Blogging Journey: From 0 to $1k/day

[dbx286]

I just started taking my blog seriously after killing my e-pharma biz. It was making me good enough for the effort I was putting in, but it simply does not fit well with my long term goals.

Target audience:
Anybody who is looking to improve themselves. Mostly focused on entrepreneurs, brain hacking & other similar life hacks.

The Plan:

• Push minimum one good quality post every day.
• Will do it for a whole year before worrying about results.
• Do a little bit of link building + social media marketing every now and then, but primary task will always be creating more and more quality content for the first 3-4 months.

Monetization:
Adsense + Affiliate Marketing + Email marketing ( will also build email list from the blog)

Day#1 Blog post: "The Art of Not Giving a F*ck" published.
PS. You can check it out at BrainHacker | Unleash The Jedi Mind if you are interested

 

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[jpanarra]

Anybody who is looking to improve themselves. Mostly focused on entrepreneurs, brain hacking & other similar life hacks.

I see you're writing about this topic and targeting this audience, but what have you succeeded at that makes you credible enough for someone to take your word and follow your blog?

 

[Greg R]

In case you need motivation.
GOLD - Blogging for Profit (With Legendary GOLD Follow Up Posts)

I will keep my de-motivational reservations about blogging to myself. And will offer one bit of advice. Do your home work and ask yourself a lot of questions.

How many blogs are like mine in this niche?
What are annual revenues from these blogs in this niche?
How many blogs represent the top 10 or 20% of revenue in this niche?
What is the total market cap of my niche?
How often do blogs in this niche sell, and how much do they sell for?
How many blogs fail in this niche per year?
How long will it take me to rank for keywords in my niche?
What makes people subscribe in my niche?
How many page view will I need to make $1 with Adsense or affiliate marketing.
Does Adsense or affiliate even marketing make sense?
Do I even like to write? If so, how much do I like to write?
If I fail, what skills will I have learned?
Will I be happy failing knowing that these skills can be applied to other ventures that I may pursue?

You need to be asking yourself many many many questions.

Only when you have successfully answered every single question you could possibly ask yourself, and you are satisfied with the sum total of the answers, should you start a blog.

Pretend as if you were buying a blog instead of starting one. All of that same due diligence needs to be done first. That is where I failed, but now I know better. Now I know.

Good luck.

 

[Mysterious]

Some months ago I thought about the same thing.Starting blog is easy but making money is the hardest part, right?
If you gonna talk about business in your blog and brain hacks etc around it, I think you should first make some kind of success
in business. Example would be as simple as "I make 2-5k a month from my business", that would be start.Then you are an authority.
Look, there are a lot of bullshit blogs out there. They try to make money by giving advice about business and selling guru webinars.
So I decided,before I talk the talk, I should walk the walk. No hate, just advice.

 

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[Choate]

The Plan:

• Push minimum one good quality post every day.
• Will do it for a whole year before worrying about results.
• Do a little bit of link building + social media marketing every now and then, but primary task will always be creating more and more quality content for the first 3-4 months.

Who is this serving? Is it actually solving a problem? Does it mean any of the CENTS laid out in the book?

All I see is chasing money and "me me me", listing some random goal of 1k/day. If you had a target audience, they wouldn't care about your monetary goals. And what happens if you inadvertently piss off Google?

The elusive, crafty cat will always get away when you chase it...

So with that in mind, if you do go through with this... all of your 'niches' like brain hacking or entrepreneur have 10 million to 40 million results on Google... what value can you offer that's legitimately better or different than the rest?

I vote $0-1 per day. Looking forward to see otherwise. Good luck.

 

[theag]

Considering hosting and domain costs and valueing your time at $0/hour, I vote for -$0,1/day.

 

[GoodluckChuck]

It seems negative but this feedback is valuable.

 

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[KSR]

A good start would be updating the look of your site. It looks outdated and ugly (sorry!). And a new logo would improve it too.

If that were me and I stumbled upon your post, I'd click away... it doesn't look professional, so what professional advice could I really be gaining from you?

 

[dbx286]

I see you're writing about this topic and targeting this audience, but what have you succeeded at that makes you credible enough for someone to take your word and follow your blog?

I experiment with nootropics a lot and they have been monumental in helping me stay super productive over the past six months. That was the original inspiration behind this blog, hence the name BrainHacker. I think there are people out there who would be interested in what I have to share about nootropics. Apart from that, I have managed some not-so-small SEO campaigns and have been a part of a now dead startup. But that startup experience helped me gain a lot of insight and I think it will prove immensely valuable to me.

