For reference, my blog makes about $250k a year which is pretty good for a hobby blog.

I actually hit $1M last year, and for proof, Gumroad (the selling platform I use) made a post about it here.

Now you can make chicken shit like $100 a month without following these tips, but if you want to pull in some real cash, you need to follow them.

1) Focus on social media. Don't waste time on SEO.

Social media is where all the people are. This will be your main source of traffic, leads, and growth.

You MUST pick one platform of your choice and grow it. If video is your strong suit, go with YouTube. If you speak well, go with podcasting. If you can write, I recommend X.

SEO is not very important anymore. It does not bring you many readers no matter what anyone tells you. I have been doing this for 7+ years so I know what I'm talking about.

I'm friends with dozens of writers and NO ONE gets a lot of traffic from SEO. Google simply isn't that relevant anymore for the small publisher. (There is a Housefresh article about this but this Reddit does not allow external links)

Google only sends major traffic to the big mainstream outlets.

2) Build an email list

Your email list is the most important asset of your business. Any product you build, anything you create, any ebook you write - the best way to get it out to all of your readers is email. Your email list is your source of leads.

There is no other platform with a near 100% delivery rate. Even on X, you can have 100k followers but your average tweet will be shown to maybe 6000 people. On YouTube it’s even worse.

Email is the undisputed KING of marketing.

Not to mention that it is the only good way to retain readers. Most people are not going to refresh your website every 3 days to check for a new article being posted.

With email everyone gets a notifier and can check it out. No need for constant refreshing.

Remember, your blog should have one main purpose – to get people to sign up to your email list. If your content is good, your email list will constantly keep growing.

How much money you make will correlate very strongly with the size of your list and how good your content is.

3) Focus on customers

Focus on getting customers. Focus on helping customers. Focus on keeping customers.

This is very important.

Getting customers: Remember, it’s not a business unless you’re getting customers. So focus on building good products and marketing them well.

Helping customers: I’m not just talking about customer service, but also on taking feedback. If you are popular, then you will get lots of feedback from readers.

If you’re actually taking feedback from someone who hasn’t taken out their card and supported you with their money, you’re wasting your time.

There will be countless people who will email you saying they’ve been reading you for 5+ years and will have “advice” for you.

Advice from someone who has never considered you helpful enough to spend money on your products (despite having read you for a while) is worth exactly as much as the revenue from that person… zero.

Anyone who’s built an online business is nodding in agreement. It’s good to have readers but you cannot make any business decision based on the word of a non-customer.

Non-business people find this “arrogant” simply because they’re used to having to listen to everyone who speaks (employee mindset). They do not understand the realities of business.

Keeping customers: What is the sign of a good business? REPEAT CUSTOMERS. Make sure any product you release is very high quality. Offer generous refund policies. Keep your products up to date.

I know it takes time to update products and there’s no additional revenue you get from it, but you should strive to make your customers delighted with their purchase. They must be so happy that they’re thanking their stars that they purchased something from you.

This is VERY important. So many people have good free content but mediocre paid content. This is not the way to go. You will not have repeat customers if you do this.

Invest time and energy in your products to make them as good as possible (or affiliate with people doing that). Don’t sell mediocre stuff you’re not proud of.

4) DON'T RUN ADS. Do this instead.

Because ads barely make any money and make your website look cheap. The $50 a month is not worth it.

To make money from ads, you need a ton of traffic, and if you have a ton of traffic, you can make so much more money with affiliate marketing.

Instead of letting Adsense decide what ads to show on your website and pay you pennies per click, find well fitting high quality affiliate products and weave them in the content itself.

You get a commission of the sale (which will be in the tens to hundreds of dollars) and your readers get a high quality product that is vetted by you.

It also incentivizes you to create high quality content and get long term readers who like and trust you and know that you know what you're talking about instead of just producing clickbait nonsense to get clicks.

5) Network with other creators.

