How To Convince Your Friends To Start A Blog

How To Convince Your Friends To Start A Blog

Podcast

In this episode, we explore we often fail to convince our friends to start having an online presence, and what a better approach might be. Possibly applicable to general "convincing" tasks as well.


Table of contents

In this episode, we explore we often fail to convince our friends to start having an online presence, and what a better approach might be. Possibly applicable to general "convincing" tasks as well.

Here are some of the highlights from our discussion:

Convincing people to develop an online presence or start a blog can be difficult because for many people it's an entirely new category and skill which is impossible to ‘perfect’ overnight. Due to the fact that it feels so alien to many people, Taimur likens it to asking someone to suddenly start playing professional golf.

Convincing people to start a blog should adopt a more bottom-up approach and that needs to come from an understanding of how you are limiting your chances by not exposing yourself to people, opinions and interactions beyond your close circles. In essence, you are essentially limiting your entire life to your physical space and geography around you whereas the internet enables you to break out of the physical chains.

When it comes to creating a presence online, it's like making friends in real life. You can’t just occasionally show up and give a thumbs up to what someone has to say – you have to be contributing something useful to the conversation. For instance, when it comes to starting a personal website, it’s not the case of just setting up a website, it’s about adding value over an extended period of time.

But although you have to provide value online but you shouldn’t see creating your presence online as simply a means to make money.

Episode 2 of Not Overthinking – Why are we scared to put ourselves out there – provides a useful discussion and starting point about why we are hesitant to start and how to overcome these misgivings.

Helpful Links to Getting Started Online:


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What is this? Not Overthinking is a podcast about happiness, creativity, and the human condition. We talk about things to help us think, do, and be better. Things like social interaction, lifestyle design, mental models...things that are hard to examine, but important to explore. And hopefully, things that make for a fun and interesting chat every week.


Follow Not Overthinking on Twitter: https://twitter.com/noverthinking.

Who are we?

Ali is a junior doctor and YouTuber working in Cambridge, UK. He makes videos about medicine, technology, productivity and lifestyle design. His links: YouTube, Blog, Newsletter, Instagram

Taimur is a data scientist and writer, working on his own startup Causal. He writes on his blog and as a columnist for Medium. His links: Blog, Twitter, Medium, Instagram

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