building a blog in 2024 [issue #3]

Dopamine hits. We all crave them.

I had to jump start my car yesterday. Instead of pulling up a blog post, it was much easier to watch someone do it on YouTube.

Side note: where would we be without home improvement videos?

I see the writing on the wall. It’s all about video in 2024 and beyond. It’s why I was so in on TikTok earlier this year. Blog posts are OUT. Short-form video is IN.

So what a great time for me to start a blog, right?

But here’s the thing: writing blog posts can still be a valuable use of your time. Yes, even in 2024.

How? I’ll show you…

Consistency

One of the hardest things to do as a content creator is consistency put out content.

(I would know, I missed my Friday newsletter, so I’m sending it out on a Monday instead).

Writing blog posts helps solve this issue. All that is required for a blog post is a computer and a word processor. You don’t need CapCut, light rings, or even your phone in order to “blog”.

So each week, sit down, log off everything, and commit to writing at least one blog post.

This will get you in the mode of content creation (so to speak).

If you can commit to posting once per week, you can have 52 blog posts by the end of the year. If you can write a blog post every day, you can have 365 posts in that same time frame.

Either way, you’ll have content, which I hear is a pretty important thing for content creators to have.

Reappropriation

Now that you have all these blog posts, you can start working on the next hardest thing about being a content creator: having enough to talk/write about!

Blog posts are in a sense, evolving pieces of the written word. You can edit them and keep adding facts to make them more helpful to your users. They are not permanent fixtures like maybe an e-book is.

You can keep adding and editing until that blog post is the ultimate authority on a given subject.

With that one really good blog post, you can reappropriate it into a long-form YouTube video. It can be turned into a section for a weekly newsletter. It can even be cut up into 5 short-form videos.

Blog posts provide you a medium to pivot your writing into other forms of content. With AI, you can even more easily turn a blog post into a YouTube script, for example. These days it’s as easy as just asking ChatGPT to do it for you.

Your blog now provides a base for your content creation and a base for your video creation. You’re more than halfway to being a successful content creator by simply just writing blogs.

Audience Testing

Now, with all your content you need to find your audience.

This definitely falls into the “easier said than done” category. On paper, gathering YouTube and newsletter subscribers seems easy. MrBeast has 200+ million subscribers; I am only looking to have a few thousand. How hard could it be to get .001% of what MrBeast has?

It’ll be a slow, slow grind for most. By continuing to post videos and blogs, you’ll eventually start to find what kind of topics gather the most engagement. If you’re getting a lot of views on a particular video or a lot of comments on a particular blog, odds are it’s resonating with an audience.

Continue to experiment. What searches are appearing in the Google Search Console the most? It might be time to double-down on the subject that’s getting the most queries.

You’ll never know what audiences are searching for if you don’t first start putting yourself (and your content) out there. The best content strategy is first writing as much as you can. Everything else will fall into place from there.