Tell me if you've heard this one before: a consultant is seeking leads for his business. He's tapping his network, but he wants something that scales. Something that feels effortless. Why look for business, when it can look for you?

There are of course 3 paths to audience acquisition on the Internet: word-of-mouth, content farming, and paid acquisition (advertising). Word-of-mouth is already covered, so he's going to give content a try and start a blog.

Great idea!...if it's 2001.

I sat down with a marketing expert friend of mine recently and described my blogging plans to him. I'd been working on the blog in the background for a couple weeks already, so the investment was already made. He very kindly pointed out a few simple facts to me: blogs are old and out-of-style, nobody reads anymore, it's impossible to break through the noise in a written medium, and my in-presence persona gives me a much better shot at landing business than publishing as a random voice on the Internet.

Of course, I knew he was right. I knew that before we sat down for lunch. I knew that before I even started working on the blog. I knew it over 15 years ago when my last blog crashed and irretrievably lost all my content, and I decided not to restart because "I didn't have time".

After moping through the inevitable existential crisis that plagued me the following afternoon, evening, overnight, and following morning, it occurred to me that I'd been working from the wrong assumption, that I'd flipped my cause and effect.

I'd been approaching this project as if writing is a convenient way to drum up business. But the truth is, the business was a convenient excuse for me to start writing again.

You see, the desire to write never left me, I just wasn't listening to the muse. 15 years plus a new life perspective helps me realize I wish I'd never stopped. And you know what, if the best time to restart my writing was 15 years ago, the second-best time is right now. Rather than think about the years I've missed, I'm thinking about great years ahead.

So, turning to the topic of this post - how does one start a blog?

I could tell you all about the technology, and the SEO techniques, and the seductive titling techniques, etc etc etc. But all of that is easy and irrelevant in the face of the most important thing you need to start a blog: an insatiable desire to write and share your thoughts. If the desire isn't there, don't bother - there are more effective ways to share and build a following in the modern world.

With that, welcome to my blog, I'm glad you're here. I plan to publish weekly across 5 general categories: startups, technology, software, music, and living. I hope you'll join me on this journey, I have some great content in the hopper.