You’re an Engineer. You’ve got lots of knowledge, ideas, and experience. AND you want to make money online. But you also got that nice, safe job that already gives a lot of freedom, pays the bills, and makes most days pretty okay. The safety makes it hard to find the motivation/time.
That’s actually me and this is how I’m doing it, maybe it’ll work for you too.
Disclaimer: this is a living document, I’ve actually been struggling with doing this for the last 2 years and am making a new commitment to getting it done (July 2nd, 2024). If you find this page and don’t see a new post in the last week, please shame me in the comments or on social media. Thanks!
How do you start your blog in 3 easy steps?
Every plan needs steps, even better if they’re easy!
- Pick a domain name. Honestly, I way over thought this. Yes, I eventually want to make a robot business, and I thought RCRobot was a good name, but using my name (DavidSwed) would have worked perfectly well. There’s one thing that will always be true, people prefer to interact with people, not brands. Second truth, if you build a personal brand, it is allowed to change because you are human and humans are never the same day to day. It’s harder for brands to change. That being said, I love robots so I can probably always come up with an article about them.
- Create an account with a hosting site and pay the fee. I use Bluehost and WordPress, it’s pretty dang cheap. Every once in while, there will be some issue with WordPress, but the fix is just a google search away. You probably won’t have to deal with that if you use something like Wix, but it’ll cost more. Generally, it’s probably okay to spend the extra money, especially if it helps you keep at it. The upside is way greater than the downside.
- Write a post. Don’t screw around with the themes or the homepage or bio. Just get your first post written. I’m doing that by writing this post, which is just my master plan thinly veiled as a how to guide (Got ya!) It’s important for your site to look good and you should set aside time for it, but it’s more important to fill it with content.
How do you make a plan that you can stick with?
Ever heard that term “Paralysis by analysis”? That’s me, and been me for the last 2+ years when it comes to trying to make money on the internet. I’ve probably listened to hundreds of hours of business podcasts, thousands of Youtube videos and read a bazillion self help books. There’s one thing they all have in common, they say to get off your butt and just do it! Well this is me finally following that advice….
I’m starting from not writing at all, so I’m not going to try and write a post every day and spend 3 hours doing it. I’m currently following a weight lifting plan that gets me in the gym 3 times a week and I’ve actually stuck with it for the last 4 weeks, so I’m going to borrow that model. It also helps to set a specific place, and time to start a habit.
For me: Desk in the living room before work (5:30-6ish) Tuesday, Thursday, Friday Alternating draft days and edit days with the rules that I must publish what I have at the end of edit days.
Every two weeks I’ll update the content plan and improve the site.
Day 3
What up! I’m actually doing it! It’s edit day on this post and I’m kind of proud of my self. I’m doing a 10k race this morning and I’m still making sure I get the editing done.
What do I mean by editing? I’m not exactly sure what pro writers do when they edit, but here are my steps (so far):
- Reread and fix the obvious grammar mistakes
- make sure the intro makes sense with the title and is interesting. (Hopefully I get better at this over time)
- Make sure there’s at least 1 image
- Check the readability score to make sure it’s easy https://readabilityformulas.com/
Day 14
In the last 2 weeks:
- made 4 new posts (there’s 15ish on the site right now)
- stuck to my content schedule (this is the biggest win!)
- got ~40 views on the site
The hardest thing about creating content, at least for me, is being consistent. Everyone starts out at some level of terrible when doing something new. There are infinite ways to get better, but all of them involve actually doing the thing. Now that I’m doing the thing (writing on this blog) I can start to think of how to make it better.
For me, that’s to start thinking of my readers, deciding who they are and trying to help them solve the problems. For this, I’m going to get real narrow and pick a type of reader I identify as. This will help write using my own knowledge.
My target reader: Technical mentor or programming student on a FRC team
Problem to solve: written tutorials and documentation for vendor specific motor drivers don’t exist
How:
- create a set of pages for spark max motor drivers, explaining how to setup and use in code.
- I’m going to look at GeekforGeeks to see if they have a common format that I can borrow for code tutorials.
- I’m also going to create these as pages instead of posts and create a general resource page that organizes all the links so the reader can easily browse the content
Bonus tip: I noticed the webpage was being incredibly slow, I used a page speed test site to confirm. The TTFB (time to first byte) was at 0.563 seconds (BAD!) (https://app.sitespeedbot.com/)
I didn’t have any form of caching enabled, I added the W3 Total Cache plugin, spent 3 minutes going through the setup up wizard and now the site TTFB is 0.071 seconds and feels infinitely better to load.
Day 30
I’m taking a pause on the blog, which might mean I’m quitting again? Or at least stopping the pace I’m going so I can reevaluate why I’m doing it. My initial why was money centered, which isn’t a great reason but also, I question whether my current method of writing posts or tutorials will work. Here are my thoughts:
- I’ve written 12 posts in the last 30 days (which I’m actually proud of) but they’ve only created 4 views. Granted, it’s he middle of the summer and most views would come from the school year.
- Right now, this blog relies on search engine traffic to drive views, but google is creating it’s own response at the top of search which will only get better with AI
- Money hasn’t worked as a motivator for me, so I need to find a different reason why to do extra projects.
- Working on this blog pulls from my other goals for my Robotics team and fitness.
- Having my own work on the internet still feels valuable so I will probably keep writing and creating stuff for this website, but not on a content schedule, and not with the intention that this will ever generate money.