Life Lessons After 10 Years of BetterExplained.com
Wow, that was a great post. I can share quite similar numbers: I run my business for 10 years now. It makes about 12,000€ per month. It grew 24% last year. Most traffic comes through evergreen content. I wrote about a hundred articles with 220,000 words in total. I answered more than ten thousand support emails over the years and generally try to be helpful. I didn&#x27;t do social media.<p>I want to add two things:<p>1. I change articles when I don&#x27;t like them anymore. I treat articles like shopping windows. Nothing for eternity. I experiment.<p>2. I don&#x27;t get the newsletter advice. Seriously. Whenever I read something like this, it&#x27;s always: <i>Start a mailing list for the simple reason to be able to contact people.</i> I get the idea, but I don&#x27;t understand the details. This advice never talks about two quite important things:<p>a) What should you write in your newsletter, if your articles are evergreen and mostly to attract new readers? They&#x27;re not made for existing customers – at least not in my case.<p>b) Email lists grow stale. People might read your newsletter for months and after a year or so, they&#x27;ll forget about it or delete every email. That 50,000 subscriber email list grown over 8 years? Probably way less worth than many people think, because relevant are only the last 7,000 or so. Better than nothing, I guess.<p>Obviously, I don&#x27;t have a newsletter, although I have people&#x27;s email addresses, because people need to have an account to use my software. But I actually never contact them.