[phoboslab]

About 20 years ago I was coming across a website called something like filthyrichguy.com (I can't remember the exact name). This site described how rich the guy owning this site was and how you could become rich too. How? By just buying his book, of course. I was mesmerized by this site and it's audacious design for a solid hour or two. I searched around the web for more information and ended up in this circle jerk of sites promoting each other. None with any substance.

This feels similar. The blog post and the site is beautifully designed (really!) but I have a hard time figuring out what I'm buying. Is it access to a chat where everyone tries to sell you their "startups"?

I guess it's not for me, but congratz to your success!

[mlent]

Haha that's totally a fair feedback, I know what you mean about those people who e.g. make more money teaching you to "be an entrepreneur" than ever doing it themselves.

If you're wondering, the community is a private forum where you can get advice from experienced bloggers, feedback on your articles, and attend workshops and meetups.

No one in there is selling stuff to each other. Actually you may end up getting access to other people's stuff for free exchange for thoughtful feedback :)

Thanks for taking a look and reading, I appreciate it!

As I shared in the breakdown, what your impression is could be why most people who join have done my newsletter first.

Maybe that's something for me to think about, how to frame it for people who haven't read my newsletter or haven't been following me on Twitter for a while.

[9387367]

haha, you charge the content creators so they can share their expertise with the content consumers who then pay you!

[cvhashim]

Haha, people want to make money off their knowledge and people want to pay money for said knowledge.

[TheOtherHobbes]

In the limit you end up with Warrior Forum and a community of marketers who basically just market marketing to wannabe marketers who want to market because marketing is a thing, sometimes in scammy and cultish ways.

The content soon becomes more about narcissism than value creation.

"I started from nothing and now I have a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, a beautiful car, and a beautiful boat, as you can see on this beautiful website, and you can too - if you sign up for this free newsletter which will give you some sticky free content and then introduce you to my special Monthly Success Diamond Club Offer which is usually $1000 but for today only...'

And then it turns out all of the above are hired for the photo feature and aren't real. But maybe wishing hard enough will make them so. And so it goes.

I don't think we're close to that limit here, but it does exist and reliably seems to exert a dark gravitational pull on the hopeful and unwary.

[mlent]

I actually pay the experts who do the workshops or sessions :) All part of valuing the work.

[ganafagol]

Monica, for those of us trying to make up our minds about whether this is just more hot air or you are actually on to something of value, do you have a short list of say the top 10 topics that those workshops/sessions are about?

I don't want to be rude. We just get so much of this stuff somebody promoting something about talking about building something that helps people build something to talk about promoting stuff. That's so many nested meta levels that I'm as a dev calling BS after about 2 of them and go away.

Unfortunately I read your blog post as something similar. It was about how you funnel people into some community that helps others polish their writings so they get more reach. That's 3 levels right there.

Here is you chance to show that the chain ends after those 3 levels and there is actual non-meta content waiting at the end of that chain.

[mlent]

Hey there! I get the skepticism, though I should also point out...I didn't post this topic on Hacker News.

So I never intended it to be here, just trying to answer some questions as I get that people from HN have way less context about me or the community than people who've been following the community and newsletter for 6 months on Twitter!

So yeah, it's not meant as self-promotion. It's part of my effort to "build in public", as I mentioned in another comment.

My main takeaway in the article is actually that a lot of people skip the step of "providing value first" and jump to something paid.

Whereas I've been writing a free newsletter for 6+ months, which many people have actually offered to pay for and told me are "better than most paid courses". I've done weeks worth of free consulting over email for subscribers and they have had really cool successes.

Anyway, we do have a public events page if you want to see the kind of stuff going on: https://bloggingfordevs.com/events/

As I mentioned at the end of the blog post, I'm personally preparing an SEO Workshop which'll be given in less than two weeks. The membership is literally $12/mo and refundable, and a workshop like that alone would cost 10-20x that if given in a conference setting.

Not sure if this is "enough" for people here, but as long as members who are there are happy and feel like their investment is compounding, that's gonna have to be my metric for success.

Hope that contributes to the discussion.

[viluon]

I guess the fact you couldn't provide a simple list of 10 topics speaks for itself...

The public events page does nothing to explain the aforementioned meta levels away.

[troughway]

Yeah, snark aside I do see a lot of front page of HN pitches of products that are essentially this.

