Phew. It’s been quite a while since writing on this blog and for good reason.
When I started this blog in January this year, I wrote every day for a long time. The articles were getting a little weak. I was taking on too much. I then made it less frequent and aimed to post content in themes (Twitter Tuesdays, etc).
Then, life got in the way. I was reducing the pace of content for two reasons. We welcomed my second son into the mix in February 2022, so my free time got taken up. Also, my first son was hitting the terrible twos / threes and becoming much more exhausting. This blog got like that sink full of dirty dishes. The longer I left them, the harder it got to get the motivation to tackle them.
Added to this, I started a new role at Automattic which is exciting and I always commit 100% of my energies towards that role first (heck, I wrote over 20,000 words in August alone on our internal P2 blogs).
It meant this blog sat on the sidelines. I intend to change that and aim to keep this little corner of the internet alive. I also got a little stuck on the YouTube side of things (which you can see by the last activity there being 10 months ago). I had too many goals:-
- Create content daily
- Grow my twitter to 1k+ followers
- Design a new product
- Create a course
- Work on a book
It was too much to try and tackle on top of a demanding role and because of this I got nowhere fast.
I did create a course outline and landing page for the WordPress course (and plan to start shooting content for this as soon as I get over my stage fright).
Pick a direction
I still believe content creation is key (rather than just consumption) and importantly video content should be at the middle of everything as we approach 2023.
So, I’m choosing that direction. My goal is to actually start producing video content – both my course and on YouTube in general and getting comfortable in front of the camera.
Pick a theme
It’s also clear from my ramblings on this blog that I needed to be clearer on exactly what I’m aiming for with my content. Being clear here will also make me less scattergun and help me build up a production schedule for what I want to talk about.
So here goes. Here’s what’s been running through my mind and how I can frame things going forwards.
Intro:-
I’m Mike Stott, and [on this channel] I help you to get started with your idea without breaking the bank on expensive software and services.
Mike Stott – Website Creation for Entrepreneurs.
Website Creation for Entrepreneurs
I see this so many times when talking with friends outside of my line of work. They have a business idea, or they’re already in business and want to get set up online. Either a website, a store, or something more detailed like a video membership platform – they want to get up and running and producing content and promoting content which is what they do best.
But, they have NO IDEA where to start on the tech side – they don’t want to get stuck in the potential complex minefield of setting it up themselves, so they’ll hire an expensive agency, or pay $$$$$ for a software as a service platform.
Yikes.
When in reality, if they just used a simple content management system (like WordPress) and a selection of plugins, they could be up and running at a fraction of the cost and importantly be in control of their own data.
While there’s plenty of generic YouTube content out there, my aim through video content and this blog is to help answer questions like:-
- How do I run something like uscreen.tv can I do that with WordPress?
- I love substack, it’d be cool if I could something like that on my site without paying them 10%.
- Wow, that landing page is nice – I wish I knew how to do that.
- I have no website, how do I even get started?
I might touch on more detailed things like coding up a new piece of functionality, but for the main it’ll be courses and guides on getting started and some of the things people new to getting setup online might miss that I’m familiar with from using WordPress and working on and with web businesses for over 10 years.
A particularly nice example of this was I recently learned how to get those cool words from your video overlaid on the video.
I thought people were cleverly writing the captions on there…
Final Thoughts
Wait, why are you writing about this? I think it’s useful to make a record of thought processes like this for me to look back on, as well as others to follow if they’re starting down a similar path.
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