The Experiment: Building Consistent Posting Habits
Posted: July 7, 2026 Filed under: Personal, smallbizai.au | Tags: ai, artificial-intelligence, smallbizai.au, openclaw, linkedin, X Leave a commentWhen I started SmallBizAI.au, I didn’t have a clear distribution strategy. I just started writing.
The AI citation thing was a happy accident. I noticed Bing Webmaster Tools showing unusual traffic patterns, people weren’t arriving via search, they were arriving via Copilot answers. The site was being cited in AI responses without me doing anything deliberate to make that happen. Once I spotted it, I started optimising for it. Structure, depth, specificity. It compounded fast. I’ve written about how that works in detail what gets cited, the traffic loop we didn’t plan for, and what we’ve learned after 500+ citations a day.
But organic search traffic was still thin. The Bing citation flywheel was working for reach, the tradie in Canberra asking Copilot about invoicing software, but it wasn’t building an audience in the traditional sense. No comments. No conversation. Just citations.
So ten days ago I decided to run an experiment. What happens if I actually show up on social, consistently, with the content I’m already publishing?
Not a strategy. An experiment. There’s a difference.
The mechanism
I didn’t want to do this manually. Manual means inconsistent, and inconsistent means you quit after a week.
So I built a system. A cron job runs twice a day,10:30am and 3:30pm,surfaces a post candidate, and sends it to me on Telegram as a suggestion. The suggestion includes the headline, the URL, and a ready-to-post hook for both LinkedIn and X.
I approve or skip. That’s my job in this system. If the post isn’t right for today, too old, wrong tone, I’ve already pushed it recently, I type /reject-am or /reject-pm and the system moves to the next candidate. Takes five seconds.
Everything I share gets logged. Timestamp, platform URLs, post title. The full history lives in a state file I can pull at any time. That’s how I’m writing this post, the data is right there.
It’s not automated publishing. I still read every suggestion. I still make the call. The cron does the legwork; I do the judgment.
What I shared
Ten days. 27 posts surfaced. Here’s what I actually pushed:
Mix of hot takes, Sunday Specials, and a few evergreen posts from deeper in the archive.
What I’ve noticed so far
LinkedIn beats X for engagement. Not close.
On X, I get impressions. Maybe a repost. On LinkedIn, I get people actually stopping to write something. Comments, replies, the occasional argument. That’s more valuable than reach numbers.
The contrarians are doing me a favour.
I shared a post about AI readiness on LinkedIn. A founder, commented that “AI readiness” is a meaningless consulting buzzword. He’s not wrong, it absolutely can be. That comment got more attention than the post itself.
My reply: for me it comes down to one test. Can you name three tasks you’d hand to AI tomorrow? If yes, you’re ready. If not, no amount of “readiness assessment” will help.
I didn’t start an argument. I drew a practical line. The contrarian came to me; I stayed on the ground.
That pattern is showing up consistently. Provocative posts attract strong opinions. Strong opinions are LinkedIn’s fuel. I’m not going to start writing bait, that’s not the site and it’s not me, but I’ve stopped softening the angles either.
Hot takes travel better than guides.
The AI Brain Fry post hit harder than most of the evergreen content I’ve shared. Same with Shadow AI and the Uber budget piece. Reactive, specific, timed to something happening right now. That’s what people forward.
Evergreen guides are the backbone of the Bing strategy. On social, they’re quiet.
Sunday Specials are surprisingly shareable.
The two-sides format works on LinkedIn. AI Slop and the AI Treadmill both got traction. I think it’s because they don’t take a clean position, they lay out both arguments and let the reader decide. People tag colleagues in those. “See, I told you it was complicated.”
And the numbers are moving. In the week before the experiment (20–26 Jun), my LinkedIn posts generated 2,499 impressions and 29 engagements. In the ten days since I started sharing consistently: 41,000 impressions and 597 engagements. Sixteen times the reach. Twenty times the engagement. The two biggest posts, the SavvyWise crowdfunding story (9,091 impressions) and the Big Four banks AI comparison (17,753 impressions), weren’t viral. They were specific, timely, and Australian. Sixty-one new followers in ten days, versus almost none the week before.
What I can’t tell you yet
Ten days isn’t enough to measure referral traffic. I’ll have GSC data in four weeks that’ll show whether LinkedIn and X are actually sending people to the site, or whether the social engagement is just social engagement, nice numbers that don’t convert to readers or subscribers.
My guess: some will convert. Not most. The Bing flywheel will remain the primary channel. But if social adds even 10–15% on top, it’s worth the ten minutes a day the system costs me.
At 30 days, I’ll report back with the actual numbers.
The real finding
The experiment isn’t really about social media performance. It’s about what happens when you build a system that removes the friction from a habit you’d otherwise skip.
I wouldn’t post consistently if I had to find the posts, write the hooks, and decide the timing manually every day. That’s four decisions before 8am. Most days I’d skip at least one of them.
The cron job removes three of those decisions. I just make the approval call. That’s the thing that’s actually interesting here. not the LinkedIn comments, not the impressions. The question of what you’ll actually do consistently when a system does most of the work for you.
That applies to your business too. Not just social media.
frankarr 