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Blogs aren’t quite dead yet.

According to long-time content strategist (and 2025’s YouTube viral breakout) Pat Flynn, SEO is dead. According to newsletter guru Matt McGarry, ad-based newsletters are dead. So, what’s alive? If you’re an AI company, it’s the lowly blog. According to NP Digital, blog posts are the #1

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Keeping a daily journal since 2010

I went on the Day One podcast to talk about my daily journaling habit. I've been journaling every day since 2010, and in Day One since...day one of the app, I think. Every Single Day: C.J. Chilvers on Journaling as Reflection and MeditationC.J. Chilvers has

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Stop asking me if I exist.

Is this true for you? I keep getting emails from newsletters asking me if I’m still around. Maybe it’s because I use Apple products, which emphasize privacy, and mask a lot of opens and clicks that newsletters (still?!) use to determine engagement, as if we were living in

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Be weird. Save Lives.

We don’t deserve dogs.  So, I got a new puppy. I figure the lack of sleep and constant cleanups will eventually get me close enough to deserving this dog.  This past week I wrote about how the rest of the newsletter world is waking up to the fact that

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This newsletter model is dead.

Matt McGarry just posted about what he’s calling Newsletters 3.0. “If you’re running a ‘newsletter business’ the way most people do, you’re doomed to fail.” His post could be mistaken for a summary of the topics in my book on newsletters, but his take is from

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Be weird. Save lives.

There’s been a flood of great “create for the fun of it” content in recent weeks, that I desperately wanted to link to — but I feared I’d be repeating my message a little too much. Then, I saw a video pop up on YouTube that said the same

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Daydreaming about Publishing

Since the last post, I spent a week in Mexico (above). I learned two things: 1. All I ever need from a “break” is time away from urgency. We rarely get that, even on a vacation. 2. When I did get a real break, I thought about how I could

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Where does blogging fit in your newsletter strategy?

I got this question from a reader recently: “Have you written about how a blog and a newsletter could interact together? Two problems: 1. We’ve monetized each newsletter. Can I monetize the blog? 2. Can I train my audience to visit a ... blog (?) ... every day?” I moved my blog

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SEO elder abuse

According to research by Neil Patel, 59.2% of traffic to blogs is driven by SEO. It’s the biggest single driver of traffic by far. He also reports that your SEO decreases over time, if you’ve published a lot of posts that no longer get the traffic they

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What’s the job?

The Criterion Collection just put out their 4K edition of No Country for Old Men, which includes a new interview with the Coen brothers. The Coen brothers made two of my favorite films of all time: The Big Lebowski (a film about life trying — and failing — to change an oblivious