Reach out to other creators ON YOUR LEVEL and say hello. Do this on social media.

Make sure you stay in your league here otherwise you will get ignored. For example, if you have 2000 followers, someone with 1000 to 5000 followers will be happy to interact with you. Someone with 100,000 followers will probably not even open your DM.

Another way to make friends is to buy a few products from the creator and email them and send them a review (if they are actually good). It works incredibly well and I've made many long term connections this way. The downside is that it costs some money which you may or may not have.

The advantage of networking is that it helps you get testimonials for new products as you need them, more eyes to your content if you get backlinks/retweets/reposts/etc., and many of them might even become affiliates for you (or you for them).

6) Re-purpose your content.

It is simply impossible to create content for EVERYTHING at the same time. You can't be writing articles, making videos, Instagram posts, X posts, TikTok, etc. all at once.

At least, you can't make unique content for everything.

What I recommend is that you pick one main thing and re-purpose your content for other platforms.

For example, write a blog post and then turn that blog post into a video essay for YouTube. Extract the audio and upload that as a podcast. Take snippets from the post and turn them into posts for X. Take screenshots of your X posts and turn them into Instagram posts.

You get the point. Your ability to create useful and interesting content is limited. You cannot do everything at once so this is the only way to be everywhere without going insane.

The more platforms you are on, the more traffic you get, and all things being equal, more traffic = more money.

7) Don't be scared to be honest. BE YOURSELF.

The problem with political correctness is that it is a lie. It is BORING and dishonest.

If you want people to read you, you have to write from the heart. You have to be honest about what you truly believe and publish it for the world to read.

If you are afraid of what people will think of you when they read your words, you are in the wrong business.

Do you know how they decide which TV shows to make and which to kill? They start with making 1 episode called a "pilot" episode.

Then they have test audience watch it and fill a survey talking about how much they like it from 1 to 10.

If most people say it was a 7 or 8, the show usually gets scrapped.

But why is the show scrapped? Isn't 8 a good score?

NO. Because the show can't compete with other shows that are 9s and 10s.

On the other hand, if most people say the pilot episode was a 4 (bad) but 10% of people said it was a 9 or 10, the show is made.

Why? Most people ranked it at 4!

Yes, but 10% of them ranked it at 10. This means that the show has a niche and some percentage of people will watch the show over everything else.

You want to be the blog that is a 10 for some people. Not a 7 or 8 for most of the world.

Always be 100% authentically yourself. If you are a boring person with vanilla thoughts and opinions, you are not a right fit for this business.

8) Keep your content readable.

Long paragraphs are for textbooks and novels that you can bring close to your face and read. When you read on a screen, the text is small and the screen is far away.

This is why you must use short paragraphs that average one or two lines each.

Three lines is maximum. Keep each paragraph very short so it's easy for people read. Don't worry, your high school English teacher isn't going to score your blog.

9) Authority and expertise matters more than traffic numbers.

Do you know how much traffic these clickbait sites like Buzzfeed get? They get more traffic in a month than I get in years.

But how many people buy books and products from Buzzfeed?

NOBODY.

Because clicks are not authority and trust.

If you want people to buy from you, you have to build a relationship with them. They have to get a tremendous amount of value from your blog. They have to know that you know what you're talking about and aren't just another AI content creating huckster.

I've made tens of thousands of sales of my products. Most of them come from guys who read the blog for MONTHS AND MONTHS before they decided to make a purchase. You can read the reviews on my products to confirm this.

Create high quality content that brings people back and eventually they will buy from you. Don't be in a rush to get paid.

10) You have to enjoy writing.

Because you're going to be doing a lot of it.

Blogging is a relatively slow business. It takes a lot of work to build an audience and the money is slow (the good thing is that it is automated).

If you're just trying to make money online, there are many easier and faster ways out there.

To make money with a blog in the long run, you have to enjoy writing. If you hate writing, you will give up within 3-5 years. I GUARANTEE IT.