Effectively a form of information dropshipping.

It also speaks to the fact that over the last handful of years HN has been reduced, in a significant way, from people discussing tech-as-a-means-of-business, to something akin to those “business forums” where people share how they made money doing Whatever, But Online (tm). As if just about any way at all to scrape a bit of money from an online presence is a viable way to create a sustaining business that can generate good profits YoY.

But I digress, here we are.

[gbrindisi]

I think I can give you my perspective here, since I am part of Monica's community.

I started blogging late this summer and quickly found how hard it is to write and be read.

As an engineer I of course started researching how to increase my readership and I ended up down the infinite sewer hole of content marketing and "how to game search engines" aka SEO.

(If you want to understand why the web looks like this and why we are rather searching ddg with !searchr for answers... learning a bit of SEO will be the epiphany you need)

The amount of _crap_ you have to navigate to get some actionable information is insane.

I was lucky to stumble into Monica's Blogging for Devs free newsletter course and it was just the perfect actionable information I was looking for. No need to waste more time scavenging the web for some free answers.

The community is, in my opinion, the natural evolution. A place where I can learn effectively. So far, I've enjoyed it and I think it's worth the money.

[ghaff]

>infinite sewer hole of content marketing

I'd just point out that things like Backblaze's drive reliability blogs are absolutely content marketing. There's plenty of low-rent clickbait out there but there's also good material that is ultimately being created and paid for for marketing purposes. (And SEO isn't all black hat. For example, if you're writing about some hot topic, you probably want to mention it in the title and not take forever to get to it in the article.)

[grecy]

> I of course started researching how to increase my readership

Do you mind if I ask why you want to increase your readership?

What is your goal as a dev who also blogs?

I ask because I've spent a decade building my blog and social media following (which I have to say, is pretty decent at this point), but there has never really been a "goal" or "purpose", and I'm really only thinking aobut ways to monetize it well now, after many thousands of hours of work.

[gbrindisi]

Of course.

1. The main goal of my blog is to help me structure my knowledge and improve my writing. (I am a non native speaker and I am constantly struggling with my comms.)

2. Secondly, related to gaining readership, a goal is to maximize future opportunities: use the blog as a facility to expand my network, and consequently as a way to build a personal brand.

[SaxoAnglo]

How much have you spent so far?

[gbrindisi]

The monthly fee.

And I got at least three thorough advises from Monica or a community member on how to improve various stuff on the blog, that I could've easily been billed for by a normal consultant.

[jrek]

For anyone joining the community for a recurring fee, at what point does it make sense for the members to just make a free offsite?

[laurex]

Perhaps iwillteachyoutoberich.com is what you’re thinking of? The author has an entire huge industry around this idea.

[rchaud]

I used to be part of the newsletter until it started feeling like I was a guinea pig for his conversion optimization experiments. Stuff like weird email titles, and "I'm opening up my course for just a feeeeew more people, get in now!"

That being said, he has a set of videos and a webinar about interviewing for jobs which really did help me communicate my experiences in a way that tied in to what the job role is looking for; that's not an easy task, especially if the job is in a different industry. It certainly wasn't the only resource I used, the Interview Guys blog and book are good too.

[joshxyz]

Here in my... Garage.

Seriously this feels like tai lopez.

[jyriand]

Fake it till you make it

[pmachinery]

> About 20 years ago I was coming across a website called something like filthyrichguy.com (I can't remember the exact name).

Possibly the Rich Jerk. I don't know how much money they had, but they certainly lived up to at least half the name.

(Edit: It occurred to me that there were probably loads of these things; I always just assumed, maybe wrongly, TRJ was the original/worst/best.)

[robertlagrant]

Maybe I should start a community of bloggers telling each other how to better compete with each other. But what to call it?

The Something Jerk?

Maybe...Circle?

[fakedang]

HackerFeuds

[jvsg]

This remind me that Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy said that if Nietzsche was really an egoist, he would not be preaching it.

[robertlagrant]

Wow, you win HN for today.

[rojeee]

I signed up to the mailing list (blogging for developers) and it's really been helpful for me over the past week or so! Would definitely recommend it.

[DrNuke]

Content is fixed, impersonal and unidirectional, so it usually does not sell; communities are fluid, plural and they do let you see whatever you want to see, therefore they do?

[RightTail]

It was TheRickJerk.com I remember reading their book.