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My first blog bombed. Should I start a second one?

D

Deleted78083

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So I wrote my first blog for one year. 122 articles, about 200 000 words.

It sucked, because the content sucked, because I wasn't writing for others but for myself. I didn't do any SEO, no keyword research, and I targeted a niche of people that don't read (GenZ).

I guess I would have had more chances with a TikTok account lol.

So I quit two weeks ago. However, it's not going well. I have this need to write. I am miserable if I don't write or don't publish, so I was thinking about starting a second blog with a newsletter, under my own name this time and with my picture so that people can relate.

The idea would be to publish all of my notes. I spend my days writing down everything I learn or find interesting, and I actually have a bunch of notes now. Book and video summaries, podcast notes, a list of 450+ quotes, etc.

Here's what the concept would be:

I would divide the blog into 4 parts: business and money; tech and economics; notes; personal development

Each section would have notes related to the respective topic.

"Notes" would be the category where I would add all the notes + notes that are not relevant to any of the topics (notes about nutrition, history, philosophy for example).

The content would de facto be high-quality because it wouldn't be mine. I would just upload whatever I learned in books, podcasts, and in my traineeship + comment about how it relates to other things I learned. I would also explain what problems I ran into that week and how I fixed it. I'd give as much value as possible.

Then I would publish a free weekly newsletter with the three most important lessons/principles I learned during the week. The newsletter would enable me to build an email list that may ease the sales of digital products later on if I decide to go that route.

I checked and...many people are already doing that. While it is discouraging, it also means it works.

The good thing is that I don't think it will take me much more work. I am already taking notes, so why not publish them and build an audience? The newsletter would be extra short, no more than 200 words.

I think it would force me to pay more attention and think more because I'd have people to serve + I could test out my newly-acquired digital marketing skills.

Should I go for it, or is it just another distraction?
 
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Lex DeVille

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So I wrote my first blog for one year. 122 articles, about 200 000 words.

It sucked, because the content sucked, because I wasn't writing for others but for myself. I didn't do any SEO, no keyword research, and I targeted a niche of people that don't read (GenZ).

I guess I would have had more chances with a TikTok account lol.

So I quit two weeks ago. However, it's not going well. I have this need to write. I am miserable if I don't write or don't publish, so I was thinking about starting a second blog with a newsletter, under my own name this time and with my picture so that people can relate.

The idea would be to publish all of my notes. I spend my days writing down everything I learn or find interesting, and I actually have a bunch of notes now. Book and video summaries, podcast notes, a list of 450+ quotes, etc.

Here's what the concept would be:

I would divide the blog into 4 parts: business and money; tech and economics; notes; personal development

Each section would have notes related to the respective topic.

"Notes" would be the category where I would add all the notes + notes that are not relevant to any of the topics (notes about nutrition, history, philosophy for example).

The content would de facto be high-quality because it wouldn't be mine. I would just upload whatever I learned in books, podcasts, and in my traineeship + comment about how it relates to other things I learned. I would also explain what problems I ran into that week and how I fixed it. I'd give as much value as possible.

Then I would publish a free weekly newsletter with the three most important lessons/principles I learned during the week. The newsletter would enable me to build an email list that may ease the sales of digital products later on if I decide to go that route.

I checked and...many people are already doing that. While it is discouraging, it also means it works.

The good thing is that I don't think it will take me much more work. I am already taking notes, so why not publish them and build an audience? The newsletter would be extra short, no more than 200 words.

I think it would force me to pay more attention and think more because I'd have people to serve + I could test out my newly-acquired digital marketing skills.

Should I go for it, or is it just another distraction?

If I were you I would find a hungry audience and get proof that they are interested first. You need a fast way to do this so you don't spend a year wasting time again. Personally, I like the Income School approach of starting a blog/Youtube channel dedicated to a specific topic. Youtube will tell you really quickly (within a few videos) if there is an audience for the content. If you start getting subscribers, then you will have a funnel entry point for a traffic source you can send to your blog for more info, products, affiliate offers, ads etc.
 