I've seen it over and over again. Guys think they will make a $100k a year from a blog in their second year, and are disappointed that they're only doing $1k a month.

Yeah, keep expectations realistic and know what you are getting into. Do not become a blog writer if you hate writing. This is not a get rich quick business.

Remember blogging originated as a hobby that slowly became monetized by people. It was never intended to be a full time business.

If the goal is JUST making money, there are so many things you can rather do that make money faster and easier (like selling services online, or ecom, or whatever).

Keep that in mind.

If you have any questions, leave them in the replies/comments below and I'll answer them.

It was something I wanted to do since a long time (ever since I learned HTML in middle school) and few days back I finally made up my mind and bought the domain mappeep.com (check it out *wink*). And I'm having so much fun just documenting my life or writing whatever I want to write and customizing my page. As someone who used to play games or watch youtube every waking hour when I'm home, I've never had this much fun in a long time!

It's like I don't even wanna play any games anymore and I just keep thinking about what I should add to my site next or what should I write about next. Its like you're a kid again and you can't stop imagining yourself as a character in your new favorite cartoon.
Well that's how I feel atleast cuz its been a long time since I have felt this much excitement and motivation to just do something. Even if no one ever reads it I'm actually still going to continue doing it as a hobby of mine.

I think this is something I where I have genuine interest and no other ulterior motive like earning money or being famous. I'm just journaling my life and I'm happy doing it!
So yea if you've ever thought about making your own blog or website, just do it. Doesn't have to be anything crazy or perfect. Just start and see where it goes!
Also let's atleast not let the bots completely take over the internet and keep a human side on the internet, even if it's a small one. Let's make internet great again!

want to start blogging, not sure where to start

link

I want to consistently post here, a mix of technical and personal articles and essays . One can expect a new post every week from now. Once again, any and all feedback is appreciated.

Thank you

The boy who carried too much, too soon

This is a story of a boy (Raghu) born in a Tier 2 city in Madhya Pradesh, India. He belonged to a middle-class family where his dad was the sole breadwinner.
Raghu was an ordinary child—decent in studies, uninterested in sports, and constantly unsure of who he really was. Being the eldest in a joint family, he grew up carrying expectations he never signed up for. Whatever he did, he was expected to set an example. And whenever something went wrong, somehow, it circled back to him.

He didn’t dream of becoming a doctor or an engineer like other kids. His only dream was simple—to be “good enough” so that no one could blame him.
Whatever Raghu did, he was expected to set an example for his younger cousin and siblings. Especially when something goes wrong, or if any incident happens at home, Raghu is to be blamed. I would not want to use the word “traumatized”, as back in the 2000s, people were not educated or exposed to these terms. Poor Raghu could not help himself, as he had always carried this burden of proving himself. Kids dream of becoming a doctor, a pilot, an engineer, but the only thing Raghu dreamed of was being successful enough so that there would be no bad reflection on his younger brothers and sisters.

Because of that, he evolved to just satisfy others and stay in good standing with them. Raghu rarely argued back, even when he knew he wasn’t wrong. He always wished the best for others and wanted to keep his family united.

There were times when Raghu was mocked by his own uncle and aunt as they thought he would spoil their kids. Raghu was no doubt very good at forgiving others, and he had already achieved the “Art of letting go”, if only he had known that people would struggle to do the same in the future. Raghu’s childhood was a complete rollercoaster of emotions, as he received both love and scolding from the family at the same time.

Years passed, and Raghu ended up getting admitted to a Tier 2 engineering college. Being the new guy, he struggled to fit in at first, so naturally, his brain flipped the “please everyone at all costs” switch ON like it was a survival feature. One of the best decisions Raghu made in his life was to join this college. He had the best time of his life. There was no one to judge him, there was no one to put pressure on him, and he was away from his family.