Who is this serving? Is it actually solving a problem? Does it mean any of the CENTS laid out in the book?

All I see is chasing money and "me me me", listing some random goal of 1k/day. If you had a target audience, they wouldn't care about your monetary goals. And what happens if you inadvertently piss off Google?

The elusive, crafty cat will always get away when you chase it...

So with that in mind, if you do go through with this... all of your 'niches' like brain hacking or entrepreneur have 10 million to 40 million results on Google... what value can you offer that's legitimately better or different than the rest?

I vote $0-1 per day. Looking forward to see otherwise. Good luck.

Thanks a ton for taking out the time to critique my idea. I appreciate it a lot.

Need: I have been around the SEO, nootropic and body hacking communities for more than a couple of years. I see a lot of misinformation, myths and generally bad advice given out regularly. All this leads me to believe there is an audience for what I might have to say. Apart from this, it might also serve as a good personal pranding opportunity down the road as I have absolutely zero credibility right now. Everyone has to start somewhere, no?

Entry: I know SEO, social media marketing and usually find clever work arounds to my marketing problems for the small-medium sized business segment. I also have long hours of research into nootropics, not to mention experiments I have done on my own body. I think that is a barrier for entry, if not a significant one.

Control: Now affiliate marketing, adsense doesn't give you much control, agreed. But I am also in the process of launching my own nootropic related product by 2017. Having a personal brand in this niche might just help me gain the initial traction.

Scale: this one is obvious, blogs can have tremendous reach. But almost everybody has a blog these days, need to be super good and have a USP to work through that noise.

Time: IF this blog was to become successful, the amount of dough that comes in is not exactly tied down to the hours I put in. That being said, most of the content I have planned out is "evergreen". For example, noopept will have the same interaction with our brain chemistry no matter what year is this. So if I have a blog post about noopept, it will be as relevant two years down the road as it is now.

UPDATE (DAY #2)

Yet to publish my blog post for the day. But I shared my yesterday's blog post on reddit. Here is the google analytics screenshot. The bounce rate is huge, but too early to complain, the blog has almost no content. No shit they are going to bounce.

 

[NewYorkCity]

I had an idea like this in college. Tried it for about a week, kind of gave up, and then went back to partying. (Nootropic based blog)

Not a bad move lol.

I have hung out with a 200k+ blog owner more than a few times. He lived in a high rise in Honolulu Hawaii IIRC and spent his days walking around a beach.

The numbers were something like this IIRC, so it might take a while:

Year 1: $500
Year 2: $5000
Year 3: $XX,XXX++

 

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[dbx286]

Okay, so I read this thread: GOLD - Blogging for Profit (With Legendary GOLD Follow Up Posts)

And it had me thinking for a long time about this idea. Even though I think I can certainly pull this off traffic and content wise, I am not sure monetization would be as straightforward. Adsense is surely not something that can subsidize my time spent, and I do not see a business in the future which stands to gain from the blog and its traffic.

So with a very heavy heart, I kill this idea, right after starting this only a few days ago. Let this be an example for the rest of us to ponder over an idea thoroughly before jumping with both feet in.

I think I was biased when I started, because most of my working life I have mostly dealt with webmaster/SEO stuff. So I am biased towards their success.

Apart from this, I have an offline business in research phase which requires about $250-300k to get started. I am keeping it under wraps till I secure all the funding and will start a journey thread again soon.

 

[KSR]

Okay, so I read this thread: GOLD - Blogging for Profit (With Legendary GOLD Follow Up Posts)

And it had me thinking for a long time about this idea. Even though I think I can certainly pull this off traffic and content wise, I am not sure monetization would be as straightforward. Adsense is surely not something that can subsidize my time spent, and I do not see a business in the future which stands to gain from the blog and its traffic.

So with a very heavy heart, I kill this idea, right after starting this only a few days ago. Let this be an example for the rest of us to ponder over an idea thoroughly before jumping with both feet in.

I think I was biased when I started, because most of my working life I have mostly dealt with webmaster/SEO stuff. So I am biased towards their success.

Apart from this, I have an offline business in research phase which requires about $250-300k to get started. I am keeping it under wraps till I secure all the funding and will start a journey thread again soon.

Good luck on your new journey Remember, Fastlane doesn't mean days.