Create an Online Home

Blogging isn’t dead. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re about to enter a golden age of personal blogs.

Make it easy for people to find you. Buy a domain name and use it to create your own website, even if it’s very simple at first. Your website is your resume, your business card, your store, your directory, and your personal magazine. It’s the one place online that you completely own and control – your Online Home.

If you’re worried about your reputation, publish pseudonymously. You’ll receive most of the benefits of writing online without risking your reputation. Plus, if you build an audience and change your mind, you can always come out from behind the curtain and start publishing under your real name.

When you first begin writing, before you publish anything, your website should have two things:

A Start Here page A curated list of your favorite articles

I’ll explain each in turn.

Start Here

Your website needs a “Start Here” page. Think of this page like the waiting room at a train station, where visitors go to find signage, kiosks, timetables, and other relevant information.

Your Start Here page should answer routine visitor questions. Most readers want guidance, so give it to them. They’ll trust and appreciate your recommendations. After repeated visits, once they’ve followed your advice, they may take some risks and explore your website on their own. That’s when they’ll pore through the archives and see what you do for work. By making it easy on visitors when they first visit your website, you’ll make it easy for them to stick around and read your body of work.

Remember, nobody is familiar with your work like you are. You’ve pored through every sentence on your site, but your readers have only skimmed them at most. In that way, you’re like a host at a party. You’ve planned the party, and it’s your job to make sure people aren’t confused when they arrive at your home. Once they’ve committed to staying, lead them around the place, and introduce them to things that will interest them. If you can do that, you’ve done your job.

Curated list of articles or resources

Writing without an audience can make you feel invisible. You feel like you’re shouting into an empty room, where nobody is listening. Every creator, big or small, knows this feeling. It’s the part of the process that most writers want to escape as fast as possible.

New creators have a dilemma: they want a critical mass of work on their website, but don’t want to sacrifice the quality of their work to create one. They know that if visitors arrive on their site, and they don’t have a body of work, the visitors won’t stick around.

Building an audience is a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you create a substantial body of work that will attract visitors, before you have an audience to talk to? The prospect of publishing post after post and getting only crickets in response is daunting.

Luckily, there’s a way to “bootstrap” your way to an audience: curation.

When you’re just beginning, before you are recognized for your own ideas, curation works exceptionally well. It’s the fastest way to ignite a following and build a body of work.

I recommend two strategies:

The Thought Leader Strategy: curate a summary of your favorite thought leader’s best work.

Examples:

2. The Idea Strategy: pick an idea you’re interested in and curate a list of the best resources on the topic.

Examples:

I’ve also curated a list of my favorite links on the Internet.

Curation is relatively easy and very valuable for people who don’t have the time to do the research themselves, which makes it an efficient way to kickstart the growth of your audience.

Don’t just hit publish. Share your work directly with people you think might benefit from it. If you curate your favorite thought leader’s work, send it to them. If it’s good and you include their work in the list, they’ll probably share it. And when they do, people will visit your website. If you choose the second option and curate a list of the best resources on a topic, send your list to practitioners in your field who are popular on social media.

No matter which option you choose, create the best guide you can, email it to people who have an audience, and drive people back to your website.