Comment by palidanx
Initially I sent out Mailchimp newsletters to my closest friends, but found the interface a bit clunky, so instead switched to Wordpress. What I do is write specifically for the audience of my friends, send them the newsletter, and post it on the Internet.
What I found kind of interesting, is when I would see some of my friends months later, they would cite something they found interesting from the blog. Occasionally, I peek at the metrics, and it is in the low single digits, but I'm okay with that as long as my friends have seen it.
My guess is with the inundation of shallow knowledge and posts people resonate with deeper writing.