MJ DeMarco

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I don't quite understand newsletters as I strive to declutter my inbox, but they can be quite lucrative.


And here's an instant "entry" ticket into the space...

 
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Johnny boy

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A blog is just one vehicle of getting content to an audience.

Nobody REALLY will pay for a blog. You have to offer something else of value that solves a problem. A course, an actual product, merchandise, a SAAS solution, etc.

You need to think first of an audience, then the vehicles you will use to attract their attention, and then the problem(s) you will solve for them

For example: People that enjoy skiing (think of an interest instead of an age group. It's too broad. Internet is best for categorizing based on interests. Brick and mortar are better for location categorization)

Vehicles for attention: (think of where the above group spends their time online)

A tik tok page that has skiing memes, highlights and fail video compilations (with some trends thrown in)

A youtube channel that teaching skiing technique

An instagram that has skiing photos as well as the same content posted on tiktok.

Something to sell them:

Invent ski helmets where the goggles don't easily fall off your helmet when you take them off your eyes and put them on your helmet and you happen to fall or something. It's annoying for me to put my goggles back on my helmet after I fall and I can hardly feel if the goggle band is twisted or not because of my gloves.

Come out with a skiing clothing line

Sell a course on how to ski better for $47

Invent some other cool product and sell it to your audience.
 

Process

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Reminds me of the glory days. (No sarcasm, it was a period of massive learning while stumbling around in the dark) Some of my first attempts were blogs. My 19 year old dreams of making $10,000,000 a year through amazon/click bank/offer vaults didn’t amount to much money.

Then I tried creating markets for a bit. That resulted in me trying way too many things at once. But, I learned it was easier to find existing markets to gain experience.

I used what I learned to get my first freelance clients. (Copywriting, SEO, Ads, coding) this was less competitive and required a bit more entry and commitment barriers.

From there I specialized in helping local businesses since there were a lot of people needing an online presence and knowing next to nothing on how to do it. Getting a job at a reputable agency taught me a ton.

Then I picked a few niches to be the expert in. This made me stand out and I swam in an ocean with even less competition.

This got a bunch of traction and has helped me move onto higher ticket opportunities. The site itself gets clients, and I get them through a lot of other outreach and advertising methods. Plus doing a great job means I get a bunch of referrals too. (The ultimate litmus test)

These days I probably could succeed at blogging, but I’d rather have more control. A software system grows itself and needs little nurturing. It takes only 4 or 5 hours a week. The ads and outreach are simply fertilizer for extra growth.

What you want is leverage and a blog itself doesn’t do that. Taking your love of writing and becoming persuasive and clear will open many doors.

You could write ad copy. That’s more powerful than blogging since you get faster feedback. It’s the equivalent of being a master fertilizer of businesses. Throw in systems and people skills and you’re very hard to replace at that point.

Now I’m onto higher calculated risks while getting residual income that goes up each month. Also saving to buy up stuff once the eviction bandaid is lifted.
 

Cyberthal

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First create a rough drafts blog where you merely throw crap you've written. This shortens the feedback loop.

Then later, if there's a business case for it, create marketing blog(s) designed to fulfill a business purpose, named and scoped appropriately.

I call the first a T3 blog and the second a T2 blog. Their purposes are incompatible, which explains your frustration.

Also, a year is too short to declare a blog a failure. Your blog failed due to its purpose conflict, on day 1.
 
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D

Deleted78083

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Are you learning the right things from your failure?

Good question.

I need to put more thoughts into this because I don't know why I would make this blog.

I want to have a blog because I want to write and be read. It's a selfish desire. But what if I write valuable content? Then I could reconcile both.

Also this blog would help me to keep on learning digital marketing. It would be some sort of sandbox that would enable me to test out my SEO and content marketing skills, then find an audience, see the pains they have and harvest business ideas, or sell them digital products.

