I’ve fooled around with a few posts in the past, knowing that I wanted to write, but not sure about what. I knew the answer wasn’t vegetarian running, since I’ve got another blog about that. But nothing seemed quite right.

Finally, I’ve got something. A reason to start.

Actually, two:

1. I’m a member of Leo Babauta’s Sea Change program, where we develop a new habit each month. This month’s habit is writing, something that I’ve wanted to get in the routine of doing daily for just about a year now, but haven’t made stick.

2. I’ve started taking bluegrass guitar lessons, and gone a bit farther by breaking out the violin that I started learning on but haven’t picked up in 5 or 6 years. The mountain folk would call it a fiddle, actually, and since bluegrass is what has motivated me to do it, I guess I should call it that too.

Don’t worry — Appalachian guitar and fiddle aren’t what I’m planning on writing about. Instead, I want to start with learning — or rather, meta-learning.

As I type these words, I know this isn’t a subject I’ll be able to write more than a few posts about, but it’s a place to start. Perhaps I’ll record a few “before” videos — my current fiddle skills are worth a chuckle, at the very least — then talk about how I’m using meta-learning techniques to speed myself along the learning curve, with occasional video updates to show you how I’m progressing.

Again, this isn’t something I know enough about to write much (then again, 4 years and 500 blog posts later, I think I might have thought the same about going vegetarian). My plan is to start with meta-learning as a way to get the ball rolling, and very quickly move into some (hopefully) interesting mix of business, science, habits, psychology, and who knows what else.

I’m aiming to write every single day, with intent to publish. That doesn’t mean I’ll publish a new post every day, nor will everything be published here (often my writing will be for No Meat Athlete). But I am looking at this personal blog as a “sandbox” of sorts, so I do expect that this is where most of my writings will end up.

Should be fun.

If you don’t know Seth and you’re interested in starting a business or making your existing one better, do yourself a gigantic favor and check out his books and ebooks (a lot of them are free). He’s got a great blog too, but for me it took reading a few of his books before I started to really “get” the blog.

Anyway, I went to a small workshop (100 people or so) hosted by Seth a few weekends ago in New York City. It was the most expensive seminar I’ve ever gone to, but it was more than worth it.

I took way too many insights from the weekend to fit them all into a blog post, but I wanted to highlight here one of the most interesting and immediately applicable ideas we talked about. It’s particularly helpful if you’re just starting out and trying to choose a niche for your business.

Using axes to choose your niche

This technique one that Seth said is a favorite of consultants, so I’m sure it’s not a totally new idea. But I had never heard it before, and it really got some wheels turning for me.

I once heard Brian Clark explain the “crossroads” technique as one proven way to choose a niche, and after that, I started to notice just how common it was in the blogosphere. It’s simple: you take two mostly-unrelated topics and explore their intersection. My buddy Steve Kamb did this with his site, Nerd Fitness, mashing up nerdy, superhero/gamer/movie culture with fitness. And it’s what I did when I started No Meat Athlete, though I admit I didn’t realize it at the time that I was following a formula.

Seth’s idea (which I’m calling “axes,” for lack of a better name), is a generalization of this. Here’s how it works.

Take out a piece of paper and draw a set of axes (a vertical line and a horizontal line) so that you have four quadrants. Each quadrant represents a niche within the market; the tricky part — and indeed, the point — is choosing the labels for the axes.

Here’s the example Seth used: Imagine you want to open a haircut place, and consider the labels “expensive/cheap” for one axis, “long/short wait” for the other. So you’ve got a lot of places clustered in the “expensive and long wait” quadrant — the fancy shops, like Bumble and Bumble. Diagonal from that one is the “cheap and short wait” quadrant, where you find the Hair Cuttery, Great Clips, and other places where you can walk right in and get a passable haircut for 12 bucks.

This situation of having all the brands in a market clustered in two diagonally-opposed quadrants is often the case. For a given business, position along one axis seems to dictate position along the other one, so you end up with two clusters, or perhaps a cloud that includes the in-between businesses (moderately-priced haircut places will tend to have moderate wait times).

Cheap goes with short wait. Expensive goes with long wait. Because who would think of charging 100 bucks for a walk-in haircut?

That empty quadrant, it turns out, is the opportunity.

Might there be a market for super-expensive, walk-in haircuts? Maybe in New York City, for successful but incredibly busy corporate women?

The other quadrant, “cheap with a long wait,” seems far less appealing. When I asked Seth how you tell which quadrants are good opportunities and which are vacant for a reason, his explanation was essentially, “That’s the art of it.”

So go do the art!

And that was another theme of the weekend, and indeed of Seth’s body of work: there’s no formula telling you exactly how to do work that matters (which Seth calls art, even when it’s business).

If starting a successful business (or adapting an existing one to become remarkable) were as simple as making some dots on a set of axes with pre-defined labels, everyone could (and would) do it. But guess what? Then all the businesses would be clustered together in the same boring quadrants, splitting up the profits of a finite pie, until someone comes along and thinks up some new labels and a new way to look at the market. And creates a brand new pie.

More simply: as soon as there’s a formula, the formula stops working. Stop looking for a system, and instead give yourself permission to mess up, learn, and mess up some more, until one day it works.

And yet, given that I’ve made my living as a blogger for a while now, it feels like a natural place to start as I grope around in the dark looking for a direction that feels right.

So with this post, I’ll answer a question I’ve been asked many times by readers interested in starting their own thing (and one I love answering): Do you have any advice for someone starting a blog for the first time?