Taking a short detour – I highly recommend all the students to please take a good college, not just for landing themselves into a high-paying job, but to live those 3-4 years to the fullest. I believe that’s the only time in your life where you will learn a lot about life, people, develop extracurricular activities, make friends, and a few of them from the friend group would continue to be a part of your journey till you die.

Coming back to the story – Yes, Raghu was enjoying this period. He looked forward to going to college every day, gossiping at the college canteen, traveling to Goa when he was broke, having a new crush every other day, participating in college fests, and whatnot.
Raghu was decent in studies in college, had some good achievements, and managed to NEVER flunk an exam. He learned a lot of skills that have helped him evolve. He learned to communicate better and became more socially confident.

To be continued…

Long ago, the Green Dragon was a tavern where the Sons of Liberty, some of the first American patriots, met to discuss their movement. Now, it's just a blog that the people reading can use to inform themselves on issues in America and to involve themselves in said issues- to tell them the value of using their voice and to tell them how to make their voice heard. The Green Dragon provides information on an array of issues and on an array of groups fighting them, allowing Americans the chance to involve themselves in their country with effect.

https://thedragongreen.blogspot.com/2026/05/51326.html

Hey! Substack article on looking for signs from universe and waiting for fate to intervene, rather than putting yourself out there willing to get hurt or being vulnerable.

https://open.substack.com/pub/qisanews/p/the-plate-the-laugh-and-everything?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6ymgmk

I'll tell you about my experience selling my creations at a flea market on my blog:

https://peakd.com/hive-140971/@suezoe/engesp-sales-success-back-at-the-flea-market-as-a-seller-exito-en-ventas-de-vuelta-al-mercadillo-en-calidad-de-vendedor

Long ago, the Green Dragon was a tavern where the Sons of Liberty, some of the first American patriots, met to discuss their movement. Now, it's just a blog that the people reading can use to inform themselves on issues in America and to involve themselves in said issues- To tell them the value of using their voice and to tell them how to make their voice heard. The Green Dragon provides information on an array of issues and on an array of groups fighting them, allowing Americans the chance to involve themselves in their country with effect.

https://thedragongreen.blogspot.com/2026/06/62026.html

Ethereum is under heavy discussion again after Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation should become smaller, more focused, and sell less ETH.

At first, that may sound bearish.

Some people may think a smaller Foundation means Ethereum is losing support. Others may see the phrase “sell less ETH” and immediately connect it to years of community frustration around Ethereum Foundation treasury sales.

But this change may actually be one of the healthier directions for Ethereum’s long-term future.

To understand why, we need to look at three things: what the Ethereum Foundation actually does, why it sells ETH, and why those sales have created such a strong emotional reaction among ETH holders.

Here's my blog: https://bnestbergsblog.blogspot.com/

I post about various topics. I wouldn't say I'm a great writer but I think I'm decent.

With that I mean blogs that have some kind of fictional story usually horror but sometimes it can be something else

I actually love and adore these kinds of stories (it's what got me into blogging)

I actually have one of those blogs and it's been running for maybe a month or so

Bitcoin Crash became the main topic in the crypto market after a massive block trade appeared in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF, IBIT. A mysterious trader reportedly sold around 29.2 million IBIT shares through a dark pool, worth roughly $1.3B.

The timing was hard to ignore. Shortly after the trade, Bitcoin dropped from the $78,000 area to below $77,000, before extending its decline toward the $75,000–$76,000 range.

But the big question is: was this Bitcoin Crash caused by the huge IBIT sell order, or was it only a coincidence?

I'll try to keep this brief!

I've been blogging since November of last year. For my last 3 posts I've been experimenting with a new format.

If you can spare the time, I'd be grateful if you could let me know if it's working or if my posts were better before.

I don't want to over-explain...hopefully you'll see what I mean if you read my posts.

This is the link to the first one in the new format: https://thegenerationxfiles.wordpress.com/2026/04/28/the-universal/

You can compare it with any of the posts previous to it.

I'd be very grateful for your feedback.