That can't hurt me in the long-term, but I don't really have a plan on how I would go and develop that. It's not really fastlane either, so maybe it is a waste of time.

It's just that I have a bunch of notes and I want to share them through a vehicle that would enable me to keep on learning digital marketing.

In my head, it makes sense, but something feels off.

Shouldn't I just focus on a business and build it instead?

If I were you I would find a hungry audience and get proof that they are interested first. You need a fast way to do this so you don't spend a year wasting time again. Personally, I like the Income School approach of starting a blog/Youtube channel dedicated to a specific topic. Youtube will tell you really quickly (within a few videos) if there is an audience for the content. If you start getting subscribers, then you will have a funnel entry point for a traffic source you can send to your blog for more info, products, affiliate offers, ads etc.


A blog is just one vehicle of getting content to an audience.

Nobody REALLY will pay for a blog. You have to offer something else of value that solves a problem. A course, an actual product, merchandise, a SAAS solution, etc.

You need to think first of an audience, then the vehicles you will use to attract their attention, and then the problem(s) you will solve for them

For example: People that enjoy skiing (think of an interest instead of an age group. It's too broad. Internet is best for categorizing based on interests. Brick and mortar are better for location categorization)

Vehicles for attention: (think of where the above group spends their time online)

A tik tok page that has skiing memes, highlights and fail video compilations (with some trends thrown in)

A youtube channel that teaching skiing technique

An instagram that has skiing photos as well as the same content posted on tiktok.

Something to sell them:

Invent ski helmets where the goggles don't easily fall off your helmet when you take them off your eyes and put them on your helmet and you happen to fall or something. It's annoying for me to put my goggles back on my helmet after I fall and I can hardly feel if the goggle band is twisted or not because of my gloves.

Come out with a skiing clothing line

Sell a course on how to ski better for $47

Invent some other cool product and sell it to your audience.

Reminds me of the glory days. (No sarcasm, it was a period of massive learning while stumbling around in the dark) Some of my first attempts were blogs. My 19 year old dreams of making $10,000,000 a year through amazon/click bank/offer vaults didn’t amount to much money.

Ok, you guys are telling me to build a blog in the context of building a business.

My original idea was to just build the blog and see if I could get business out of it.

You're telling me to aim at something and take the fastest route to reach it, while I am just there walking along a random path hoping it'll get me to a nice destination.

I need to decide what the purpose of this blog would be. My first blog didn't have any purpose, it was just me writing what went through my head.


I used what I learned to get my first freelance clients. (Copywriting, SEO, Ads, coding) this was less competitive and required a bit more entry and commitment barriers.

From there I specialized in helping local businesses since there were a lot of people needing an online presence and knowing next to nothing on how to do it. Getting a job at a reputable agency taught me a ton.

Then I picked a few niches to be the expert in. This made me stand out and I swam in an ocean with even less competition.

This got a bunch of traction and has helped me move onto higher ticket opportunities. The site itself gets clients, and I get them through a lot of other outreach and advertising methods. Plus doing a great job means I get a bunch of referrals too. (The ultimate litmus test)

This is really cool! I figured I could do the same thing. Writing this blog would ensure I'd keep on learning digital marketing, then I could get clients, earn a freelance income which would enable me to free time (and myself) and build an actual fastlane business on the side.

So here are the two paths I can choose:

1. Build a blog that works -> practice and learn digital marketing doing so -> become a digital marketing freelance guy -> now I earn an income outside of a job and can build a real business on the side, and I already know marketing and have an audience thanks to the blog, which I can monetize or use to find out about needs.

2. Build a real business right now and learn everything as I go.

What you want is leverage and a blog itself doesn’t do that. Taking your love of writing and becoming persuasive and clear will open many doors.

You could write ad copy. That’s more powerful than blogging since you get faster feedback. It’s the equivalent of being a master fertilizer of businesses. Throw in systems and people skills and you’re very hard to replace at that point.

That's another idea.
 

JosephS

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So I wrote my first blog for one year. 122 articles, about 200 000 words.