I sure do. And the good news is when you boil down the (avalanche of) blogging advice out there, you’ll find that building a successful blog is really only about a few essentials. So here’s what I’d do if I were starting over from scratch, without anyone knowing who I was and without a platform I could use to get it off the ground.

7 Steps for Getting Traffic to Your New Blog

1. Publish a new post every single day for the first month.

Less is more later on, but at the beginning, writing every day accomplishes a lot of things simultaneously. It builds up a decent volume of content quickly, so that Google can start to send you traffic. It also speeds you through the inevitable “suck” phase as you find your voice — I promise you won’t have found it in a month, but you’ll learn a lot faster than if you write just once a week.

Most importantly, writing every day keeps you going: when it feels like you’re writing to nobody at first, it’s too easy to let the gap between posts get bigger and bigger until one day you give up entirely. A commitment to post every day prevents that.

2. Get a Twitter account and start posting helpful stuff.

Even if it’s just links to relevant articles you find, people value that. Use a service like Twellow to search for people who mention your topic in their bios. Follow all of them, and a decent number will follow you back. Now be cool, make friends, share their stuff, and tweet links to your own stuff every once in a while.

3. Read other blogs in your niche and leave as many insightful (non-self-promotional) comments as you can.

Spend as much time doing this as you do writing posts, if you can. Most people think you leave comments for the link back to your own site each one creates, but that’s not the real reason. Instead, you’re doing it to form relationships with popular bloggers in your niche — relationships that will one day lead to their linking to you or letting you guest post for them.

4. Focus on getting subscribers.

Don’t worry about traffic stats, and certainly don’t think about money yet. You want people to pay attention to you over time, and the way they do that is by subscribing to your RSS feed or getting your posts by email. (I’d use Feedburner to manage your feed at first, and eventually move to Aweber or Mailchimp for your email subscribers.)

Focusing on anything other than your subscriber count will lead you to make bad decisions and change course too often as you try to improve this number or that.

5. Build trust, trust, trust.

This is different from building authority, a distinction a lot of blogging gurus miss. Look, being able to write “The Ultimate Guide to ____” is a great thing. One day. But few will listen or care when you write it as your first (or tenth) post. At first, empathize. Be human, be humble, be funny … or be the opposite of all of these, as long as you do it in a way that makes you likeable and trustworthy. But of course, don’t dare be boring.

6. Don’t run ads. It’s just stupid. (I should know, I did it.)

When your blog is new and your traffic low, you’ll be lucky if those ads (that annoy your readers) earn you forty cents a day. Yes, it’s fun to make actual money on the internet, but until your audience is much bigger it’s not worth it. (This, by the way, is a consequence of both #4 and #5, above.)

7. Write amazing content.

This one is so obvious it’s kind of a joke. And if it were that easy, there wouldn’t be an overflowing graveyard of abandoned blogs. But I’ll say three things about writing great content.

First, make it about the reader — it may be your blog, but it ain’t about you. It’s about the person reading it, otherwise they won’t be reading for long.

Second, go really narrow with your post topics at first. You’re not trying to please everyone; you’re trying to absolutely delight a tiny handful of people (and those two aims are mutually exclusive, by the way).

Finally, study good content. Learn from others rather than trying to figure it all out on your own. Copyblogger and Boost Blog Traffic are my favorite sites for this.

Do it

There’s one big thing missing here. And that’s Step 0: Start. So many people meticulously plan everything out, build up some hype on social media networks, write a bunch of almost-finished posts, but neglect to do the one, absolutely necessary (hardest, scary) thing: hit “Publish.” And as a result, their ideas die without ever being heard.

To get anywhere, you don’t need to be perfect or brilliant or impossible to criticize. You just need to be brave enough to begin.

So I started my first blog. A free, wordpress.com blog; anyone, right now, can start one in five minutes.

I didn’t have any world-changing ideas scratching and clawing to get out. No business model. No experience writing.

But I knew I wanted to do something different than what I was doing, so I just started.

A very quick two years later (the second one especially quick after our first son was born!) that blog became my full-time job. I quit my PhD program and was out on my own — free of what I viewed as work, but also free of a dependable paycheck and a backup plan — and with a wife, a baby, and two dogs depending on my little blog to support them. (To be clear, my wife still works a few days a week.)

For a decade I had known deep down that no other path than running my own business would ultimately make me happy. But I didn’t understand just how much it would teach me: in the 500 or so days since we made that scary decision, I’ve learned skills far more valuable than any I took from nine years of college and grad school. And I’ve also learned more about my myself — my emotions, strengths, weaknesses, values, and beliefs — than in any other time of my life.

Most of the experience of working for myself has been wonderful — a flexible schedule, meaningful work for a cause that I care about, thank-you emails from readers nearly every day, and my family’s freedom to live where we want and not be tied down by a traditional job — but it hasn’t been without stress and difficulty.

I understand now that the reason everyone doesn’t run a business is because not everyone would like running a business. Among other things, it’s a hell of a lot scarier than knowing that if you just show up for 40 hours a week and do what you’re told, you’ll get a paycheck every other Friday. (Which, viewed a different way, is the same thing those of us who love it, love about it.)

So that’s why I’ve decided to start this personal blog — after a few years of finally doing the thing that fulfills me most, there’s a lot I have to write about that doesn’t quite belong on No Meat Athlete. About time management, habits, happiness, and who knows what else.

And although this is by no means a business blog, I do have a lot to say about starting your own thing and spreading your ideas, whether those ideas take the form of writing, art, business, activism, or whatever else. We’re living in a time of incredibly rich opportunity to stand out, lead a tribe, make a difference … and if you’re in the position I was a few years ago, well, I hope you’ll find something here that helps you to finally make it happen.

With that, I start. Again.