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't do social media.
I want to add two things:
1. I change articles when I don't like them anymore. I treat articles like shopping windows. Nothing for eternity. I experiment.
2. I don't get the newsletter advice. Seriously. Whenever I read something like this, it's always: Start a mailing list for the simple reason to be able to contact people. I get the idea, but I don't understand the details. This advice never talks about two quite important things:
a) What should you write in your newsletter, if your articles are evergreen and mostly to attract new readers? They're not made for existing customers – at least not in my case.
b) Email lists grow stale. People might read your newsletter for months and after a year or so, they'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.
Obviously, I don't have a newsletter, although I have people's email addresses, because people need to have an account to use my software. But I actually never contact them.
Thanks, glad you liked it! We have about the same wordcount after 10 years :). Far fewer support emails on my end, maybe about 4-5k comment replies.
Agree on updating articles over time. Text is infinitely tweakable and there's so many ways to improve it over time (often in response to comments I'll reword things, create/update diagrams, fix typos, etc. -- if there's an issue with a YouTube video, there's not much you can do.)
I wasn't sure about email either, but Patrick's post demanding I do something convinced me:
(He actually sent an email saying that was the most important thing to do, yelling it, and said 1% of people would actually follow it. I decided to start it just not to fall into the trap.)
Here's what I've found personally:
1) It has a better chance of being seen than other social channels. I don't want to be buried under political news and entertainment on Facebook, twitter, etc. Also, many older folks aren't as familiar with tech, but check their email.
2) It's a self-selected group. Here's a set of people who want to hear from me, which means I can be myself a bit more when writing a newsletter update. I imagine I'm writing to some friends who want to know what's going on. I used my email list to get 50 paid beta customers for my Calculus class, which was itself delivered by email in its first iteration.
3) Marketing is way better. I sold more books by announcing it to my 20k email list (at the time) vs. getting on Reddit and HN homepages, with ~1M pageviews.
4) Engagement is higher. Many people reply to the email and we have a quick (or long) conversation, but they don't want to leave a public blog comment. Also, it helps keep in touch with a larger set of people.
5) For numbers, I have about 38k people, 35% open rate, maybe 5-10% click rate depending on the content. If your audience isn't engaged you should prune/remove people who haven't opened it in a while. But, for an engaged audience, you can get thousands of people to take a look at something.
6) Help people get started. I have a short auto-sequence that goes out with 3 lessons (I'd like to make more). Getting a gentle nudge every week with some new content helps people (vs. having to remember each week to find some articles to read).
When people think of "newsletter" they think of spammy groupon emails designed to sell sell sell. I aim for simple, plain-looking updates (not technically plaintext, sometimes I have images), with a casual vibe. "Hey, have something new you might like. Enjoy."
7) On what I write: announcements of new articles, new product launches, requests for beta customers. I probably email 1-2 times per month on average.
8) Lastly, it's fun for me. I don't like the FB/twitter environment that much -- it feels too much like a stage -- with email, I feel like I'm chatting with friends around a table.
Thanks for your detailed response. I think 8) is good advice for me. I think of newsletters as this serious thing. Every email should deliver value. Maybe I need to rethink this, make it more fun for myself and don't try to think too much about it. 6+7) seems a good approach for this.
(Kalid from BetterExplained here, thanks for posting this!)
The impact of evergreen content was my biggest eye-opener. The more time, the better, but don't beat yourself up about "lost time". Just start today. Before we know it, 2, 5, 10 years will have passed.
This worked for blog posts, starting an email newsletter, selling books on Amazon, making YouTube videos (for standard math concepts), design improvements to the site, etc. You plant the seed once and it bears fruit for years.
Really glad it resonated. It's hard to overstate gentleness with yourself, I remember the instant last year when I forgave myself for mistakes / regrets that had long bothered me. I was walking outside at night, and literally felt an evaporation from the back of my head. Tension I didn't know I had just disappeared.
It reminds me of a Greek proverb which goes a step further with time: "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
Pretty much everything I know I've learned from the internet or from books I found on the internet... but for some reason I had not found your site until just now from this post! It looks really nice so I'm going to start reading it.
Actually, now that I think about it, I probably have come across your site before but I think I may have exited out after a quick glance at the front page. Maybe I'm crazy but when I first look at your site it seems like I have to sign up for some sort of service to access the content. I hate signing up for services, free or otherwise. The first thing I see is
'Math without endless memorization.
Instead of memorizing procedures, learn why equations work. This site helps you overcome mental roadblocks and truly grasp new concepts.'
and then a box right below it asking me to give you my email. If I press pagedown I get to a section titled 'blog posts' (in my mind not the actual content I would be looking for) and then at the very top of the page I see the horizontal navigation bar, but none of the titles really read 'click here to learn cool stuff for free'. By this point I've probably left your website. Something to think about, definitely going to start reading your site and I really respect what you do.
The newsletter is fully optional, basically to get alerted to new articles & other site news. The homepage should be fully scrollable with a big list of articles, you can also check out:
for a visual guide. That said, I'll definitely think about rewording things, and I've long wanted to make a "Getting started" section for students, teachers, parents, etc. Really appreciate the feedback!
I love hearing that, thank you. I started the site to help other frustrated students -- I clearly remember cramming in a small dorm room and not having things click. Happy it helped.
Hello, Kalid. At the "critic" from the HN post, just wanted to say hi and that I am as big a fan as ever. It was interesting to me to read our discussion again.
Hi Charlie! Great to see you, and thanks for the support over the years :).
That discussion was an eye opener for me (in a good way), it showed me of how easily things get muddled in online discussions as context goes missing. It always reminds me to really see what the other person is thinking.
Thanks. I was really disappointed to see what happened to HowStuffWorks. I loved reading it in high school, and it likely planted the idea in my head that a single person could start a learning site.
On paper it reached "success" (sold for millions, is now a Top 500 site) but unfortunately it's far away from its original mission.
There's been countless studies about happiness and income, but I realize once my reasonable needs are met, my life satisfaction comes from things that can't be bought (getting in the zone, helping people, feeding my curiosity).
Good post. I run a small blog and your retrospective gave me some good insights on how to approach things moving forward. The idea of evergreen content and your monetization breakdown were nice to see.
I love betterexplained and I almost religiously check if it has an article on any topic I'm reading up on.
At least the free content can't stand alone, but it makes khan academy or coursera videos much easier to follow if I've read an article on Betterexplained before hand, and I think that has tremendous value.
Does anybody have experience with any of the courses? Are they worth it?
I want to add two things:
1. I change articles when I don't like them anymore. I treat articles like shopping windows. Nothing for eternity. I experiment.
2. I don't get the newsletter advice. Seriously. Whenever I read something like this, it's always: Start a mailing list for the simple reason to be able to contact people. I get the idea, but I don't understand the details. This advice never talks about two quite important things:
a) What should you write in your newsletter, if your articles are evergreen and mostly to attract new readers? They're not made for existing customers – at least not in my case.
b) Email lists grow stale. People might read your newsletter for months and after a year or so, they'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.
Obviously, I don't have a newsletter, although I have people's email addresses, because people need to have an account to use my software. But I actually never contact them.