Five Goals and What to Expect From Each

Blogging Outside Format. A manifesto, post #9/14

"Good results" is subjective. Before asking how to get results, you need to answer honestly: what do you actually want from a blog? Because that answer determines everything — the topic, the format, the expectations, and the disappointments.

Five options. Each with its own price tag.

1. Find your tribe

Write about what keeps you up at night. Share your take on work, your field, your life. Talk, argue, think out loud together. It's a basic human need — atomization tears people apart, communities hold them.

The downside: your tribe is small by default. Probably not tens of thousands. More like 200 — 800 people — and that's genuinely great. Picture a room of 800 people who trust you. The first bloggers in 1999 wrote for communities of a hundred. Or twenty. Or three. That was enough.

I don't care about the numbers. I want to find people I actually want to talk to. People who are in the same headspace. Get a group like that pointed at something real — you can do a lot.

2. Attract clients

Show your work. Tell clients about the details they never think about — but you do. Remind them you're available. A blog like this signals: you're engaged, you're trustworthy, you're someone worth working with.

You don't need followers for this. Someone finds you, sees what you do, sends a message, becomes a client. Your ceiling is the size of your market. Which is definitely not millions.

3. Sell information products

Courses, workshops, consulting. Talk about breaking into the field, what it actually pays, how it actually works. Give people the foundations — even if it's been covered a hundred times. In your voice, it becomes yours.

But be ready: beginner "how to get started" content pulls an audience many times larger than deep industry writing for people who are already in.

4. Become known

This is a different job. It doesn't mix well with a professional blog. To become famous, you need to trigger strong emotions: envy, desire, outrage, anxiety, or comfort. Politics, sex, health, consumption, hype.

Your work, by definition, isn't that. You can become well-known in your field — but that's thousands of people, not millions.

5. Make money from ads

Then forget the personal blog. Start a few infotainment channels. Hire cheap ChatGPT operators and churn out rewritten news. You need a media network that produces brain candy at industrial scale.

"But plenty of experts run ads in their blogs!" Sure. But that's coffee money, not income. Best case — an extra month's salary. Half of which gets eaten by accountants and lawyers. Net result: a trickle of cash and a serious pain in the ass.

71% of creators earn under $30K a year. Only 2% of Patreon creators hit minimum wage. The median Substack income is $4K a year. Enough for coffee. Not for life.

Don't mix

You can combine goals, but the more directions you pull in, the faster you lose people. Someone subscribed for industry news, and you're talking about your work process. They wanted to learn the basics, and you're pitching services and riffing on current events. At some point the gap between what they expected and what you delivered gets too wide — and they leave.

The "1,000 True Fans" idea promised freedom: find a thousand fans, each pays $100 a year — that's $100K. Clean and simple. But in reality you need 2,000 — 5,000, because 30 — 50% churn every year. And building even a thousand takes years.

The simple answer

Decide why you have a blog. Tribe, clients, courses, fame, or ads. Each goal leads to different writing and different expectations. And only one of them doesn't end in disappointment: write about what burns, for people who care. No expectations. No KPIs. No pain in the ass.