How I Created the Best Dad Blog on the Internet

How do you go from zero to becoming a a top performing blogger for more than three years? How do you write your first book and make it a good one from the start?

How do you grow an email list from no-one to hundreds of subscribers who get your emails several times a year, read them and enjoy them. How do you find your niche, your voice and become a leader in your field?

These are the questions I would ask myself now if I was starting a blog over again. But at the time I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

I just wanted to write. But not just that – I wanted to be read. So I wrote and I published and I repeated. Three years on, here we are.

It’s cool writing a post like this – about what I’ve learned in the time I’ve been writing online. Hopefully you’ll be inspired by it. You might not be destined to be a writer but there’s something else you can put time and effort into, enjoy and be good at.

How I Created the Best Dad Blog on the Internet

If you go to my ‘Start Here’ page, you’ll read the story of how this blog came into being. So I’m not going to re-hash that. Instead I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned about writing. And what that has taught me about life.

Maybe you want to write. Maybe you are a writer. Maybe you want to do something completely different. Whatever, that’s up to you. But know this – if you apply certain principles and approaches, you can be successful in a variety of fields.

That’s what this post is really about – how to be a success at something.

It’s hard to distil everything I want to share into this one article. Where I am now in life (not just in terms of this website) has been such a product of so many things – processes, projects and people – that the idea of putting all of that into a blog post is a bit staggering. So instead I’m going to go broad brush. Here goes….

1. Bird by Stinking Bird

One of my favourite books on writing is the seminal Bird by Bird which is written by Anne Lamott. The title comes from an account which Lamott goes into more detail about in the book:

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

I’ve often thought about that idea and it’s a helpful one. You build blog with over 200 posts and 300 subscribers in the same way. Post by post, subscriber by subscriber. But sometimes it comes harder.

Sometimes you write great content and it flows out of your finger tips onto the screen as if you’re possessed and channelling some great deity of the written word.

Other times its as if you’re writing a high school book report on a book you hate.

Which is where my take on it comes – Bird by Stinking Bird. Sometimes your birds stink. But you keep writing anyway – because you can’t write amazing stuff all the time. It’s mixed in with all the mediocre crap you’ve written along the way (more on this later).

99.94% of people in the world will never read your work.

How many people would you like to read your blog in the first few years? A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred and ten thousand?

Right now I’ll be over 100,000 page views for this year which I find incredible. But that’s still less than 0.06% of the worlds population reading this site.

What’s my point? You don’t have to be mega famous to be successful. As a wise man once said ‘Get a thousand of anything and you’re doing well.’ Think about it this way:

• Sell 100,000 books – you’re a best selling author
• 500,000 records and you’re Gold Selling artist
• Make £100k profit and you’ll have a good income for life

Everyone wants to be ‘the next big thing’. But you don’t have to do that to be successful.

That doesn’t mean that consistency x time = success. If you consistently pump out poor or mediocre content, you’ll never be a successful blogger.

But if you consistently put out good content, some of that is going to stick. Then you’ll build a reader base, fans and fellow journeyers. It’s a whole circle of life thing but on the internet.

That has lessons for life too. You don’t have to be the best salesman or top performer in your company to be successful. A narrow minded man might think that his success depended on him being at the top.

But someone a bit smarter would know that this doesn’t necessarily ring true. You can be a success without breaking any records.

For every Platinum selling artist (back to this metaphor) there are a bunch of musicians who have had a good career and made good money from music. They’re happy, never did drugs and live a good life.

Which leads me well into this next point.

The 80/20 Rule Bro

If you haven’t heard of the 80/20 rule then buckle up bro, you’re in for a treat. The 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle) theorises that you get 80% of your results from 20% of your efforts.

So:

• 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients
• 80% of gym success comes from 20% of the exercises
• And.. 80% of your blog page views comes from 20% of your articles

OK, so I’ve never sat down to work out the numbers but from my site stats, a handful of posts make up the vast majority of weekly and monthly views. Some of these aren’t that well written either.

The thing is you can’t always write the 20% content. Partly because you don’t know what’s going to land right or resonate with your readers. Sometimes it’s just luck – my most read post in 2016 was a complete fluke.

Or was it? A good/shocking cover image, a couple of shares from the right people. and you might just have your first viral hit.

The right title makes a difference too – the title of this post will trigger all the neckbeard, soyboy DaddyBloggers because they don’t know when they’re being played.

That’s why you need to generate consistent content for a blog like this – because some of your writing will suck and be ignored. But its worth it for that 20% that resonates with people and makes a difference to their lives.

Write Your Own Stuff – In Your Own Style

Building your own style takes time. And you will be influenced by other writers you like. I didn’t always write this well. It took time learning what people liked.

And didn’t like to read.

I want my writing to be like having a conversation with me – is it working? That’s how I write my emails – and my book. It’s as if I’m sitting down to write an email to a personal friend.

Maybe you don’t like that – it’s too flippant. Fine. That’s good if you turn people off because for every person who hates your style, there’s at least one who likes it and enjoys reading it.

Guess what? Those are also the people who will buy your book and ask to get your emails.

Writing your own style also means being true to who you are and your values. The generic Dad Blog scene sucks because it’s full of graphic t-shirt wearing clones publishing paid-for ads for Unilever.

If you do get paid posts, make sure you get plenty of $$$ and dilute it so no-one notices.

Don’t Take It Too Seriously

If you’re blogging because you think you’ll make money, I got news for you. You’re right. You will make money. But it won’t be enough to live on. If it’s money you want, get a job delivering Amazon packages for £15 an hour, put the cash in the stock market or crypto and you’ll be better off.

But if you want to create something and have a good time doing it. If you have a compulsion to write and communicate through the written word then write. Enjoy it, don’t take it too seriously, be consistent and show love whenever you can.

Neil

P.S. You can show me some love by buying my book.