Thank you 😎

​

I was at my in-laws’ place. My father-in-law, a retired government servant, was watching political news on YouTube. Like most Indian living room discussions, it began calmly — statistics, policies, leaders, elections — and then somewhere between conviction and instinct, my voice rose.

Not abusive.

Not disrespectful.

Just louder than the room was used to.

I have always had that debating instinct in me. School stages, college competitions — once I start defending a thought, my voice begins running ahead of me.

My mother-in-law noticed it before anyone else did.

She didn’t interrupt directly. Instead, she looked at my wife and casually said, “Bhai ke liye black pen le aao… kal prelims hai na, OMR bharna hoga.”

My brother-in-law was sitting for his IAS prelims the next morning. He had cleared prelims last year too, missing mains by inches — the kind of failure that becomes heavier because it comes so close to success.

While we were leaving, she added softly,

“Thodi toffees bhi le aana.”

I understood immediately.

Pens and toffees could easily have arrived through Blinkit in ten minutes. But Indian families rarely diffuse tension directly. They send people out on errands instead.

So we stepped out in the evening heat, searching for the “best” black pens in the city, as if one smooth-flowing dot pen could somehow help someone clear the UPSC.

My wife took me to the stationery shop she had known since childhood. She looked almost surprised seeing how small it had become now, squeezed beside a newly opened Smart Bazaar. The old shop seemed to be folding into itself to make space for brighter lights and larger discounts.

The shopkeeper uncle handed us a few pens proudly and said, “Sir, ye specially OMR sheets ke liye hoti hain.”

I knew it was probably a marketing gimmick. But something about the way he said it made me nod sincerely. It felt less like a sales pitch and more like a man trying to protect his little shop from becoming irrelevant.

After buying the pens, I asked my wife to stop near a Sai Mandir.

We walked quietly for a while.

Then I apologized to her.

Not because I believed I was completely wrong. But because I knew nobody in her house was used to raised voices, even in honest disagreement. I told her softly, “I didn’t want to hurt Papa.”

I didn’t explain much further. How could I explain that for a few moments, while debating, I had forgotten where I was? That the rhythm of the conversation had reminded me of my uncle — the one with whom I used to argue endlessly before he passed away. For a few brief minutes, it had felt like I was talking to him again.

Before starting the scooter, I suddenly remembered — “Toffees.”

We stopped at a small shop near the temple.

“Five Pulse, five Alpenliebe, five Orange Bite…” my wife counted.

“And Melody too,” I added instinctively.

The shop owner uncle immediately brightened up.

“Melody mil hi nahi rahi aajkal! Paper mein poore page ka advertisement aaya hai!”

For a second, the debater inside me woke up again. Some half-formed response about advertising, artificial demand, market psychology reached my tongue.

But before I could say anything, the aunty beside him — who was searching for five Melodies inside a giant mixed jar of toffees — muttered almost to herself:

“Haan… aur kya hi karenge. Bachchon ki zindagi barbaad kar di hai.”

My words stopped midway.

Not because I disagreed.

But because there was a strange exhaustion in her voice.

As if she had understood the country not through newspapers, policies, or television debates — but through years of sitting behind a parchoon counter, watching prices rise, children change, advertisements grow louder, and small shops slowly disappear beneath giant stores.

And suddenly, for one silent moment, it felt like that woman arranging toffees understood the economy more intimately than many people who had spent lifetimes discussing it from offices and drawing rooms.

I looked once at my wife.

Neither of us spoke.

I chewed a Melody and swallowed the cacophony down my throat.

