I had no real aim when I first started blogging three years ago.
I’d sat on my personal domain name for a few years and knew it was time to finally do something with it. I was living in a shoebox apartment in Tokyo at the time, trying to make it as a fiction writer. I was productive as hell. All I wanted to do was write. And when I’d burn out from writing fiction during the day, my mind was still whirring and I’d end up writing how-to guides and articles around whatever was on my mind.
The blogging world was a different landscape back then.
It was easier to get people reading your shit.
You could post a few ill-thought-out responses on Quora and rake in millions of views that would spill over to your blog. Today people are stuck on Twitter and Tik Tok and much harder to get onto a blog.
And blog quality has declined. There used to be tons of nuanced and interesting thought-pieces across different niches. Blogging was highly individualised, personalised, exciting, a way to connect, and fun. Now it’s regurgitation, plagiarism, and hawking shit.
I look at my blog today and think about the ways I could have capitalised during the end of the Golden Era of blogging.
Here are some things I’ve learnt in the amateur trenches of blogging.
Get the newsletter going immediately
One year into blogging, I hit my peak traffic volume. Traffic volume today is 25% of what it was during the peak. And whilst I spent years implementing and crafting newsletter campaigns for other people, it was only relatively recently that I got my own personal newsletter underway.
It’s never too late to start, but I missed a peak. And lost out on retaining readers.
Even if people love your content, it can be hard to remember names or titles of specific posts. So people who would have been fans for years slip through the cracks.
I personally subscribe to newsletters, blogs, and YouTube channels because I don’t want to lose great content and forget great creators forever.
Don’t rationalise “not being big enough” in order to delay starting a newsletter. A benefit to not having a huge audience and starting one is that it buys you time to experiment and make mistakes. Newsletters, like any product or service, adapt to the market.
It also pays to go pro from the start. I recommend using Convertkit for your newsletter.
Focus on reducing site-loading time
People only see the front-end of a blog. Tell someone you’re a writer, and they think all you do is write.
If all I had to do was write, I’d have 100x the amount of content out there. Writing is maybe 40% of the gig. It would be more like 20% if I did any social media (I don’t).
There’s a lot of backend stuff. It’s boring but essential, especially if you want eyeballs on your work.
SEO isn’t just about writing great content that people want to share. Google and other search engines take a lot of factors into account when they decide what position to rank your blog. One key factor is site loading speed.
I was severely lagging the loading speed of my site and negatively affecting my rankings because there were certain practices I didn’t even know I should have been doing.
Top tip for you if you’re starting a blog:
Don’t just upload photos direct to your website. Photos are great for SEO and delivering compelling content, and you want to have at least 2-5 unique photos preferably taken by you per blog post. But you must compress them before uploading!
Go to Tinypng and run your photos through there before uploading them to your blog. You’ll often reduce the weight by up to 90%, which will result in a speedier, more search-engine-friendly blog.
Don’t take your foot off the pedal – momentum!
Like I said, my blog traffic tanked and didn’t recover it’s volume.
I got complacent at the peak. Life got in the way and I rationalised taking long stretches of time away from the blog.
I believe there were a few different wider sociological issues at the core of the traffic decline. I won’t list them all, but the crux of the issue is people stopped caring about blogs around that time. But I certainly heralded in the bleed-out by my behaviour.
If people like your stuff, there’s only so long that they’ll wait for new stuff before they forget about you and stop visiting your site.
It’s also harder to get back into the groove once you’ve had a long lay-off. If you hit flow state, don’t stop for any reason. Keep it going and double down.
Affiliate income is rarely a viable long-term business solution.
Affiliate based enterprises violate a serious commandment of business: Control!
Blogs can make good businesses, but they are inherently volatile.
Yes, you can fill a need, a gap in the market, with your blog. Yes, you can scale the enterprise as much as you like – your audience is global. But the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, so any old chump can enter the game, which causes a lot of noise. And you don’t control your source of income (read The Millionaire Fastlane to get a solid grasp on this idea).
You need to be smart and have multiple streams of income, but a huge stream can be cut off overnight for any reason when you’re an affiliate. The company you partner with could go bankrupt, they could decide they don’t need affiliates any more, their product could be smeared in the media – anything could happen, and you can’t control it because it’s not your product or business! You’re a middle man. The world needs middle men, and you can offer a valuable service as a middle man, but the man in the middle is almost always the first to get cut when times get rough.
