The Logic and Reasoning of the Blog: The Ten Steps to Dominating Niche Markets

 

So what's the point of this blog? Aren't you trying to start some kind of School or something?

I got this question recently, and I decided it would make a good post. Pretty much every detail of everything I've done and will continue to do with this project is deliberate and planned. Including starting a blog and all the seemingly weird details. Like the fact that I'm using BLOGGER. And the name is an obscure psychology joke within an even more obscure psychology joke that's really more amusing than funny.

Here's the plan I'm following. But first the back story.

For those who don't know me well, I tried my hand as a "professional" writer back in the day, and have written recreationally for years. While my actual writing is just kinda "meh", I have been an extremely prolific writer and did find a moderate degree of commercial success. I've written five books I self-published, two of which were eventually published by real publishers and between the groups, sold around 50-60,000 copies in four languages. I've also written six or seven  articles that appeared in magazines, and have written a who mess of blog posts across about twelve or thirteen different blogs. At last count, I think I'm up to around 1,500 posts containing about 1.3 million words written and published online, which have been read somewhere in the ballpark of 800,000 times. The point isn't to brag (a lot of the writing really does objectively suck... just read the Amazon reviews or blog comments), but to highlight that I have a pretty solid foundation of using the written word to share my ideas. I've thrown a whole lotta pasta at the wall, and I'll be damned if some of it didn't stick.

The entire process has been a lot of trial and error. Heavy emphasis on the "error" part... which is part of the reason all that work hasn't made me rich or famous. But wishing to be rich and famous is a fool's errand. But that was never the goal, so it's okay. Every single book, article, and post served a purpose - help others. This is likely why I've had the relative success I've had; the goal has always been to share knowledge people could apply to their lives in an actionable way that would lead to objective improvements in their lives. Didn't matter if it were barefoot running, trail and ultrarunning, teaching, traveling in an RV full-time with kids, helping people understand relationships, helping men learn how to get better at being men, or this project right here. 

That "helping others" idea serves another useful purpose - it gives you a reason to write other than getting famous, making a ton of money, getting a ton of readers, or getting that book publishing deal. Not only are each of those things extremely difficult, but every one of those things, once you achieve it, is hollow and usually creates more problems than you believe it will solve. It's just like the people who start jiu jitsu for that black belt. If that's why you're doing it, you'll quit soon after getting to blue. Extrinsic motivators suck. That's a post for another day.

Anyway, this project is essentially the sum of all those efforts. I really do believe this Tribe idea has the potential to make a real, significant difference in the world, and can be a tool to help solve some of modern society's more vexing problems. Even if my specific application of the ideas crashes and burns (I'm supremely confident it won't; but I was also supremely confident spending hundreds of dollars on Jeff George rookie cards would be the key to early retirement), I'm confident people smarter than me CAN tweak and apply these ideas with loads of success. But the only way that happens is if I can effectively spread the ideas. Ergo the blog.The best part - EVERY part of this can be done at ZERO cost.

Here's how I do it step-by-step, and the logic behind it.

Step One: Choose the platform. I use Blogger. It's old, feels old, LOOKS old, and isn't especially versatile. But it's a Google product, so content gets a bit of an SEO boost. It's free, has good sharing options, and allows you to easily implement Google's ad system to run ads on the site. If the blog develops a lot of traffic eventually, that can be an excellent passive income stream. And, honestly, I like my writings to be stripped of aesthetics. That assures people are reading it for the content, not because it looks pretty. For purposes like this project, that's important.

Step Two: Choose the name. I like weird names with a slightly offensive bend. Like the URL of this blog. The title of the blog is benign, but the address? Not so much. The weird names make projects a little more memorable, and the offensiveness acts as a filter for the prudes. Outside of the classroom, I don't like to filter myself. Neither does Shelly. We save everyone a lot of time and angst if we can keep the easily-offended at bay from the beginning. You may have other reasons, but choose your title deliberately.

Step Three: Define the parameters of the subject matter. Finding the right "bandwidth" of ideas is tricky as it varies by topic. I start narrow, then widen with time. Start too wide and you'll have trouble developing a core of dedicated readers.

For example, my original barefoot running blog only dealt with learning how to run. By the end of its life cycle, I was discussing topics like the merits of using information from the S&M community to learn how to deal with the pain of running ultras. 

As a slight sidebar - Long ago, I discovered the value in always presenting the most authentic version of yourself as you possibly can to anyone who matters. This assures you attract like-minded people and, more importantly, repel the people who eventually won't like you. When people put up facades, it never ends well. This is also why all my works are filled with dumb, obscure, and/or inside jokes.