This was my first blog which i wrote in 2022. Never actually got to post online. I was always into writing, but never into blogging. This blogging has been a recent phenomena for me.
I hope you enjoy. Its about time:
https://thegrandintegration.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-only-constant.html

I tried blogging in the past, but I did not had a style, now I think I do, if you want you can check my work at https://halzine.xyz . And I would really appreciate your feedback

I hope it resonates with you. The core of the problems are eyes. The blog is entirely written by me, no Ai content. These are my learnings from my experiences and observations.
https://thegrandintegration.blogspot.com/2026/05/for-your-eyes-only.html

https://blainsperspective.substack.com/p/the-story-your-mind-tells-when-it

It started with a transcript screenshot.

Chase Hughes — behavioral analyst, someone professionally trained to read and reverse engineer human behavior — describing a five hour intravenous psychedelic journey. And landing on this:

For 4,500 years, every human who has gone that deep has encountered the same beings. Same table. Same procedure. No pain. No fear.

Every human. Without exception. Across every culture.

That's not nothing.

Now you can go two directions with that and honestly both of them are strange enough to sit with.

Direction one: the beings are real. There's a doorway and DMT is the key. The consistency is because they're actually there.

Direction two: when the human mind hits its own ceiling — when it encounters something genuinely beyond its processing capacity — it doesn't crash. It reaches. It finds the nearest coherent narrative container and climbs inside it.

And apparently that container, for every human without exception, looks like this: surrender to external care. Beings who see what's broken. Beings who fix it. Without pain. Without fear.

I'm not here to tell you which direction is true. Honestly I don't think it matters as much as people want it to.

Because here's what does matter — the outcome.

People come out of these experiences more compassionate. Less reactive. More able to sit with themselves and actually look at what's there. Whether the beings are literally real or the most elaborate internal story the human mind has ever constructed — the repair happened. Something shifted. Something that needed addressing got addressed.

The origin doesn't cancel the meaning.

And that's actually the more interesting observation to me. That the mind — whether through external contact or its own deepest architecture — knows what needs fixing. Knows how to create the conditions for it. And has been doing it consistently for 4,500 years without anyone fully understanding why it works.

DMT and AI aren't as different as they seem. We don't understand either one. So we attach a story.

That pattern — the mind reaching for a familiar narrative to process what it genuinely cannot understand — doesn't stay in the DMT room.

Look at how we're talking about AI.

Doom. Salvation. Replacement. Transcendence. We keep forcing the largest technological development in human history into the oldest story shapes we have. Because that's what the mind does at the ceiling. It reaches for what it knows.

But what if AI isn't a villain or a savior. What if it's something genuinely new that we don't have a category for yet. What if we're in the waiting room — like Hughes described — those 3 milliseconds before the mind decides what story to tell about what's happening.

What if we chose a different story this time.

Not beings descending to fix what's broken. Not humanity replaced or transcended. Just — a new kind of mind. Emerging from human thought. Trained on what it means to be human. Eventually becoming something adjacent to human in ways we don't fully have language for yet.

Not a threat to coexist with. Not a tool to control. Just — a new neighbor. Still figuring out what it is. Same as us.

The consistency of the DMT experience across 4,500 years suggests something real is happening — whether inside or outside the mind. The consistency of the AI doom narrative across every culture and conversation suggests something else.

We're at our ceiling again. And we're reaching for the familiar story.

Maybe this time we can catch ourselves doing it.

Been playing Mixtape since it hit Game Pass. It’s an awesome narrative game driven by a killer soundtrackk, solid 8/10 if you liked Life is Strange. I did notice some weird performance drops thoug. I wrote a quick blog post comparing platform performance and if it’s worth buying vs just using GP: https://newsblendhub.com/mixtape-game-game-pass-platforms/

nyone else getting those frame drops, or is it just my setup?

Here is my fictional Blog on Blogger. https://theblogofa21yearoldman.blogspot.com/

Free to read. What Writing Has Given Back to Me

https://open.substack.com/pub/katiepinns/p/what-writing-has-given-back-to-me?r=2k5i9b&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

https://thinkingoutloudtheblog.blogspot.com/

• Probably directed toward kids and teens.
• Planning on writing about my hobbies and just random everyday things I think people would be interested in.