I find myself in a a bind.
A real crossroads in my career.
As you know, if you’ve been following me for a while, I’ve spent a lot of time writing about dating and relationships over the last few years.
In 2018 I began to pull away from that subject matter. Not entirely, but to a large extent.
Why is that?
A number of reasons.
We all change.
Our tastes change.
The things that we’re interested in change.
And for me, for a number of years, I’d been more interested in the ‘self-development’ and particularly ‘business’ advice that was coming out of men’s websites than the dating stuff.
Articles about meeting girls and so on was fun. But you can only go so far with such material. And for me (because I have never been anything other than an intellectual snob masquerading as a superficial hedonist) it wasn’t enough.
I needed to do something else too.
That is not to say that I regard dating advice content as being in any way superficial. It isn’t. Sex (or procreation, to be accurate) is the most fundamental drive that human beings have.
What could be more important to talk about?
And there are some great content creators who cover the topic brilliantly. Tom Torero and Tyler from RSD are two that spring to mind.
But I had got to a point where I felt I had said everything I really wanted to say about it. For now, at least.
Entrepreneur
Also, when I gave up my corporate job last November, what I quickly found was that the work took precedence over pretty much everything else. My priorities shifted. Suddenly I was getting as much pleasure from a well-written article that garnered online praise as I had been from the fleeting affairs of my past.
Now, I am in my forties, and so you might assume that nature is taking its course and my libido is dropping as a result. Well, maybe there’s some truth in that.
But interestingly enough, I am good friends with a guy of 28 who is also an entrepreneur (in the process of raising venture capital for his property start-up). He has hardly dated for the last two years. Business (both the pursuit of money, but also the pursuit of meaning through creating something great) has taken precedence for him too.
Although he is ‘in his prime’, he is simply not interested in being promiscuous while he builds his empire.
It is only right, of course, that I create content about what I’m actually doing. And since what I’m doing is ‘building a personal brand business online’, then that is what I’m recording.
Size Matters
By certain measures it looks to be working. I exceeded 5,000 followers on Twitter yesterday, and within a few weeks I’ve gone from 150 – 700 on Instagram. I also have a growing daily email list that you should definitely join immediately here.
Of course, these are not huge numbers and I’m not trying to claim they are, but nevertheless, the feedback from ‘the market’ would indicate that people like what I’m putting out.
That said, traffic to this website has fallen over the last few months, and sales of my earlier books are not as strong as they have been.
The latter (the drop in blog traffic) I would put down to my not giving the website the attention it has deserved in Q2 -Q3. Since I’ve been sending my daily email out I have put a lot more energy into that.
On the site I’ve frequently either recycled old emails or republished even older articles from the vaults. And as any professional blogger will tell you, in order to create a buzz around your site you need to be releasing fresh content regularly.
This I intend to rectify from hereon in.
As regards the earlier books not selling as well—the truth is that I am in a period of transition.
(No, not like that!)
Given that I am not putting out regular articles about meeting girls it should come as little surprise that fewer people are looking to buy books from me on that subject. The internet is after all a voracious beast. If you don’t feed it constantly (with the right content in the right places) then you will quickly lose traction.
And so I find myself in the somewhat dichotomous situation where my audience is now bigger than ever before, and yet this is not reflected in my financials.
That said, another factor is that I haven’t yet released a product that properly fits with my new direction, a direction that I would broadly define as ‘Game—but for business’. This I will be correcting soon. I am currently working on my first digital course, which I’m really excited about. I’ll be keeping you updated on that and will bring you more details soon.
Artist
But an other issue presents itself to me. I am an artist and a writer. After that I am a businessman . . . but that comes as a pretty distant second. Nevertheless, like every creative, I have to embrace commerce to put food on the table and pay the bills . . . and most importantly, keep working on my art.
But that creates something of a dilemma for me as a writer. The best pieces I’ve written for this site, in my opinion, are the deeply raw, personal ones I did last year when I was suffering in fucked up situations with girls and so on.
At the moment, because of the nature of online business, I’m putting out a lot more content along ‘get up early, lift and crush it’ lines.
Both of these things are part of my character. I like to think I am somewhere between Bukowski, Pete Doherty and Gary Vaynerchuk.
But I don’t want to get too clean cut or too Tony Robbins, because that just isn’t me.
I tried to express this on Monday when I put out an article called ‘Fuck Business’. Because the truth is I am not one of those clean cut, motivational business advice guys. I am a hustler. I’m a salesman, yes, but I’m more influenced by the 48 Laws of Power than anything else.
Because sales—and by extension business, since business is sales—is a down-and-dirty, Darwinian struggle for dominance. And it is reflecting that which I am most interested in.
Even more importantly though, my interest is not in creating a perfect Instagram ‘G lifestyle’. I’m friends with some of these guys on Twitter who do drop shipping and make a ton of money per day, but that’s not really me either.
I admire their hustle, but I am predominantly a writer who has to hustle to keep writing.
So if you’re looking for ’33 Ways To Get More Backlinks To Your Site’ then I am not the right guy for you. If you are interested in dark psychological tips based on human psychology to win while creating work with real meaning, though, then you’re in the right place.
I will, as always, keep you updated on my progress.
If you haven’t already, and you want to live a life of freedom, sign up for my DAILY email newsletter here now.
