I hate marketing

I’ve been wondering what to make of this blog. I’ve had it around for years, and I’m in the middle of a challenge to myself to post every day for a month. I’ve been cheating a bit, back-dating some posts to keep my streak going, but other than that I’ve been maintaining a good run. I don’t have a specific minimum word count, but I’m making an effort to type at least a few paragraph. No single link video posts or whatever as I might have done in the past.

I don’t really know what I want to do with this. I guess I’m using it as an alternative to journaling. I’m kind of interested to see what will happen at the end of the 30 days. I’m trying to keep it low-effort, not worry about SEO, analytics and all that. Still I can’t help but look at the stats from time to time, just to verify that no one is looking. It’s like my anti-dopamine to all of the like-hunting and attention seeking that I might be engaging in on other social media.

I’ve always desired to keep a bit of semi-anonymity in this place. I’ve scrubbed all the obvious places for my proper name, but as I’ve said before, anyone with the time or will could probably track me down in a few hours, if that. I like to think that I have the freedom to be honest here without having to worry about what others think, but I know that’s not true. I’m still not completely honest here either. I’m not ready to drop the wall quite yet.

Maybe that’s the point of this exercise, to give me 30 days to try and refine my voice, get some things off my chest that I’ve been meaning to for some time. And maybe I’ll have something true to say that might resonate. Who knows.

I spend a lot of time reading Medium and it seems like there’s a whole meta-category of articles from ‘professional’ content creators and tips for this, that and the other things. I’m not really sure I want to go that far into publishing and blogging, but I guess at this point it’s only natural.

I really must credit Seth Godin for giving me the inspiration to start this challenge. He told Tim Ferris that the most important thing he did for his business was to blog every day. I suppose I’m hoping to emulate his success in some way. Maybe soon I’ll be able to write more than one post a day to schedule them out and give myself a break. Right now I try to write early in the morning after meditating, but since I went to an hour it’s been a bit tougher. Especially with the wife out of town. There’s no room for oversleeping, so I find myself writing here at the end of the day.

Most of the time the biggest challenge is just figuring out what to write about. I’m keeping a clear head most of the time, but I’m going to have to start planning things out a bit more if I’m going to keep this up. Brainstorming topics and keeping a list in Airtable or somewhere that I can go to if I’m feeling a bit unenthusiastic. For now I’m happy to just sit down and hammer something out for 20 or 30 minutes, but at some point I’ll probably settle on a longer-form piece like I’ve written elsewhere. A few thousand words or something.

Next thing I know I’ll be doing SEO and going full marketing evil-genius. Testing headlines and optimizing for this and so on and on. I have a new client I’m working with that wants to do an e-commerce site on Shopify. This and the fact that I’ve been mucking around with Printsables for a small WooCommerce website I threw together quickly earlier this month is apparently enough for the YouTube algorithms to start throwing me all kinds of garbage ads in the middle of music listening. Just a bunch of annoying tech bros telling me how so-and-so made x number of dollars with this and that.

There was an infomercial that was pretty popular during the late 90s. Some MLM, most likely, but the pitch was that success and riches was all to be yours, “just by placing classified ads in newspapers.” I think the guy eventually went to jail for fraud, and Craigslist killed the classified business, but the game just moved online.

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