I’m not sure quite how I got on the Simple Programmer mailing list, but most weeks I get a few messages from the founder, John Sonmez. Lots of them are of the slightly annoying teaser variety that require you to read the whole thing until you get to the very last line. Or you have to spend $10 on a special deal that’s 90% off or something like that. Not my favourite technique, but I would have unsubscribed a while back if there wasn’t stuff from time to time that was genuinely useful and not just fancy marketing for yet another thing he is selling.
One of those things was a course on how to set up a technical blog. By his own account, he seems to have been pretty successful at it – but his web presence and YouTube hits would tend to back that up. It’s a pretty simple 6 session course. Twice a week he sends you a step in the process you need to go through to set up a blog. Since it’s aimed at developers, he doesn’t sweat the technical details – if I needed my hand held on how to set up a WordPress blog I wouldn’t be much of a developer now, would I? But what he does do is talk through some of the bigger picture stuff about why you would set one up, how to choose a theme, how to start getting traffic etc. All pretty simple and easily actionable for the most part – but you might not do it if someone didn’t tell you! I know I have missed this sort of thing in the past for other blogs I have been part of. I have found it very helpful.
For $5 you can actually get all content in one go (there’s his marketing stuff again!) – or you can just wait for the emails. Waiting worked better for me since it gave me a couple of days to do the homework without getting overwhelmed with everything I would have seen if I’d read the list in one go. So, if you like this blog, then John Sonmez can take some of the credit.
The thing he doesn’t tell you for free is how to make money from your blog. For that, I will have to shell out $100 – or wait for another one of those “Gotta get in quick on this %50 off deal, my friend” emails that I’m sure will be winging its way to me soon!
Hmm, maybe that’s how he does it…