Got another year working and learning on the side while keeping my day job. I will write an annual recap later but for now, I want to go back to the first project that I created, michaelshoe.com/.
I started this personal site aka blog in January 2025 (or maybe Feb. 2025, can’t be sure) as a learning project. Since then, I’ve written over 100 articles (107 at this point) in nearly 2 years. This project has two folds of meanings:
I was going through transitions in life and I wanted to use writing to clear my head
I wanted to get better at using tech
TL; DR
Learnings summary:
The biggest lesson: 10% of the product drives 90% of the results.
An even bigger lesson: you don’t know where results will come from beforehand; often they show up in the most surprising and unexpected place. For example, the biggest contributor to my site’s traffic is a series of solutions to Code in Place problems which I didn’t really expect too much from.
Search engine favors SOLUTION. If you want to leverage search as a discovery mechanism, create SOLUTIONS to peoples problems. This can mean in the most literal sense – like solutions to test problems!
Other than SOLUTIONS, people also want RESOURCES – like transcripts of stories. For example, if you have a voice transcribe AI company you might create thousands of transcripts to different types of stories to drive traffic.
A field such as finance is searched a lot and Google will try to serve as many relevant pages to a keyword as possible. However, this field is so competitive that your chance to rank high is very low.
Search engine is an intent-solution matching entity in nature. Looking from a different perspective, the relationship between the site showing up on a SERP and the user clicking it is very transactional. After solving the problem, the user will quickly forget who you are and may never come back. This is where other types of platforms/ channels such as social media come in if you want to cultivate a parasocial relationship.
Intro
Before I started the blog, things just appeared so difficult in my head, and I just couldn’t push myself to even thinking about creating a site of my own. After I started, things were definitely unfamiliar to me, but I managed to navigate the unknowns by Googling and watching a lot of Youtube tutorials.
Until now (Dec. 2025), michaelshoe.com/ has generated close to 109K impressions from Google Search and over 1400 clicks.
Aside from all the small learnings here and there, the biggest lesson from this project really comes down to this:
10% of the product drives 90% of the results.
The imbalance between my input and output is beyond me. And this is what I mean: a handful of articles drive the bulk of clicks to my blog. It’s not like anything I’ve done before where things are just – “linear” in nature.
84 of the 124 posts have 0 clicks.
In other words, 68% of my writing has never been read by anybody other than me. Well, even I don’t read them after the writing. Only 40 posts have generated traffic and most are extremely low (think low single digitals).
1 post is responsible for almost half of the site’s traffic.
The post (as well as five other posts) were solutions to coding problems from Code in Place – a free online coding course provided by Stanford University. I participated in Code in Place in 2024, and published these solutions on my personal blog.
This checkerboard karel solution gets a total of 8620 impressions from Google Search Result Pages, and around 8% of those impressions results into actual clicks to the post, or a total of 692 clicks.
In addition, it takes time for Google to trust you.
I wrote the Checkerboard Karel Solution (and other solutions) around May 2024 but it took a year until Code in Place 2025 for the posts to get traffic. This was when Code in Place was held again and probably many learners started to Google the solutions.
The top 2 posts is responsible for 70% of traffic, and the top 10 posts for 93%.
Outside of the top 10 posts, page traffic soon gets down to below 10. Posts 28 and beyond all have exactly ONE page visit each.
There are not only 1, but 5 ‘Code in Place’ solutions in the top 10 posts.
I have marked all Code in Place solutions in red and as you can see, 5 of the top 10 posts belong to this category and all top 4 are occupied by it.
Each of the top 4 posts ranks as the first for its main keyword. For example, my checkerboard karel solution post is currently ranking just below the Google search bar, and before the Youtube results. Here is its SERP in incognito mode:
My other series – the Financial Analysis – have huge impressions with close-to-nothing traffic
Which has over 25,000 impressions but because its average position is so far below, it never gets clicked, generating a grand total of 0 traffic.
I have written many posts in this series and seeing that none got read definitely doesn’t excite me. However it doesn’t really surprise me that much.
An unexpected surprise – my Matthew Dicks transcript series have some of the highest click through rate
I learned storytelling by reading Matthew Dicks’ book “Storyworthy” and got really fascinated by the subject. I went on to watch some of Matthew telling the stories on Youtube and then created transcripts of the stories for further studying.