Don’t believe the hype of internet marketers who want to sell you on “easy” affiliate marketing courses. There aren’t many people who find volatile and variable pay-checks easy to live with.
Connect with others, add value, and promote others.
My most popular posts aren’t always the ones I put loads of time, thought, care, and effort into.
Popular posts, even hastily written and barely polished, often come off the back of connecting with and promoting other people.
Like this post I wrote about how to solve your problems by viewing art. This post was a direct response to an article written by one of my favourite blogs, The Wall Street Playboys. They saw the article and retweeted it because it promoted them and added onto a conversation they started. I benefitted from their audience checking the article out and I was incredibly grateful for the traffic. I buy all of their books, share their articles, and send people their way to continue to show my gratitude.
Back in the heyday of blogging, writers used to create those sorts of posts all the time. Direct responses to other blog posts, expanding upon and adding to someone else’s conversation. It was a friendlier time where everyone gave each other credit and wanted to bring each other up. Now people hate blogs because it’s just a bunch of bandits stealing from each other.
Write about real people you meet and want to meet.
Another one of my top popular articles was this one about my friend Misha.
Write about your friends!
The only way we can save blogging and return to the glorious Golden Age is if we embrace what is unique about us. That means tell your story and populate it with the characters in your life.
Write memoir!
Instead of regurgitating a top ten list from someone who who yanked their top ten list off wikipedia, go niche. The benefit of writing about what only you can write about is no one can rip you off.
No one else in the blogosphere had the exact same conversations with Misha as I did. So no one can write the article I wrote.
Another benefit of writing about people you meet is it’s a charming way to give back and show appreciation.
You should also write about people you’d like to meet. I’ve written about Wim Hof, Jordan Peterson, Joanna Penn, Scott Adams, and many more:
I’m on the radar of many A-list names simply because I’ve written favourably about them. I’ve written about Martin Scorsese, James Patterson, and Samuel L. Jackson, to name a few. Whenever the day comes when I want to ask one of these great people to be a guest on my podcast, the chance of getting a yes will be higher if they already recognise you and know you’re a fan of their work (okay, might be shooting a little too high with those names, but you never know).
Have a regular posting schedule.
Treat your blog like a hobby and it will pay you like a hobby. And hobbies don’t usually end up paying anything, instead you pay to feed them. That might work for a lot of people. The personal diary format is a fun locale in the blogging world.
But it wasn’t enough for me simply to write for the sake of writing. I had to get something back to feel vilified, as a measure of the value I was putting out, a way to keep score and take stock of my skills. Monetary reward isn’t a measure of how Proust-like you are. It’s a more a measure of your marketing acumen, how persuasive you are, and ability to tap into trends and global conversations.
The first way to treat your blog like professional, and be rewarded as one, is to post consistently. Notice I don’t say “write consistently.” You should be writing every day (several hours) because you love it and for the pure joy of it. You don’t need to publish everything you write, but you do need to hit the “publish” button frequently.
Deadlines and schedules sharpen your sword.
The more frequently you publish, whilst retaining quality, the better. If you can publish a post a week without sacrificing quality, do it. Any less than a week is almost not worth it – especially at the beginning. Three times a week is better. Once a day even better. And people like Seth Godin would argue three times a day even better.
Always be A/B testing.
A/B testing means you try two different options with your writing and blogging.
For example, you send out an email newsletter and half of your list has one subject line, the other half has a different subject line. You then track and analyse the data. Why did one headline perform better with higher open rates than the other? Sometimes it’s the headline you didn’t expect to be the more popular one.
Or maybe you spend a month using one colour scheme for your blog, and then the following month you try out another colour scheme. Track conversions, how long someone stays on your page, and tweak from there.
A/B testing gives you data. Data gives you insight. And insight = improvements.
You’re never just a writer when you run a blog. You’re a bit of a scientist and psychologist too. And that’s one of the many joys of getting into the blogging game and taking it seriously.
Those are just a few things I wish I had known when I first started blogging.
If there’s any interest, I’ll do a part two.
And feel free to put your questions to me if you’re interested in starting a blog too.