Step Four: Set up methods for readers to easily share the content. Subscribe and Share buttons are your friend. This IS a relative weakness of Blogger; the social media sharing is only so-so. They're there, but they're not great. Again, though, the people who really connect with the ideas will find a way to share them.

Step Five: Write a lot. This is usually the hardest part. Doing anything worthwhile takes FOREVER. Doesn't matter if it's jiu jitsu, college, or building a blog audience. Writing one post a day for the first year is usually my early blog goal. That takes discipline and persistence, which usually determines who succeeds and fails. It's important to understand this one rule:

There is no such thing as an overnight success!

I have the advantage of leveraging my existing, curated audience, so I can get 50-100 posts the first day I post something. But when I started, it took something like two years of writing before I cracked 20 daily hits. But growth is exponential, not linear. By year three, I was getting 1,000 daily hits. By year four, 25,000 daily hits. The hard work pays off, but you gotta resist eating the marshmallow. 

If you've read any of my work, you've probably notices it's poorly-edited. That's by design. It's actually not edited at all other than the red squigglies for misspelled words. First, I HATE editing. Second, I'm too lazy to use the online tools used for grammar usage, which are excellent. Well, maybe not lazy so much as writing tends to be a manic-like activity for me. I will go months or even years and produce virtually nothing, then go through six months to a year of writing A LOT. Finally, it's one of those authenticity things I mentioned above. It effectively weeds out the OCD grammar Nazis. I've found they're usually not the kind of people I want in my social circle. Or, as sometimes happens, they appreciate the ideas enough to ignore the crap writing.

Step Six: Analyze the data to determine the audience, then use it to tweak your writing. Once you get some posts written and you start getting some views, you can look at the blog post data to determine what kinds of posts and topics are resonating with your audience. THIS DATA IS PURE GOLD! Use it to apply Pareto's Principle. Keep doing what works, quit doing what doesn't.

Step Seven: Add affiliate links. Amazon Associates is an awesome program. Any time you mention a product, link to it. Review products related to your blog topic, then link to those. At the height, I was making several hundred dollars per month doing this, and each link took like 45 seconds to create. It's a great passive income stream.

Step Eight: Add ads. I haven't done this for a very long time because all my newer blogs were either too controversial OR didn't get a critical mass of traffic. But running ads is another very good passive income stream.

Step Nine: Write a book (and/or develop other media channels like video.) Once your blog has a degree of success (usually about when you have 100 regular readers or about 300 hits per post), start considering producing some sort of information product. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing is what I use. Market it to your True Fans. They will promote it to their friends, and those friends will promote it to their friends, and so on. It creates a sustained, growing passive income stream that requires no money and virtually no time.

Another benefit of the blog and the accompanying data - it'll tell you what you should add in the products you produce. It's a long story, but "Never Wipe Your ass with a Squirrel", probably the best book I've written, was written, edited, and published in a frenetic 36 hours. We were a few days away from financial catastrophe after some miscalculations when bumming around the country in an RV, and I needed cash immediately. After selling my body only produced $3.50 and a half-drank can of watermelon Four Lokos, I was able to just use the sixty or so posts on the accompanying blog to organize and write the book in a way that I knew would resonate with that project's True Fans. It sold hundreds of copies the first day it was sold. It saved our asses.

Step Ten: Sit back and collect the checks. If you follow these steps, you should end up with a good sized audience who is very similar to you, willing to buy and promote the stuff you produce, and you have multiple passive income streams. That then frees up a whole lotta time to either really immerse yourself in the project OR pivot to a new topic (which is what I tend to do.) 

For this particular project, though, I designed it in such a way that the entire Tribe will contribute and benefit from this process, AND it gives me the freedom to explore all kinds of interesting topics that will then use this project as a foundation. I've learned my lesson on how to make this system sustainable. 

Now, this project does take time and effort. Writing ain't always easy. But if you adopt this Tribe model I'm presenting in this project, recruit people who like to write. Every other aspect of this process can be delegated to people who actually enjoy doing that kind of thing, which is one of the HUGE advantages of creating a deliberate tribe. 

~Jason

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The Logic and Reasoning Behind the Facebook Group: Leveraging Social Media to Make the World a BETTER Place

When setting up this project, I took two steps to communicate ideas to the "outside" world: Started this blog, and set up a Facebook Group, which can be found here. This post explains WHY I did this, and WHAT PURPOSE the Facebook Group serves. 

