Why I Started This Blog

I miss writing, and Substack will let me do more of it

Way back in 2014, I started a fitness blog at johnfawkes.com. Readership grew fairly quickly, thanks to a series of highly successful guest posts. In either late 2015 or early 2016, I started making money off of it. Don’t bother going there- it just redirects to this site now.

For several years, johnfawkes.com was my main source of income. It never made all that much, but it brought in two or three thousand dollars a month through a combination of selling coaching, a couple of courses I made, and income from affilliate links. On top of that, it got me noticed as a writer, which lead to freelance writing work, which pulled in another one or two thousand a month from clients like Spartan and Better Humans.

So what changed? A few things.

First, I started to run out of ideas for things to write about. I occasionally wrote non-fitness articles, but since I was monetizing by selling fitness products, I didn’t want to do too much of this.

Second, I got really worn out by all the work that went into actually making money. Coaching clients, writing sales emails, writing sales pages, building and updating products. Having to constantly switch between writing/audience-building mode and monetization mode started to wear me down.

Add in miscellaneous tasks like fixing up my Wordpress-based website, dealing with emails and payment processing, and I found myself with less and less mental bandwidth to write for my own website after writing for all those freelance clients.

Finally, I got offered better work. In 2020 I got hired to write for a health site called The Unwinder, then got hired to do content marketing for a pair of tech startups, Esteem and LineDrop. Within a few months The Unwinder had hired me as managing editor and Esteem and LineDrop had me working as a general marketing consultant doing everything from writing, to ad campaign management, to social media and business development.

This new work paid better than my own business and was less stressful, so at that point johnfawkes.com started to fall by the wayside. Then I got into photography and picked up a little more writing work, and it essentially died altogether, although it was- and still is- getting a few thousand visitors a month.

So why am I back? I miss writing, and now that I’ve parted ways with The Unwinder and gone on hiatus with a couple of other writing clients, and I have a little more time on my hands.

I don’t want to go back to how it was before though. I don’t want to have to keep switching back and forth between building my audience and selling stuff to them. That’s where Substack comes in.

Substack has no monthly fee, acts as both blog and newsletter, and doesn’t require the design work that a Wordpress site does. Setting it up took me about a half hour, including importing my old blog posts and mailing list.

Most importantly though, Substack focuses on a different business model: getting paid for the writing itself. Writers can create a paid subscriber tier and paywall some fraction of their articles to be for paying subscribers only, with a free preview for non-payers. It’s a bit like OnlyFans for writers.

That means I can make money off the writing itself, rather than some other product. It also means that since the writing itself is the product, I have more freedom to explore non-fitness topics without worrying that it’s not helping to sell my products or fitness coaching. And that means I shouldn’t have to worry so much about running low on ideas.

That said, there is no paid subscriber tier yet, and won’t be for some time. I’m not in a hurry to make money off this new blog, and I’d rather spend at least a few months- and maybe a lot longer- building up my audience, writing about whatever I want, and proving to you that I can deliver good articles on a regular basis. Even if I do add a paid tier, I’ll only plan on paywalling about a third of my articles- my main goals here are to improve my writing and get my ideas out there.

So that’s the story- I’m back in the writing business, and this time I’ll be writing about a wider variety of topics.