With the completion of my draft of my "Five Retirement Processes" thing (manuscript? really long blog posts? maybe ~150 pages in total) this week, I've hit an inflection point. If I got this stuff wrong, I have some more work to do so I don't misdirect anyone. If I am half right, that's about as much esoteric retirement quant stuff that I can handle for any six month period or at least it is for a while. Plus, the real question is "now what?" The blog has been fun but not so remunerative in terms of dollars or feedback or sense of service....except for my 20 readers (up from 2, so my growth rate is stratospheric). So what, exactly do I do now? Choices so far include:
- Stop this insanity and go do "life," i.e., go retire for real...
- Keep going and try to monetize something here via blog, book or services
- Limp along and keep doing posts but maybe more review and commentary
- Go back to work
- Partner with someone in the Ret-fin domain to do whatever
- Contribute knowledge cap via some type of volunteer service
- Other TBD
Anyone?
I don't have any answers but I sympathise. I maintained my blog for about a year, doing various analyses, writing a lot of numeric code, etc. I did it mostly for my own personal knowledge/growth as I was sorting through retirement issues but I was also a bit disappointed that I never got more than 1 comment on any post (and the vast majority of the time 0).
ReplyDeleteI came to terms with that and the volume of my blogging went from ~1-2 a month to ~2-3 a year :)
I think that monetising isn't the right path. I look at the "big hitters" and I find their choice of topics simplistic/repetitive/some combination of both. But I think that's generally what you've got to do to have any kind of big audience. Dirk Cotton's blog is the closest to popular + analytic and I'd be surprised if it is anywhere close to monetizable.
I guess my vote is for combination of "go retire for real" with "limp along with more review & commentary" since that's what I've done ;)
Way too many unknown unknowns for me to offer you any advice on which direction to take. Better you sit with yourself and decide what's next. You've seen lots of changes in your life over the past couple of years. Just sitting and reflecting a bit might be the best idea.
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