It sucked, because the content sucked, because I wasn't writing for others but for myself. I didn't do any SEO, no keyword research, and I targeted a niche of people that don't read (GenZ).

I guess I would have had more chances with a TikTok account lol.

So I quit two weeks ago. However, it's not going well. I have this need to write. I am miserable if I don't write or don't publish, so I was thinking about starting a second blog with a newsletter, under my own name this time and with my picture so that people can relate.

The idea would be to publish all of my notes. I spend my days writing down everything I learn or find interesting, and I actually have a bunch of notes now. Book and video summaries, podcast notes, a list of 450+ quotes, etc.

Here's what the concept would be:

I would divide the blog into 4 parts: business and money; tech and economics; notes; personal development

Each section would have notes related to the respective topic.

"Notes" would be the category where I would add all the notes + notes that are not relevant to any of the topics (notes about nutrition, history, philosophy for example).

The content would de facto be high-quality because it wouldn't be mine. I would just upload whatever I learned in books, podcasts, and in my traineeship + comment about how it relates to other things I learned. I would also explain what problems I ran into that week and how I fixed it. I'd give as much value as possible.

Then I would publish a free weekly newsletter with the three most important lessons/principles I learned during the week. The newsletter would enable me to build an email list that may ease the sales of digital products later on if I decide to go that route.

I checked and...many people are already doing that. While it is discouraging, it also means it works.

The good thing is that I don't think it will take me much more work. I am already taking notes, so why not publish them and build an audience? The newsletter would be extra short, no more than 200 words.

I think it would force me to pay more attention and think more because I'd have people to serve + I could test out my newly-acquired digital marketing skills.

Should I go for it, or is it just another distraction?
Take all the notes you've wrote and write your own e-book. Have that specific e-book link back to your blog for traffic so can earn affiliate commission. Once you start earning a significant amount from your e-book and commissions from your blog, start a how-to course and how-YOU did it which builds your audience even more and gets your paid more. Once you have that email list full of loyal subscribers, start a podcast.
 

Johnny boy

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Ok, you guys are telling me to build a blog in the context of building a business.

My original idea was to just build the blog and see if I could get business out of it.

You're telling me to aim at something and take the fastest route to reach it, while I am just there walking along a random path hoping it'll get me to a nice destination.

I need to decide what the purpose of this blog would be. My first blog didn't have any purpose, it was just me writing what went through my head.

I'm saying to solve a problem for a group of people.

The way you get attention of that group of people is by using vehicles such as a

blog
tik tok
instagram
youtube

and even paying for ads


Find a group of people you can help. (Easier if you yourself are part of that group because you recognize their problems)
Get their attention by giving them something interesting, helpful, entertaining, etc. and distribute it where that group of people spends the majority of their time online.
Now that you have the attention of that group, sell them something they need or want. The bottom rung of this is selling merch as an influencer. But if you've got the business chops you can move up the ladder and sell things that are more valuable or helpful to your audience.

There's a TON of people you could make content for.

You could make content for young conservatives

You could make content for dudes that want to look at hot chicks shake their a$$

You could make content for small service business owners

You could make content for motocross riders

etc.
 
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D

Deleted78083

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Take all the notes you've wrote and write your own e-book. Have that specific e-book link back to your blog for traffic so can earn affiliate commission. Once you start earning a significant amount from your e-book and commissions from your blog, start a how-to course and how-YOU did it which builds your audience even more and gets your paid more. Once you have that email list full of loyal subscribers, start a podcast.

Funny you're writing this. I have been looking at all the blogs and bloggers that would somehow resemble mine and noticed something striking.

All of these people did cool stuff and then wrote about it. I want to do the opposite, and this is why it's not working. I want to write something but have nothing to write to about. I want to explain how to achieve stuff but have achieved nothing myself.

So I'll leave this idea alone for a bit. Gonna go do stuff instead and learn, fail, do more, learn more, become good at it, and then write about it.

