Blog update 1/3/2018
Happy new year!
My semi-viral post, called "How to be an uncommonly good web developer" is still getting some hits here and there. It will probably plateau out just under 9k claps. Last I checked, it had 35k hits and 1.2k fans (# of people who clapped). And my list jumped from 32 subscribers over 160 currently. I'm very pleased.
I also managed to pull out a new post two days ago that got published this evening. It will probably not be as popular, but it was fun to write. It's called "Inspirational success stories by self-taught web developers" and was a glorified listicle of stories that I'd seen on Medium. The authors all wrote about how they got into the field, many of them against quite high odds.
I'm still very very early on, but I've noticed that writing is getting slightly easier the more I do it. I'm still working on mainly focusing on the writing part. I'm trying to plan out the next few posts but sometimes I just don't know what people are interested in.
I am slowly getting a sense of what types of articles people like to read. Success stories, also I think tips on problem-solving and productivity as related to coding, in-depth and well done tutorials. I can see myself finding a sweet spot the problem-solving and soft skill type stuff. And also doing tutorials to fill in the gaps of areas that seem to be overlooked-- servers and deployment, nitty gritty how-to's on less popular stuff.
I'd also like to make some good GitHub projects that document things that would help beginners-- file structures, Grunt files, how to set up Sass files.
One things that I'm still trying to figure out is how to monetize this all. A lot of bloggers monetize by ultimately offering an online course that ranges from $199-500 or more. But there are already a lot of learn to code tutorial courses on places like Udemy for just $10-15. So I definitely can't compete with that.
One area that I think I could offer a unique product would be like the School of Motion model. I'd offer a 12 week course that would have the students build different websites from a design, and critique the front-end code. I think that a supportive environment where people of the same level can help each other would be pretty valuable. My main worry with that is that it would take a lot of time-based work while the course is going on.
My ideal product would be something that I can sell passively, without necessarily needing to hire people. But a school type model would be impossible to do just on my own. So I need to think about that. I'm starting to do some research into making online courses.
Other smaller products could be a book about problem-solving and productivity in coding, t-shirts with cool tech-y designs (there are a lot of crappy ones out there), a package of templates that people can work off of.
There are a lot of possibilities, but at the moment I just need to worry about writing content and getting email subscribers. And I think I'll figure out the rest as I go.
My semi-viral post, called "How to be an uncommonly good web developer" is still getting some hits here and there. It will probably plateau out just under 9k claps. Last I checked, it had 35k hits and 1.2k fans (# of people who clapped). And my list jumped from 32 subscribers over 160 currently. I'm very pleased.
I also managed to pull out a new post two days ago that got published this evening. It will probably not be as popular, but it was fun to write. It's called "Inspirational success stories by self-taught web developers" and was a glorified listicle of stories that I'd seen on Medium. The authors all wrote about how they got into the field, many of them against quite high odds.
I'm still very very early on, but I've noticed that writing is getting slightly easier the more I do it. I'm still working on mainly focusing on the writing part. I'm trying to plan out the next few posts but sometimes I just don't know what people are interested in.
I am slowly getting a sense of what types of articles people like to read. Success stories, also I think tips on problem-solving and productivity as related to coding, in-depth and well done tutorials. I can see myself finding a sweet spot the problem-solving and soft skill type stuff. And also doing tutorials to fill in the gaps of areas that seem to be overlooked-- servers and deployment, nitty gritty how-to's on less popular stuff.
I'd also like to make some good GitHub projects that document things that would help beginners-- file structures, Grunt files, how to set up Sass files.
One things that I'm still trying to figure out is how to monetize this all. A lot of bloggers monetize by ultimately offering an online course that ranges from $199-500 or more. But there are already a lot of learn to code tutorial courses on places like Udemy for just $10-15. So I definitely can't compete with that.
One area that I think I could offer a unique product would be like the School of Motion model. I'd offer a 12 week course that would have the students build different websites from a design, and critique the front-end code. I think that a supportive environment where people of the same level can help each other would be pretty valuable. My main worry with that is that it would take a lot of time-based work while the course is going on.
My ideal product would be something that I can sell passively, without necessarily needing to hire people. But a school type model would be impossible to do just on my own. So I need to think about that. I'm starting to do some research into making online courses.
Other smaller products could be a book about problem-solving and productivity in coding, t-shirts with cool tech-y designs (there are a lot of crappy ones out there), a package of templates that people can work off of.
There are a lot of possibilities, but at the moment I just need to worry about writing content and getting email subscribers. And I think I'll figure out the rest as I go.