Even though this series of posts don’t have lots of impressions – like the one post with the most impressions only has 345 ranking at 31st – the CTRs are all surprisingly high. 11 of the 20 highest CTR posts are from this storytelling series.
What to do with all the analysis
Moving forward, I think it is important to understand all the learnings but I shouldn’t revolve all my writing around it. Like only write about solutions or create resources for people to find. We humans do have the drive to create things and writing can be just purely therapeutic.
However, I also have sites that I want to promote via writing, and these learnings can be very useful. This way I won’t waste time writing things with low traffic potential.
Bank of America froze me out of my bank account a while ago due to some technicalities and now my account is in danger of being treated as abandoned property because it hadn’t been accessed for some time. Even though I have been calling their customer support consistently – which is outright useless and disrespectful most of the time – the problem persisted. Thanks to Reddit community r/BankofAmerica, I filed a report on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and within one day, I heard back from Bank of America via email and a phone call. I don’t know if the problem can eventually be resolved, but I do want to document the process of filing the report online on CFPB so more people can know and understand how to do it. In the meantime, will just keep my fingers crossed!
First, find the site – CFPB
CFPB is in charge of consumer financial protection (as its name suggests) and the first step is the locate the right website. You can Google CFPB or click the link here or use the link above to go to the sign up page directly. This is what the website looks like (and the “file a complaint” option is down when you scroll):
cfpb official site: you can see it’s official coz “An official website of the United States government”
Second, sign up
Then there is the sign up process which doesn’t require too much info and is very straightforward. Then you go to the file process which has 5 steps to follow. Do notice that the site doesn’t really have a “save” option so it is better to prepare in advance and file the complaint in one sitting.
Third, the actual filing steps
Step 1: what is this complaint about?
Then choose the product or service that best matches your complaint.
After that, choose what type of banking product.
Step 2: What type of problem are you having?
Choose the topic that best fits your complaint.
Choose which option best describes your problem.
Afterwards, choose actions you have already taken to make things happen (but obviously failed).
Step 3: What happened?
First, describe what happened, and CFPB will send your comments to the companies involved.
Then you suggest a fair solution to the issue.
Optionally, you can attach any document you think might help.
Step 4: What company is this complaint about?
Step 5: Your contact info and some other demographic related questions (optional)
Basic contact info. You don’t have to fill your demo info if you don’t want to since this is just helping CFPB better understand the people they are serving.
After submission, you will get to this page:
I don’t know why banks still function like this even when so much technology exists (and they still declare they care about tech advancement in their org!). Life is hard enough, and these large corporations are making it harder for the everyday people. Hope everybody can get out of the issues they are facing! And don’t loose faith! (follow me on X if you want for any reason @themichaelshoe.)
Ever wonder how your favorite email newsletter sends you emails from a personal email addresses such as pat@starterstory.com instead of something like noreply@starterstory.com? With Ghost you can manage your email configuration easily. However, there could be some complications.
“noreply”: The default email configuration in Ghost
If you belong to the not-so-technical camp but still desire to write online, Ghost’s hosting service could save you some trouble. When you set things up right, you will be able to write a post and publish it on the site and send it as an email newsletter to your subscribers at the same time.
This is my first newsletter sent to myself with Ghost. The email was sent from noreply@michaelshoe.com via m.ghost.io. The only thing I did before this was linking my own domain with Ghost, and magically, I am capable of sending out email newsletters in bulk to my subscribers (though I still don’t know the mechanism behind)!
I want to get “personal” with my dear followers.
To be specific, my goal is to accomplish these two things:
Enable readers to reply to the sending domain (i.e. replying to noreply@michaelshoe.com) and have a direct one-on-one email communication with me (i.e. hit reply, write an email to me directly)
Use a custom email sending domain to send out newsletters, i.e. replace noreply@michaelshoe.com with something like hi@michaelshoe.com
The process, as it turned out, was easier said than done.
Enabling readers to reply to the sending domain
Accomplishing #1 is my priority, since it is important to talk to my dear subscribers directly in my initial phase, an embodiment of “doing the things that don’t scale” mantra. I tried to reply to noreply@michaelshoe.com, and then checked my personal email – the one I used to sign up to Ghost – the email was nowhere to be found.
