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Hmm... most (or at least many) people here are building businesses now and have little interest in being on yet another marketing-heavy email list. A forum like

by xiaoma 10y ago

Hmm... most (or at least many) people here are building businesses now and have little interest in being on yet another marketing-heavy email list. A forum like this is a great place to connect and share stories! In the long run that will pay off far more than just strafing by and telling people to sign up for your email. How did you build your following? How did you monetize? Are you an ad publisher or are you selling something? What kind of content did you create?

nickjj 10y ago
I'm in the process of building a business right now too, which for me encompasses "how to be a self reliant software developer who can choose to work whenever and wherever". I'll tell you a secret, I haven't even e-mailed my list once. Why? Because I'm still figuring this stuff out as I go. I don't have years of content to create marketing auto-responders and dozens of products to push to people. Just yesterday I was thinking about the problem of "you have all these people on your list, if you don't message them, they are going to forget about you", so I thought maybe I should be spinning off newsletters based on the weekly blog posts I create -- and at worst send maybe something out every 2 weeks. That's why when I stumbled on this ASK HN thread I thought I'd ask if people wanted to hear this stuff, and then figured by publicly posting something like this, I'll have accountability to actually start messaging my list. P.S, I'm just a dude who cannot accept wasting his life away to make another company rich so I can "retire" when I'm nearly dead. I want to live life right now on my own terms and have the self reliance and freedom to work anywhere in the world, and never have to worry about money again. My income comes from a few streams. Course sales (related to tech), affiliate sales, book sales and consulting. I don't have ads on my blog and never will. All of the content can be found on my site at https://nickjanetakis.com/ https://nickjanetakis.com/. I recommend reading the home page because it better describes what I just wrote here.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tmaly 10y ago
  You blog posts seem pretty interesting. How did you choose the titles? I agree 100% with your statement about living live on one's own terms.
  - nickjj 10y ago
    Thanks. I spend a considerable amount of time on the titles. Usually I write out a bunch of headlines, and then eliminate the ones that are horrible. My goal is to condense the essence of the entire post in as little characters as possible. I often ignore any type of SEO tactics, and optimize it for humans. There's definitely way more I could write on this (there's a whole process, tons of things to research, etc.), I'll add it to a Google Keep note for a future post (if you read some posts you know what I mean!).
- xiaoma 10y ago
  Alexa 500k in just a year in is pretty good. What was your general audience building strategy?
  - nickjj 10y ago
    Thanks. Honestly, I don't even think I'm a blip on the radar. For most of 2016 I didn't really try to build an audience. I just posted on topics that interested me while not paying attention to anything. Then I stopped blogging for a few months and really started to think about what I want to do (this happened about mid-year). During that time I re-did my site and completely changed my mindset from "I want to make money" to "I want to create the best content I can on a specific subject". I don't really use twitter or other platforms. I just post content on my site, and try to reply to comments on relevant sites (like HN and other tech sites) when it makes sense.

by xiaoma 10y ago

nickjj 10y ago

I'm in the process of building a business right now too, which for me encompasses "how to be a self reliant software developer who can choose to work whenever and wherever". I'll tell you a secret, I haven't even e-mailed my list once. Why? Because I'm still figuring this stuff out as I go. I don't have years of content to create marketing auto-responders and dozens of products to push to people. Just yesterday I was thinking about the problem of "you have all these people on your list, if you don't message them, they are going to forget about you", so I thought maybe I should be spinning off newsletters based on the weekly blog posts I create -- and at worst send maybe something out every 2 weeks. That's why when I stumbled on this ASK HN thread I thought I'd ask if people wanted to hear this stuff, and then figured by publicly posting something like this, I'll have accountability to actually start messaging my list. P.S, I'm just a dude who cannot accept wasting his life away to make another company rich so I can "retire" when I'm nearly dead. I want to live life right now on my own terms and have the self reliance and freedom to work anywhere in the world, and never have to worry about money again. My income comes from a few streams. Course sales (related to tech), affiliate sales, book sales and consulting. I don't have ads on my blog and never will. All of the content can be found on my site at https://nickjanetakis.com/ https://nickjanetakis.com/. I recommend reading the home page because it better describes what I just wrote here.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tmaly 10y ago
You blog posts seem pretty interesting. How did you choose the titles? I agree 100% with your statement about living live on one's own terms.
- nickjj 10y ago
  Thanks. I spend a considerable amount of time on the titles. Usually I write out a bunch of headlines, and then eliminate the ones that are horrible. My goal is to condense the essence of the entire post in as little characters as possible. I often ignore any type of SEO tactics, and optimize it for humans. There's definitely way more I could write on this (there's a whole process, tons of things to research, etc.), I'll add it to a Google Keep note for a future post (if you read some posts you know what I mean!).
xiaoma 10y ago
Alexa 500k in just a year in is pretty good. What was your general audience building strategy?
- nickjj 10y ago
  Thanks. Honestly, I don't even think I'm a blip on the radar. For most of 2016 I didn't really try to build an audience. I just posted on topics that interested me while not paying attention to anything. Then I stopped blogging for a few months and really started to think about what I want to do (this happened about mid-year). During that time I re-did my site and completely changed my mindset from "I want to make money" to "I want to create the best content I can on a specific subject". I don't really use twitter or other platforms. I just post content on my site, and try to reply to comments on relevant sites (like HN and other tech sites) when it makes sense.