First impressions matter. Everyone likes to claim they care about what’s inside — about who a person truly is. But the truth is, we don’t have enough time to get to know everyone deeply. So we all make quick judgments. Within a few seconds, we decide whether someone is worth investing more of our time.

What’s true in real life applies even more online.

When I stumble upon a new YouTube channel, I scan the thumbnails and check the most popular videos. It’s shallow, sure — but if those don’t catch my attention, I move on. On Twitter, I make that decision even faster. And when it comes to blogs, it’s no different.

If a website greets me with pop-ups, sign-up forms, and flashy, blinking sidebars trying to sell me something I never asked for, I immediately lose interest. The writing might be amazing, but once the ads hit me in the face, I’m gone.

To me, a blog is like a personal business card. It represents who you are and gives complete strangers their first impression of you. And I don’t want that impression to be that of a salesman desperate to make a quick buck.

Years ago, I used to read a website called Danger & Play by Mike Cernovich. Around 2016, Cernovich stopped publishing, but before that, I visited his site almost every day. When he finally released a book, I bought it without hesitation. Then I bought the follow-up, and even a collection of his best blog posts. When he launched a podcast, I listened. When he tried YouTube, I subscribed.

At no point did he ever have to sell me anything. I’d been reading his blog for years, and when he released a printed book, I felt like I owed him my support. It wasn’t the relationship between a salesman and a customer — it was more like helping a friend out who’d helped me for years.

That’s the kind of relationship every personal blogger should strive for. You don’t want readers to see you as a salesman looking for easy money. You want to be a friend — someone genuinely trying to help. And when your readers feel that you’ve truly helped them, they’ll naturally want to give something back.

No ads required. No hard selling.

Just a simple announcement:

Hey, my next book is out. If you’re interested, here’s a link.

And after that announcement is out of the way, get right back to doing what matters most: writing something that helps or at least entertains your reader.

Besides running my own blog, I also love discovering and reading great ones. But lately, it’s been getting harder and harder to find truly good blogs out there. So I thought I’d give my readers a chance to promote their own work here. That way, I’ll find new and interesting things to read, and you’ll get the chance to reach new readers by hijacking my site.

This invitation is open to anyone who creates content online — bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, authors — everyone’s welcome.

Yet, here’s what I’m most interested in:

• Authors who write about writing and how to promote their work
• Bloggers who share stories about their everyday lives
• Travel, fitness, the broad topic of self-improvement, and making money online
• Vloggers are welcome too
• Motorbike riding, sailing, flying planes, surfing
• Philosophy and exchange of ideas (the more controversial the ideas are, the more I’m interested)
• …

As I said, basically everything is welcome. The only thing I don’t want is corporatism — if your goal is simply to sell a product, please don’t bother. I’m looking for real people creating real content.

If that sounds like you, feel free to say hello in the comments, tell me and my readers what your content is about, and drop a link to your main platform.

I think this term is the best way to describe what I’m doing here.

A decade ago, blogging was a much bigger thing. But even before social media took over, I was only really interested in the kind of blogs I now call real-time biography blogs.

I remember one guy in particular who wrote about losing weight and getting fit from his personal perspective. At some point, he realized that his true passion wasn’t fitness—or even writing. It was baking. I kid you not: the guy went from blogging about weight loss to baking his own croissants. Later, he announced that baking had taken up so much of his life that he no longer had time to write. A few weeks after that, his site disappeared.

The strange part is, I was super in to it. Reading his posts became a daily highlight for me. I checked his multiple times a day for new posts, re-read old entries just for fun, and even picked up solid workout advice that I used in my own routine.

Baking isn’t really my thing. I don’t like croissants. But I still read his posts about his newfound baking passion. They were fun. They were exciting. Every update felt like catching up with a friend.

His website originally had one of those generic marketing-style names—I’ve forgotten exactly what it was. But it had nothing to do with croissants or baking in general. It simply happened. His blog evolved. In real time. Just like life does.

Those are the kinds of blogs I find the most interesting. You see the same thing on YouTube with vlogs: people just recording their lives as they unfold. And if it’s done honestly and openly, the story can develop in directions nobody could predict.

That’s what I want to create here—and with my online persona in general.

My ultimate goal is to become a “real” author, which for me means making a living by writing and selling my stories. How I’ll get there is still unclear. I might even take some strange detours while figuring it out. Who knows—maybe I’ll end up writing about baking croissants one day. I doubt it, but that’s the nature of real-time biography blogging: nobody knows where it’s going. Not even the blogger.

I mean it. Seriously. Just don’t.

I’m not going to link to the site, nor am I going to name it. Yesterday, I spent some time reading about how to improve my blog. The blogosphere has shrunk massively since I last looked into finding readers, writing better posts, and related topics. Still, there are so-called experts out there claiming to know how it’s done. A blogging expert I am not, so I dug into a dozen or so articles, ready to learn something new.

But instead of finding enlightenment, I got hit with pop-ups. Every single article I opened came with the same intrusive ad asking me to sign up for a mailing list. By the eighth time I had to click “close,” I was so irritated that I abandoned the rest of the articles I had already opened in background tabs.

I couldn’t even tell you what the site was offering in exchange for my email. Was it an e-book? A newsletter? “10 secrets to building an audience on Twitter no one talks about”? It could have been a free Bitcoin, and I wouldn’t have noticed—because the pop-up was so distracting that it made me start to irrationally dislike the person behind the site.

We all want an audience. We all want people to join our mailing lists. But here’s the thing: nobody who hates you will ever sign up.

The internet has changed. Everyone is on social media now. And on social media, you follow people you like and block people you don’t. Reading a blog isn’t any different. Information is everywhere—thousands of versions on thousands of sites on the same topic. Why should I choose your blog to read? Only because I like you and not the thousand others writing about the same topic.

Treat your blog like a welcoming home, and people will stay. They’ll get to know you—and maybe even start to like you.

But if the very first impression of your site is an unwanted pop-up, most visitors will walk away and never give you another chance. Is that worth it getting a handful of mailing list sign-ups. I don’t think so!

To drive the point home, look at this:

Does that look like a successful club you’d want to be a fan of?