TL;DR: After 20 years of blogging, I’ve learned that not everything belongs in the same place. Your blog, social media, private communities, local notes, and AI conversations each serve a different purpose. The key is matching the content to the right layer of openness.
I’ve been publishing online since 2006. What started as a personal blog where I documented my life kept spinning off other things over time. The first was a small web development agency, built on the back of the projects that came in after I started writing about the work. Then WP Mayor, when the WordPress writing became its own site. More recently, the Good Life Collective, which grew out of the lifestyle posts and the real-life meetups, lunches, and coffees with readers.
Along the way I made most of the mistakes you can make with publishing online. I published personal notes as blog posts. I let lists go stale. I avoided social media entirely because I was afraid of losing ownership of my content.
Recently I sat down and rethought the whole thing. This is what I came up with.
The Problem With Putting Everything in One Place
My original dream for my blog was to create a kind of manual for life that my kids could read one day. Investing lessons, health habits, travel tips, recipes, thoughts on how to live well. Over time, the blog became something else. Strangers came for the P2P lending reviews and crypto guides. The personal stuff got buried.
Worse, I had hundreds of short posts that were really personal notes masquerading as articles. A list of my favourite podcasts. A 200-word post about how to copy a garage remote. A coffee recipe. These were useful to me as reference material, but they weren’t genuinely useful to anyone searching the web. In the age of AI search, where tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity synthesize answers from authoritative sources, thin content doesn’t just underperform. It actively hurts your site.
The fix wasn’t to stop sharing. It was to share the right things in the right places.
The Layers of Your Online Identity
I now think about publishing in layers, each with a different audience, a different level of openness, and a different purpose.
Layer 1: Your Blog (The Permanent Archive)
Your blog is the only platform you truly own. No algorithm changes, no account suspensions, no platform shutdowns. It’s your canonical source of truth.
But that means it should contain your best work, not everything. I now only publish articles on my blog that meet a simple test: would I send this to a stranger who asked me about this topic? If the answer is yes, it belongs on the blog. If it’s a personal reference or a half-formed thought, it doesn’t.
The blog’s job is depth. Long, experience-based articles that AI can’t generate from generic sources. Your real investing results over years. Your actual experience living abroad. The kind of content where your personal data and perspective is the value, not information that’s freely available elsewhere.
Layer 2: Newsletter (Direct to Inbox)
A newsletter is a blog post delivered to people who actually asked for it. The audience has chosen to hear from you, which raises the bar for what’s worth sending.
I don’t have one yet but I’ve been thinking about starting. What’s kept me off so far is the platform choice. Substack pushes its own app and social features more aggressively than I’d like, and the platform ends up looking out for itself over its writers. Medium puts a login wall and a paywall in front of readers for pieces that should just be a quick read.
The two options I’m considering are beehiiv, which has a solid reputation for deliverability and treats writers as customers rather than inventory, or self-hosting alongside my WordPress blog with something like MailPoet or Ghost. The self-hosted route matches the blog’s ownership argument. The hosted option trades that for better deliverability without me having to manage sender reputation myself.
Haven’t picked yet. Ownership usually wins for things I want to last, but running your own mail infrastructure has real operational overhead.
Layer 3: LinkedIn (Professional You)
LinkedIn is where you know exactly who’s reading your content. You can see their faces, their job titles, their companies. That makes it the most personal of the public platforms, paradoxically. You’re not shouting into a void; you’re talking to people you’ve chosen to connect with.
The content that works here is professional but personal. Not corporate jargon, not motivational quotes. Real opinions, real experiences, real lessons. I write about investing, building businesses, AI, and sometimes padel on LinkedIn. The key is: anything I post there, I’d be comfortable with a business partner, a client, or a journalist reading. It’s personal without being vulnerable.
LinkedIn is distribution, not the destination. Write the deep article on your blog, then extract the sharpest insight for a LinkedIn post that links back.
