Good day, friends! After a few months off from running this Newsletter, I'm happy to get back here to share my latest experience.
First of all, I want to let you know that this is the last direct mailing from Substack that I do (probably). No, I will not leave you, but on the contrary, I want to present even more useful and valuable content.
For several months I have been working on my own website www.Web3BrandBuilding.com and I came to the conclusion that in the future the user experience of communication through the Newsletter from my own domain will be much more effective and diverse than using a 3rd party like Substack.
It's a good thing to use it, and I'm sure I'd love to continue doing it here if I was a full-time writer and didn't have a few other projects going on at the same time. But doing it all in a single ecosystem of my website somewhat simplifies the headache of using many third-party services. #IYKYK
Start Blogging with a Newsletter
Surely you can see with your own eyes what is happening in the NFT market today and how everything bleeds. People one after another leave the Web3 space, sell their assets in a panic, and new blood does not even think to meddle in this place (perhaps it is for the best today).
I can understand why they do this and I will tell you more that I kind of even like to see that in this space there are, at most, a couple of tens of thousands of active people left. And if for someone this is a surrender, I see this as a huge opportunity if you know what to do.
I want to give you an understanding of what I am doing in order to attract new people to the Web3 space, or rather bring Web3 to normies. You can do the same in your niche and with your own style.
Perhaps there are some of you who run their own Newsletter, this is really a useful and valuable thing, but the main problem that lies in this is SEO optimization, or rather the lack of it.
Yes, there is some kind of optimization in Substack, but it only works in its own ecosystem, not for Google. That is why I thought about creating a blog for the Web2 audience, on various topics about social networking, personal branding and much more.
But in order to be really effective in terms of implementing Web3 technologies aka NFT, I touch on this topic in each of my posts as a "by the way", without unnecessary intrusiveness.
This whole area is denigrated by scams, gambling and other garbage, which prevents ordinary people from looking at this space from a different angle. Therefore, we have to dodge and select words in order to turn their thinking in a completely different direction.
When I say "start blogging", I don't just mean a blog in text format, but also a video format on YouTube. You can take absolutely any niche and link it intelligently with Web3 - it will work well in the long run.
The most banal thing you can do is talk about crypto & NFT projects, which is what many do. But this kind of content on such a shitty market will not get many views even from large channels. Think bigger.
In My Last Blog Post, which I spent more than 10 days of work on, I described in as much detail as possible how to start blogging, where I mentioned all the possible nuances related to this topic.
With a blog, you can drive organic traffic to new audiences via SEO, and then, as I do right now, provide valuable new information through the Newsletter. And in my subjective opinion, such a combination will work much more efficiently than just keeping a Newsletter.
Just a side note, blogging is not the same as social media. Twitter (X) is a good tool to complement your blog and other businesses, but it's not really a solid base.
Why blogging?
When I first started my blog on YouTube in 2015, I didn’t think about the long term, the various problems that I could face, I just started doing it, trying to find my niche, because at that time I already knew that YouTube there is money that I can get.
I did not perceive it as a full-fledged media business, but rather as an entertainment that, by a lucky chance, can bring me money from ad impressions on my videos. Eventually, a few years later, this money printing machine exploded when the NFT and cryptocurrency came into my life.
There were a lot of advertisers for CG courses (that was my main niche initially) + good monetization from YouTube ads, it was a really good time.
This worked in the CIS segment until 2022, now I have been building everything anew for about a year, literally from scratch and without any budget. But this time my approach to this matter is on a completely new level, so that nothing could destroy this "base".
My blog posts in text format have already begun to work for me, creating a presence on Google and other search engines. The figures vary by only a few hundred impressions per month, but the main thing is that it started to work and now you can test more and more different formats and work with the website.
The best part of blogging on your own website is going to be monetization with the product you're building. And it does not have to be something complicated, for example, some kind of info-product.
At the end of 2022, I launched my first online course on Web3 Brand Building, where only 25 people signed up, but I didn’t have a blog as such, only a Telegram group with an audience from YouTube.
I could run the courses again, but I decided to take a break to improve the user experience when taking these courses and build a blog that could bring in a new target audience that might be interested in what I create.
Info products it’s a Gamechanger
Previously, for me, an info product was considered something meaningless, because in most cases selling information is the same as selling air, especially when 99% of the information can be collected from free sources.
And this is indeed true, but only if the experts who sell such an information product are "experts" for only a few weeks. In this case, all information is inherently worthless.
On the other hand, those people who have been versed in their niche for more than a year can create a really useful and valuable information product that will help people solve their problems. Such information for solving problems has been collected for years and there will definitely be high-quality and structured information for which people will be willing to pay money.
I realized one important thing that people just won't be interested in the Web3 sphere and using NFT technology, so my task is to create such content on the blog in which people will be interested in this and want to learn more about it.
No one will buy the courses "How to trade NFTs and earn millions", because if in 2021 this kind of information product could work, today it is already an obvious scam.
Give people skills they can apply to both Web2 and Web3 and they'll be happy to use it, especially if they can make money with those skills.
You can't even imagine how much people really love high-quality info products that open up completely new opportunities for them! If someone had once told me that the computer graphics courses that I took in 2018 would be one of my main drivers today, even if I am not directly involved in CGI now, then I would definitely not believe it.
Therefore, by creating at least one such product related to Web3 and NFT technologies, and correctly presenting it to the masses, it will become a real game changer.
If you are ready to lead and grow your blog, join our Discord with other like-minded people!
-Buchara