this was the correct approach and that it was the timing of this pursuit that led me astray. In other words, by blogging about the topics, themes, and research that guided my manuscripts’ paths only after they were slated for publication, I’d left myself with too little runway to cultivate an audience for the novels via blog.
Had my main blog instead targeted readers specifically interested in the genres of my books instead of other writers with an interest in sharpening their craft, I’d have had no need to maintain multiple websites and assume all of the overhead that comes with keeping them online.
Lessons Learned
Unlock brand synergy wherever possible
Avoid liquidating your brand by doing a little of this here, a little of that there
Know your target audience; engage them early
The Late Jurassic
Pangaea breaks in two. The now-separated supercontinents tell the oceans that the split was amicable. The oceans know better.
Who the heck is R.R. Campbell, anyway? Long live Ryan R. Campbell! I purchase the domain ryanrcampbell.com from WordPress and have it become the default domain for what was once rrcampbellwrites.com.
I decide to self-publish a couple of books and stand up my own imprint to do so. Enter cedarbrookbooks.com! Nothing lives there. It just redirects to ryanrcampbell.com and does so to this day.
Why This Was Wise
Just as Pangaea was cleaving itself in twain, I was bringing all of me back together. By pivoting away from a pen name and embracing myself more fully—even if only in a seemingly superficial, digital capacity—I created a permission structure to be all of me.
If ever there were a healthy way to take on a crisis of identity, this was it, or at least it felt like it at the time.
Separation had been one of the issues I faced in the Middle Jurassic, if you recall: I had attempted to keep separate the parts of me that wrote for disparate audiences, and all I received in return for my dedication to separation were ballooning bills for an increasing collection of domain names.
One might argue I was falling into the trap of bygone epochs by creating a website for Cedarbrook Books, but remember this site simply redirects to my primary hub online. It’s not domain- or cybersquatting, per se, but rather a protectionist, strategic choice.
Where This Came Up Short
It was—is—contrarian of me to pursue this path. One of the lessons learned from the Late Triassic was to trust the conventional wisdom, but there I was, rejecting the notion of emphasizing highly targeted content for a highly targeted audience.
Or so it seemed on the surface.
I wouldn’t recognize this until years later, but at the time, I was laying the foundational philosophy that would lead me to R: On Everything, which asserts I can’t be the only person whose interests are far more diverse than any single-topic blog could ever aspire to be.
In other words, I’m not targeting everyone, I’m targeting—without liquidating my brand—everyone who’s up for a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
Polymaths, essentially.
Lessons Learned
Be yourself; no one will do it for you
A separation of concerns can work if done strategically
A Stop Along the Way
This is not the end for our timeline, nor for our lessons learned. We still have four epochs to traverse, in fact, though we’ll save them for another time, along with a final analysis of all the lessons learned since our little planet came to be.
Have you ever migrated content from one place to another? What lessons did you learn before, during, or after undertaking this effort for yourself? Be sure to tell me in the comments.
And don’t forget to subscribe to be updated when the second installment in this series becomes available.
Wow! Quite a history and sounds like lots of digital remains are still floating in cyberspace. The only thing I have that’s largely abandoned is a Facebook author page that I haven’t updated in quite a while. My focus is on my Substack newsletter and at some point in the next year I’ll pay a professional to create an author webpage for me. I’ll need that in place before I launch a book.
I enjoyed your old podcast and was bummed when you quit doing it. It was one of the few I had the patience to listen to. Now I’ll continue to look for you on Substack and won’t worry about where the rest of your digital remains hang out.
Keep writing and putting yourself out there. You still have fans.