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Blogging: Better Late Than Never

Blog attitudes have changed a lot over the years.

In the 2000s and early 2010s, blogs were the shit, because there wasn't much competition. You could publish an essay online and it would get seen by tons of people. Those days are gone now that the internet is more saturated, and it felt like the ship had sailed.

I was one of those people. But last year, I began to get more serious about leaving social media and developing a writing-centric brand for the long game.

But blogs still work. Especially when you lean into SEO. I've worked on SEO a lot this year in my writing, and it's starting to pay off, which is great.

As you can see, my website was little more than a business card for years. I was publishing in other places and in media outlets. In 2020, I began publishing on Medium and linking back to my website-- you can see that in the blue line, which is “referring domains.”

But my website still wasn't producing traffic. Most of my traffic was coming from either Medium or social media, and I didn't like the feeling of building on rented land. So I refocused this year on blogging, and it's been going well.

If a blog is something you'd like to add or uplevel in 2024, here's a new post with some suggestions on how to get started.

🔗 How to Write a Blog Post

Meet Claude, the ChatGPT Killer

I'd like you to meet Claude.

Claude is an AI Chatbot created by Anthropic, an AI laboratory. Anthropic is the AI darling of Silicon Valley at the moment; Amazon announced a $4 billion investment in them in September, and Google announced a $2 billion investment in them last week, as tech works to capture some of the market share OpenAI has built up.

The Claude beta is now free to start using. There is also an application to access its API, which will enable integrations like Zapier, but I don't have a read on how long that waitlist is. I've been on it for a month, currently.

The biggest reason to know about Claude is that it lets you upload and analyze files. This is huge. On ChatGPT, your query length has a cap of about 750 words, so it's hard to leverage it for things like summarizing a transcript.

With Claude, you can upload entire texts in the form of Word docs or .TXT files. The chatbot also has slightly tighter guardrails, and pauses if your requests are veering in the direction of copyright infringement.

All of these technologies are iterating quickly, so I've got my eye on them for you. At this time, I think writers and entrepreneurs would find more utility from Claude than ChatGPT, and I encourage you to give it a try -- the free tier is more than enough for most people.

🔗 Learn About Claude

Hello From the Office Nook

I leased an office nook and wanted to share. Cute, right?

Cultivate an environment that helps you do quality, focused work. One hour of focused work is better than half-assing it all day long. The older I get, the more I realize how true this is.

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As always, thanks for reading.

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Cheering you on,

—Nick