Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

http://mrmonksy.com/blog

Why don't I blog? Well I don't feel like I should be running marketing for it and have to sydicate it everytime I write an article. It's exhausting to build your brand not get rewarded for it. I wouldn't mind if it built a community that would contribute back to me based on the article and I could contribute to them. I.e. We could do code golf challenges have blog replies etc.

Nope.. the audience is just not there. Our tools were crippled and abandoned (ping backs for blogs) etc.

Let's say no publishing for the privacy concern. There are a lot of claims that writing is helping the writers think thru things clearly or understand better. I want to explore writing for decision making. What is a decision I should "think thru by writing"? Maybe writing lets the writer weigh pros and cons and be more at peace (for a longer time) with a decision.

Anyway, I have a dozen more open tabs now to check out the the blogs people shared in this thread. Also, recently there are lots of blog posts telling others to write more.

Speaking of open tabs, I have started to think that writing down things is like closing those open tabs of thoughts in the head.

I read patio11 over the years and was struck by his often mentioned "Write about what you know and it will surprise you the value it will add to people" (paraphrasing). In particular, in one of his posts about consulting he mentions: "Some of my consulting engagements were essentially me doing a dramatic reading of my blogs posts."

I realized that for the past couple years I had been coaching my friends through salary negotiations and general career advice as well. This led me to start a blog and write about some of the ideas and stories I used to help people get a better understanding of how to negotiate a compensation package, how to think about switching jobs etc.

I then posted it to Hacker News and didn't get any response at all for the first couple posts. Then one of them took off. I should mention that when that post did take off, I thought there was a bug in my metrics script but no, not a bug, it did indeed hit the front page of HN.

~30 people reached out and a couple turned into paying clients.

So answer to the question "was it worth it"?

- From a personal financial perspective, better than not doing it

- From a "wait! you can write things down, people read your words and then pay you money to hear more?!?!?" perspective, I can't think of a more worth it experience

PS There is this one distinct memory from when I did a free consult and the person said "I read your blog and thought to myself 'If I'm ever switching jobs, this guy is the first person I'm calling' ".

It brings 2k unique visitors per day according to Cloudflare analytics.

My understanding is that the following are your main concerns: 1. Content, including blog posts, talks, and images. You don't really want those reposted, especially if misattributed or altered. 2. I know you really don't want people to come to rely on the software have put out there on the net, especially in any way where you would feel obligated to provide support, notifications about vulnerabilities, etc.

For #1, clarifying that the contents of the `blog`, `gallery`, `talks` and `static` folders (and perhaps `template` too) are not part are not covered by the license, would effectively take care of this. (I also agree that it probably won't stop people from hosting such modified copies, especially if they are using scraping techniques, as opposed to running the code, but at least then it is completely unambiguous that they are violating the license.)

For #2 the existing nonstandard license, and warnings in the readme are probably mostly sufficient to make this clear. Plus honestly overall the code is pretty tailored to you. If I were to try to create a blog based on your code, I'd want to rip out the galley and talk sections, would need to redesign or remove the webmention support (or run a stripped version of the `mi` api), remove the patreon support, remove or modify xe-conv, change the cloud flare ping code, remove signalboost (I'd be too small to meaningfully boost anybody) etc. And all of that on top of creating the content, creating a stylesheet I like, creating new templates, etc.