Layer 4: X (The Megaphone)
X is reach. A good post can hit thousands of people you’ve never met and will never meet again. The viral mechanics reward bold opinions and sharp takes. That’s both its power and its danger.
The people reading your content on X are mostly strangers. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and they have zero context for your words. Something you write as a casual observation can be screenshot-quoted five years later, stripped of all context, to damage you. I’ve seen it happen to others and I’ve been cautious as a result.
My approach on X: it’s for ideas, not confessions. Share insights, link to your deeper work, engage with interesting people. But keep your guard up. The asymmetry between effort to post and potential for misinterpretation is enormous.
Layer 5: YouTube (The Next Frontier)
I’ve been thinking a lot about YouTube. It’s the platform with the longest content shelf life. A well-made video can generate views for years, much like a good blog post. Unlike social media posts that vanish in 48 hours, YouTube content compounds.
The barrier is higher (filming, editing, being on camera) but the payoff is proportionally larger. And for certain topics, like padel technique, gear reviews, or city guides, video is simply the better medium. I haven’t committed to it yet, but it’s where I see myself going next.
Layer 6: Stories (The Ephemeral Share)
Instagram and Facebook stories sit in a middle ground that’s different from everything else on this list. They’re public but not permanent. They reach people you know and people you don’t. Because they vanish after 24 hours, you can post things you’d never put on a permanent feed.
I was skeptical of stories for years and mostly ignored them. I’ve changed my mind. They work well for the kind of content that doesn’t belong on a blog or a LinkedIn post but is still worth sharing: what I’m up to on a weekend, a place I’d recommend, a trip with the family.
You can share how you live without building a searchable public archive of your photos, meals, and locations. If you care about privacy or the long-term footprint of social media, stories let you share with the people who actually want to know, and then move on.
I use Instagram stories occasionally when something might be of genuine interest to people who share my interests, or when family and friends would want to see what I’m up to.
Layer 7: A Private Community (The Real You)
One of the reasons I built the Good Life Collective was to have a space where I could be completely myself. On public platforms, every post is a permanent record that can be taken out of context. In a private community, you can share unfiltered opinions, admit you’re having a bad day, or say something provocative without worrying about it being weaponised later.
This isn’t about hiding. It’s about having the right audience for the right level of openness. My GLC members know me, they have context for what I say, and the discussions that happen there are richer because of that safety.
If you don’t have a community, group chats with close friends serve the same purpose. The point is: not everything you think needs to be broadcast to the world.
Layer 8: Private Notes (Your Second Brain)
For years, I published personal reference material on my blog because it was the only thing I had access to everywhere. A recipe, a list of gear I liked, notes from a tennis lesson. I thought: if it’s on my website, I can always look it up.
That made sense in 2010. It doesn’t make sense in 2026. Tools like Obsidian, Apple Notes, or even Evernote sync across all your devices instantly. I recently moved dozens of posts from my blog to Obsidian and the blog is better for it. Those posts were useful to me but not to anyone else.
Private notes are for things you want to find later. Blog posts are for things you want others to find. The overlap between those two is smaller than you think.
Layer 9: Your Journal (The Private Record)
This is the most private layer, and the one most people skip. A journal isn’t for anyone else to read: not future readers, not an AI, not even a close friend. It’s just for you.
I’ve used Day One since around 2012. Fourteen years of entries adds up to a record you can’t get from anywhere else. You see patterns you couldn’t see at the time. You remember details that would otherwise have faded. You notice who you’ve been becoming.
The reason a journal works is privacy. You can write things down that you’d never publish. That’s exactly what makes old entries worth reading years later.
If you don’t already journal, the choice of app matters less than starting. Day One has served me well. Obsidian or a plain text file would work just as well. The point is having somewhere you can write without an audience.
