I’m considering making some changes to the format of the blog. Facebook has largely replaced the trivial “here are pictures of my cat and we’re going to the Vermont house this weekend” type of life updates…the personal stuff. LinkedIn has replaced the professional “here is my resume and some work samples” part, which, frankly, hasn’t been up on this site since I changed it from a job hunting site to a blog.
So what I’m thinking about doing is attempting to write more articles that people might want to read and enjoy. I have some ideas for categories, structure, and schedule, and while I’m doubt that I’m going to end up being a HuffingtonPost or BoingBoing or Slashdot, I would like to at least present content that appeals to a wider audience.
What sorts of articles? Well, nothing far out of the realm of what I write about now. Food, cooking, beer, travel, news, thoughts about life, how-to’s…basically, I want to learn everything about everything worth knowing, and pass it along to people who like being well-rounded, in a style that’s entertaining and accessible. Or something like that. I’m still working out the details.
At various times, I’ve considered starting up a sort of side-blog project to do something like this, but never really got around to it. Given how infrequently I update this blog, I think adding another blog to the list is a recipe for just not getting anything done.
And, I don’t think I need to go register another website and come up with a brand that represents the type of writing about everything that I want to do…I think that markdalius.com, as an extension of me, is also an extension of what I perceive my personal brand to be. I’m curious, I’m obsessed with learning, and I like to teach other people what I know. I’m not planning to build this as a magazine with a staff or anything like that; I’m taking my own hobbies and trying to spend some time writing about them. Basically monetizing my hobby of dabbling.
My motivation behind all this is certainly not to make tons of money…I did a quick analysis of the online magazine/blog space and determined that it’s a shockingly lousy industry to be in, with trivial barriers to entry for competitors, lots of buyer and seller power, plenty of substitutes, and a ton of competition. It is not a replacement for my day job. It’s just me thinking that I should be writing more and needing a place to do it, and figuring that I might as well try to get people to read what I write, do some self-marketing, and if I can pay for the web hosting with some ads, that’s a plus.
So what does this all boil down to? Well, probably these changes:
- migrating to a new blog “engine” – I will probably update the backend that I use to run the site, to start fresh with a new look and feel (nothing crazy; I plan to focus on the writing, not the site design). I’m considering WordPress but I’m going to look around a little.
- migrating selected old entries – The old content will still be around somewhere or other, but most likely the more personal entries will be password-protected. It’s still out there on the internet, but it doesn’t have to be so easy to find.
- establishing a schedule – If I’m going to commit to writing more, I have to commit to a focused schedule. This will likely be a very gradual process…initially, I think once per week is about as high as I’ll go. But, I’ll stick to it.
- advertising – Google AdSense is a fairly non-intrusive advertising system that I think is reasonable and could provide a very small but non-zero revenue stream. As I said above, this is not about making money, but a couple of bucks couldn’t hurt.
- regular column categories – If you like reading X, and you see that there’s consistently a new column on X on Tuesday mornings at 9 a.m. at a given website, you’ll probably swing back each week. I have some ideas about the types of columns and I’ll probably be exploring those in the near future.
I’m not sure if this is overly ambitious, but at the very least, I think I can devote an hour a week to banging out a screen of text that is intended to have a point. If I’m honest with myself about, again, my personal brand, and my strengths, I think that I’ve got some writing skills that could be coupled with that innate curiousity and might result in some good content being generated. It’s nice in one sense that the startup costs are nothing…I don’t have to deal with editors or shopping my stuff around, or losing ownership rights. It’s my stuff, it’s up there, and I can do pretty much whatever I want to do, and the market will tell me if it’s working or not.
So, let’s see how this goes. I’ll write up some sample articles over the next few weeks to prime the pump, before I make any changes to the site or do any ads or anything, and we’ll take it from there.