Reason #1: I have a lot of Facebook friends who have been discussing my idea for years, which are usually just ideas that come from them that I stitch together in weird ways. I've spent years curating a diverse set of social media friends who are equal parts creative, objective, and skeptical, and most of which have no problem telling me exactly why any given idea I synthesize is stupid. Given their brains kinda work like mine, just from vastly different perspectives, their input and feedback is incredibly valuable. They understand what I'm trying to do, understand my motivations, and have the ability to inform me of the inevitable blind spots I have based on my limited perspective. They're objective outsiders who get the big picture enough that they don't immediately reject the ideas. 

This is important. To paraphrase Hugh MacLeod, "Good ideas have lonely childhoods." Meaning, the more "out there" an idea is, the fewer people there are who will get it. That's part of the reason so many good ideas die a premature death. Luckily I'm used to trying bizarre ideas without any real support (thanks, barefoot running prior to Born to Run!) But the real problem is a lack of feedback. If people don't get your idea, they can't really offer any kind of feedback. The people who join this Facebook group are the precise people who CAN give me feedback right now, today, because they've been with me long enough to see my other seemingly stupid ideas succeed.

Reason #2: It provides an infusion of ideas from sources outside our little world. Not only can outsiders give feedback on the ideas we're testing, but they can be a great source of NEW ideas that we don't consider. Back in the aforementioned barefoot running days, this was absolutely critical to developing good methods to teach people to run without shoes. In many cases, that new info came from people who had some legitimate knowledge about advanced biomechanics, which was far superior to my half-assed knowledge from college anatomy and physiology class. Which I barely passed. 

This project, while pretty simple, involves A LOT of pretty complex social dynamics AND involves bringing together a diverse set of people to act as a singular unit. Until we get enough Tribe members to fill out each of the types of people we need, the Facebook Group folks can and will serve an important role. 

Reason #3: It can be used to recruit potential new members. It's fairly unlikely someone would move to Montrose, Colorado just to be part of this experimental group, but you never know. In this sense, the Facebook group is kinda like a national or even international recruiting tool.

Reason #4: It can be used to "seed" other similar groups that members of the group may start themselves. This is probably more likely than #3, and has happened with all my other experimental projects. This is especially valuable because this idea SHOULD be able to be deployed anywhere by anyone, but that's just a hypothesis. Actually testing that hypothesis would be incredibly useful.

Reason #5: The Group provides a starting point to market and sell any products we produce. This is tied to my last post about the rationale behind this blog. If this project turns out to be successful and I write a book about it, this is the group most likely to buy the book initially, and recommend it to their friends.

Reason #6: The Group will eventually give us some idea of the kind of people who would not work well in this kind of tribal environment. There's a weird effect that happens when ideas start to grow and spread. You reach a critical mass, then all of a sudden all kinds of people want to join the movement. But they don't usually really understand what you're doing, or WANT to understand. To paraphrase Hugh M. again, "They just want to be on the winning team." Once they join the team, they tend to sabotage the original idea. Sometimes they're only there to take and are not willing to contribute. Or they're only there to sell us crap. Or they're just looking for pictures of your dirty feet. Yeah, that happens. 

A lot.

I call it "The Law of Annoying People." 

The Facebook Group offers some good "reconnaissance" to figure out how to identify these people, because their characteristics vary based on the project. But every project that reaches a certain degree of success has them. Because the threshold to join the Facebook Group is so low (all you have to do is send a request), you'll see these people showing up there way before you start seeing them show up in person. Once you figure out what they look like, you can set up safeguards to keep them away from the actual real life Tribe. 

Some people have asked me in the past why I basically scare these people off when I could be selling my crap to them and making a quick buck. In short, I've learned the hard way that it's not worth the money. Isn't it kinda mean to push people way? Yes. Yes, it is. Part of the difficulty of leading projects like this is making the tough decisions that are ultimately good for the health of the group you're leading. You don't let them into the circle for the same reason you don't put the injured deer in your back seat.

 

 

How is the Group Being Utilized?

 As of right now, I will utilize the Facebook Group by posting these blog post AND a "Topic of the Day." Both are meant to both disseminate information and receive useful feedback, which is accomplished through respectful, productive, open discussions. 

IF THIS SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING YOU'D DIG, join the group and contribute your expertise from your unique perspective!

Conclusion

There you have it - the six primary reasons I started the Facebook Group. For the folks who may eventually read this and decide to start their own tribe, the platform doesn't really matter. I use Facebook because that's where all my important friends spend their social media time. 

~Jason

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