Layer 10: AI Conversations (The New Layer)
This is the layer nobody talks about yet. A significant amount of my thinking, planning, and even writing now happens inside conversations with AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT. These conversations generate insights, decisions, and reflections that never get published anywhere. They exist in chat memories and conversation histories.
In a sense, AI conversations have become another form of personal content storage. The reflection I’m having right now about my publishing strategy? It started as a conversation with Claude while reorganising my blog. The AI remembered context from earlier in our session, connected dots between different topics, and helped me articulate things I’d been feeling but hadn’t put into words.
Those conversations are also fragile. Chat history can be truncated, platforms change how memory works, and you often don’t realise the value of a session until long after it ended. Andrej Karpathy has written about persisting AI memory as markdown files you own rather than relying on the platform’s history. Anything you want to keep lives in your own files, not in someone else’s database.
My version of this is simple. When I finish a meaningful conversation with Claude or ChatGPT, I ask the AI itself to write a short summary of what we covered and what I took away. I review it, adjust anything that’s off, and file it in Obsidian under the right category. A transient chat becomes a note I can actually find later. The AI might remember our last session next week, or it might not. The summary in Obsidian will be there either way.
This layer is new and its permanence is uncertain. But some of your best thinking might now live in places that aren’t your blog, your notes app, or your social feed. Unless you deliberately move it there.
Choosing Your Platforms
You don’t need to be on every platform. In fact, you probably shouldn’t be. Here’s how I think about the decision:
- What’s your goal? Reach (X), professional network (LinkedIn), direct audience (newsletter), long-form video (YouTube), casual updates (stories), community (private group), personal archive (notes), self-record (journal).
- Who’s your audience? Strangers (X, YouTube), professional contacts (LinkedIn), active subscribers (newsletter), friends and acquaintances (stories), trusted circle (private community), yourself (journal, notes, AI).
- What’s the risk? Public and permanent (blog, newsletter, X, LinkedIn, YouTube), semi-public but ephemeral (stories), private (journal, community, notes, AI).
I personally use my blog, LinkedIn, X (sparingly), Instagram stories occasionally, and the GLC. I stopped posting to the permanent Facebook and Instagram feeds years ago but kept stories active for the reasons in Layer 6. Your mix will be different based on your goals and comfort level.
The One Rule That Ties It All Together
Write the full version once, on a platform you own. Then adapt it for everywhere else.
A 2,000-word blog post becomes a 200-word LinkedIn post with a link. That becomes a tweet thread. Maybe a YouTube video. Maybe a newsletter edition. The blog post is the canonical source; everything else is distribution. If any platform disappears tomorrow, you haven’t lost anything.
FAQ
Should I still have a personal blog in 2026?
Yes, but only if you’re willing to maintain it. A blog with 50 deep, well-maintained articles is more valuable than one with 500 stale posts. Your blog is the one platform you own and control. Use it as your permanent archive, not your daily notebook.
Is it worth posting on LinkedIn if I don’t have a big following?
LinkedIn’s organic reach is still strong compared to other platforms. A well-written post from an account with 500 connections can reach thousands through likes and comments. The audience quality is also higher because you can see exactly who’s engaging with your content.
What about Substack or Medium for a newsletter?
Both are convenient starting points but both create friction you don’t need. Substack’s app-first push and Medium’s paywall and login walls both get in the way of what should be a simple read. If you’re starting a newsletter, beehiiv or self-hosting with something like MailPoet or Ghost are worth looking at before defaulting to either of those.
How do I decide if something is a blog post or a private note?
Ask yourself: would I send this to a stranger who asked me about this topic? If yes, it’s a blog post. If it’s mainly useful to you as a reference, keep it in your notes app. The overlap is smaller than you think.
What about AI conversations as content?
AI conversations are becoming a legitimate layer of personal content creation. Reflections, decisions, and insights generated in conversations with AI tools are real intellectual output. Consider periodically reviewing your AI chat history and extracting anything worth preserving into your notes or blog.
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