Thanks to everyone that answered!
 

lowtek

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Funny you're writing this. I have been looking at all the blogs and bloggers that would somehow resemble mine and noticed something striking.

All of these people did cool stuff and then wrote about it. I want to do the opposite, and this is why it's not working. I want to write something but have nothing to write to about. I want to explain how to achieve stuff but have achieved nothing myself.

So I'll leave this idea alone for a bit. Gonna go do stuff instead and learn, fail, do more, learn more, become good at it, and then write about it.

Thanks to everyone that answered!

Just to provide a somewhat contrary opinion... there is a reason most fantasy and sci fi stories have a hero's arc. Most of us realize the deck is stacked against us, and nobody is coming to our rescue. We can all relate to the hero that has to grow and become better to overcome the overwhelming odds against him.

While you may not be at your goal state just yet, there's no harm in documenting the process in a public venue.

It's just a simple tweak in how you present the material. Instead of "Here's how you become a badass", it's "Here's how I'm becoming a badass".

It probably wouldn't get much traction until you have achieved some results (and shown that your process works), but at least by that point you would have a big catalog of content that does a good portion of the heavy lifting for you (i.e. better SEO because you have more articles, more content for people to binge, etc.).

You can write companion articles, but I'm firmly in the camp that video should be the primary vehicle for these types of ventures. This means a YouTube channel. The bonus is that linking to your blog from YT helps with SEO (after all, what has more juice than YT?) and getting cheap traffic when a fraction of the viewers click from the description.
 

Process

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Good question.

I need to put more thoughts into this because I don't know why I would make this blog.

I want to have a blog because I want to write and be read. It's a selfish desire. But what if I write valuable content? Then I could reconcile both.

Also this blog would help me to keep on learning digital marketing. It would be some sort of sandbox that would enable me to test out my SEO and content marketing skills, then find an audience, see the pains they have and harvest business ideas, or sell them digital products.

That can't hurt me in the long-term, but I don't really have a plan on how I would go and develop that. It's not really fastlane either, so maybe it is a waste of time.

It's just that I have a bunch of notes and I want to share them through a vehicle that would enable me to keep on learning digital marketing.

In my head, it makes sense, but something feels off.

Shouldn't I just focus on a business and build it instead?








Ok, you guys are telling me to build a blog in the context of building a business.

My original idea was to just build the blog and see if I could get business out of it.

You're telling me to aim at something and take the fastest route to reach it, while I am just there walking along a random path hoping it'll get me to a nice destination.

I need to decide what the purpose of this blog would be. My first blog didn't have any purpose, it was just me writing what went through my head.




This is really cool! I figured I could do the same thing. Writing this blog would ensure I'd keep on learning digital marketing, then I could get clients, earn a freelance income which would enable me to free time (and myself) and build an actual fastlane business on the side.

So here are the two paths I can choose:

1. Build a blog that works -> practice and learn digital marketing doing so -> become a digital marketing freelance guy -> now I earn an income outside of a job and can build a real business on the side, and I already know marketing and have an audience thanks to the blog, which I can monetize or use to find out about needs.

2. Build a real business right now and learn everything as I go.



That's another idea.
Blogging is a means to an end, not the end itself.

I can’t stress enough leaving the passion projects and market creation for later.

Go where there’s money changing hands but people are complaining.
 
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Unknown M.F

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The best way to start a blog is if you already have an audience waiting for your blog posts. I'll say start a Facebook group instead before starting a blog (my opinion though). Why? Because you'll get engagements fast to kick in your feedback loop.

You may be surprised that after 6months of growing a Facebook group, you will discover an untapped need and you will change your mind on the type of blog niche you want to start rn. For E.g: I wanted to start a blog but after 2 years of growing an fb group from scratch, I'm now running my own forum because that was where the market was pointing to and so I listened.

Also, if you are going to be depending on Google for traffic, then my best advice is don't write unless you've done proper keywords research. Else, you'll be wasting your time writing with little to zero traffic - from Google.
 
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