Okay, this has been a long time coming, but it needed to happen. Let’s take a journey, shall we?

In 2011, after a few years learning about blogging from people like Michael Hyatt, John Saddington, and Derek Halpern, I decided to start taking my blogging seriously. I took the leap to buy a domain name, web hosting, and fired up a self-hosted WordPress install.

My primary goal was to write about things I was learning about social media, design, and online marketing. Fast forward a few years, and I was recognized in various online publications as one of the best social media bloggers in the world.

I became a small-time public figure in the online space, and my marketing consulting career was taking off. Working with successful businesses building high-converting websites and high-level content marketing campaigns was great. It was all thanks to building my personal brand through my blog and social media channels.

With Great Knowledge Comes Great Power

As my knowledge of SEO grew, however, my blogging became much less frequent. When you’re working with clients, naturally you have less time to work on your own projects. And all that SEO knowledge meant that I was taking sometimes as much as 20 hours to write, research, and publish a blog post. Then there’s the promotion of said blog post… eek.

Then came the big content audit. After years of blogging I had amassed hundreds of blog posts. Most of them were terrible and getting zero traffic. So I audited all the content on the site, kept only the highest performing stuff, and SEO’d the ever-loving 💩 out of the stuff that remained. Only evergreen content from then on out!

My blog traffic went from about 20k visitors per month to over 100k visitors per month in no time. Suddenly my email list of a few thousand subscribers turned into 50k, and then 80k… and then over 100k email subscribers.

I hit the SEO jackpot!

But unfortunately, I didn’t really have much to do with these email subscribers. Most of them weren’t hiring me for my services. So they ended up just being an expense.

With Great Knowledge Comes Great Burden

Before long, my big fat SEO brain had me thinking that writing a new blog post was just too much work.

So I stopped doing it.

I stopped writing about what I was learning. I stopped investing in my personal blog. And while that SEO wave lasted a good 5+ years… my traffic has finally petered off.

And I’m 100% okay with that. Because in that time, by the grace of God, I’ve been able to build a successful SaaS business that doesn’t rely on me writing personal blog posts.

I’ve let go of the idea of building a personal brand via my personal blog. I’ve stopped caring about SEO and getting massive amounts of traffic and email subscribers.

Not that any of that is a bad thing. It’s just not the business I want to build anymore. I’d rather just write when I feel like I have something valuable to say–not worrying about the SEO or evergreen value.

So here’s to a new chapter.

I’ll still be writing about online business with the intent of helping creators and entrepreneurs. I’m just refusing to care about what an SEO algorithm thinks of it. And every now and then I might write some more personal stuff about running an online business.

Of Course, a New Design

Feeling unburdened by the pressure to build a successful personal brand the way that you’re “supposed to” I had to make some design changes.

Thanks to Rich Tabor, I was able to do exactly what, without having to fuss (for more than an hour or two) with design. I needed a blog design that was me. Something minimal, and so well crafted that I didn’t need to fuss with anything other than putting components in the right layout.

Rich’s beautiful theme, Kanso.

I took one look at his site and fell in love with it. Took no effort to switch over from my old WordPress theme, and is the perfect blend of minimalism and function.

So here we are. Blog blown up and respawned.

Cheers. ☕️