Ben Casnocha and Ramit Sethi discuss whether to build a blog around a narrow niche or your personality, and why high-quality content alone won't work without outreach. They cover audience size versus quality, content formats, and what realistic blogging goals actually look like.
The way you stand out is the way you stand out doing anything right through doing something really high quality and then letting people know about it. And there's that. Two prong. Yeah. I can't just like write good content and be a hermit. You have to do outreach. But I think if you do that, it's very possible to write a blog that's one day be as popular as you are to get to know the person you've always wanted to meet. That's interesting. I mean, Tim and I talked about this last couple weeks ago on the blog, which is getting readers depends on your goal. Do you want to be a really large blog? Do you want to have a book? Or do you want to have a small blog? Really influential readers that are exactly what you want. The way that we're talking about is actually to contrast our blog. Oh yeah, let's talk about probably more people in your read. Although my blog. But I think our friend Chris has a theory that if you want to have a popular blog, you have to have two characteristics. One is you have to focus on a, on a topic so you can become a domain expert. So for you it's personal finance, right? You're the go to guy in the blogosphere on money and personal finance. Or you have to have massive cult personalities so you can be like one of these, why can't I do that? You have a vote. But there are like certain celebrities who like write shitty content. They don't have a domain expertise, but they have tons and tons of readers because there's just this cult around them. Now, my blog, so I don't. My blog is not focused on really anything. What is your blog, by the way? What's the URL? It's just go to bed. And essentially it's about entrepreneurship, but really it's very wide ranging. And so because it's so wide ranging and varied, it limits my audience, but it limits my audience in a way that I'm okay with. So I'll have fewer readers. But to my mind, the readers that are higher quality and also widely interested like me. And so the comments I get and the relationships I build through it are people who I like hanging out with. Like generally I don't like hanging out with somebody who's only like obsessed about business and has no other interests. But if you read my blog, it means you must at least have some interest in these other things that I'm blogging about. So it's a trade off. Right? So for me, I'm not trying to maximize readership. I Want to have, you know, healthy number of readers, but I'm happy to limit it and to get the demographic that I'm looking for. Well, in some ways, you are actually. You actually put up small barriers to people participating. You don't. Your newsletter is like weird and hard to find. You don't email regularly. And I always scream at you about this. Whereas me, it's like, dude, sorry if I know better. And of course I don't do enough with it as well. But I email people and stuff. My take has. I get a thrill out of writing something and starting to get comments, and then it quickly turns into rage when I see stupid comments, which I then mock. But yeah, my take was personal finance. Although I will teach you rich, as I've emphasized over and over again, it's not just about personal finance, but whatever. That's how it gets pigeonhole. That's how it's seen in the minds of the unwashed masses. They know it's like there's negotiation, there's automation, there's entrepreneurship. It's about living a rich life. So, I mean, the real leaders are not stupid. They're actually really smart. And if you look back at the first two years, three years of post, they're really long. Now note this, because the type of content you produce determines your type of readers. If I had written Top 10 Ways to Do blah, I would have gotten a bunch of morons. Instead, I got a really intelligent, amazing group of readers. As I've done YouTube videos and other things, that's opened up the funnel to people who may not be able to read a really long, nuanced post, but they can certainly click play on a YouTube video. So the quality may go down, but the quantity certainly goes up. You have to think about carefully, what kind of readers do you want? The video I did with Tim, which is on my YouTube page, we talked about some people in Silicon Valley who have relatively small group of readers, but they're very influential. Yeah, I think another Ramitz blog is almost a business of sorts. I think it's okay to write a blog that's just a way for you to practice writing, a way for you to develop a repository of things you're reading or things you're thinking about. I don't think you have to be so ambitious where you treat it like a business. So if you're totally involved in your own business or you have a day job or whatever, and a blog is very much a side thing for you, I think that's okay. Even if you have a limited readership. So long as you view the exercise of blogging as something independent from feedback that you get, like, if you're okay yet, you know, comments, I think that's fine. Right? It's a mechanism for you to post your thoughts out there and that will make you a better writer and in return, in my opinion, makes you a better thinker. I think that what you said is directly related to the I will teach you rich crowd, which is being brutally realistic with yourself. So when we talk about weddings, for example, we talk about how, look, the average wedding is going to cost about 25,000 bucks. The average guy is going to get married at X age and the average girl at Y age. Let's be brutally realistic and say I'm not going to have a small wedding. I'm probably going to have a really big wedding. Once you do that, then you can start to make moves based on honesty. The same is true of blogging or writing. If you are getting no readers, be honest with yourself. First of all, is that intentional? And if so, are you? If so, that's fine. Be conscious of it and then give it up. Don't be anxious about it. The whole point of GTD four hour, real quick, I will teach rich is in part to reduce anxiety. The second thing is, if you're not getting comments and you think you should be, then ask yourself, what am I doing wrong? And perhaps to end this part, most unsatisfyingly is that I didn't get a lot of comments for the first six months and then one day it just magically picked up and I don't know, I didn't do anything. Brian stopped. And the therapist visit, yes, that was a side benefit. You became richer.