I then went to my domain registrar, Porkbun, to look for some clue. Porkbun actually provides free email forwarding up to 20 for free if you purchased a domain with them, and I swiftly set it up to have emails sent to noreply@michaelshoe.com delivered to my personal email. However, even though I can receive emails sent to noreply@michaelshoe.com, I can only reply via my personal email address. Additionally, I disliked “noreply” as it presents a robotic feeling, and it literally tells people NOT TO REPLY. So I kept on looking for a better solution.
Just type in “noreply” in the first box and type in your own email address in the second
Use a custom email sending domain to send out email newsletters
To accomplish #2, I first activated an email account with my domain registrar, Porkbun, by leveraging their free three-month email domain service. Now I have my own custom email domain, hi@michaelshoe.com, with their email host. I also configured DMARC, an additional security measure that uses SPF and DKIM to help prevent email spoofing, even though I have absolutely no idea what it means (more on this later). After I’ve acquired my own email domain, I also set it up so that I can send and receive emails from hi@michaelshoe.com in my Gmail mailbox. If you are also using Porkbun, you can read “How to Set Up an Email Address in Gmail” here.
If you are using Ghost (Pro) to send email newsletters, there are two places where you need to make further configurations if you want to use your custom email sending domain. The first place is your membership portal, and the second place is your newsletter.
Membership portal
Your membership portal (Membership -> Portal settings) is the place to:
Customize the look & feel of your signup button and your signup modal
Change the support email address, i.e. the email address that sends the welcome email to the first-time subscriber
Membership -> Portal settings -> Account page
Newsletter
“Newsletters” is the place to:
Customize the design of your newsletter, i.e. how it arrives in your subscribers’ mailbox
Set up basic newsletter info, i.e. name, basic descriptions, and sender email address and reply-to email address
Solving one problem created an even bigger one
I changed all email addresses to my own hi@michaelshoe.com, both for the Membership Portal and for the Newsletter, and then gave it a shot. Something horrible happened afterwards: all my email newsletters and signup welcome emails went straight into spam; when I dug them out of the graveyard, they were covered with a warning sign like this:
What made this an even bigger problem was that regardless of how I tried to tell Gmail that this wasn’t spam, Gmail was adamant about its original opinion. I clicked on the “Looks safe” button, and marked it as no spam, and tried sending again. Again the letter ended up in the spam.
At this point, I’ve exhausted all my skills and methods, so I resorted to the Ghost support team for help. They replied within a few hours and gave me a clearcut solution – disable DMARC in my email hosting. It worked.
As it turned out, Ghost (Pro) offers custom sending domains, but this feature is only supported on the Creator Plan or higher on Ghost (Pro). As a humble Starter Plan user, I don’t have the luxury to this feature.
I’ve figured out how email configuration works in Ghost, but decided it’s not worth it to change.
At this point, I was able to accomplish both goals, i.e.:
Enable readers to reply to the sending domain (i.e. replying to hi@michaelshoe.com) and have a direct one-on-one email communication with me
Use a custom email sending domain to send out newsletters (hi@michaelshoe.com, instead of the default “noreply”)
However, I’ve decided to revert back to Ghost’s default sender addresses. I’m not technical enough to figure out the problems, and it’s just not worth it to risk not delivering the newsletters into every subscriber’s mailbox. It doesn’t matter how personal-sounding your name is if all your emails are ending up in the readers’ spam. Ghost has done a great job to ensure deliverability and it’s just too risky for me to change that. Plus DMARC sounds too important to be turned off.
I still want to have that personal connection with my subscribers, and my solution is simply to add my hi@michaelshoe.com email at the bottom of each newsletter so people can just click and start writing to me.
P.S. the question that finally got answered: who created the “noreply” email domain and why I can only send, but not receive, emails from it?
This question finally got answered by the Ghost support team (kudos to them!).
Sharing my learnings about the core skills on how to run life like a company in the Me Inc. Newsletter. Topics covered: Copywriting, Finance, Technology, and Productivity. Read my why here or join directly👇. No spams. Ever. – Michael
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