Hello. I’m Chinoms, a software developer with a special focus on back-end development. As far back as 2015, I used to write technical articles, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Between then and now, I’ve jumped on and off writing.
Not long ago, I went digging up my old articles using the Wayback Machine, and I began to wonder what I would have accomplished by writing if I had not stopped. I would surely have been a better developer. I would have firmly established myself in the developer community as a very senior developer, and I would have made some good money too, probably enough to have made me focus entirely on content creation, making me self-employed – freedom!
Rather than sitting back and imagining what could have been, I am making a return to writing, and this is the first article on my new blog, chinoms.com. While I cannot do anything about the past, I am an ardent believer that I can dictate aspects of the future by what I do now.
Why am I returning to writing?
You may wonder, ‘why the sudden desire to return to writing?’ Well, I have a number of reasons, and I’ll gladly share them.
Writing helps me document my learning. When I put what I learn into writing, it serves as a personal reference to which I can easily run when I get stuck. For example, in my early days with Laravel, I referred back to articles I’d written when I hadn’t fully grasped some basic concepts. This is one good reason why I’m returning to writing.
Apart from creating a personal library for myself, it is a well-known fact that writing reinforces knowledge. When you take the time to think thoroughly about and research a topic, you’re reinforcing your memory and making it even clearer for yourself.
By means of writing, I want to give back to the development community. After having learned a lot from blogs, forums, and videos – many of these free, it is right to pass on something to the next generation of developers. It goes without saying that one good turn deserves another.
One other motivation for writing is that I hope to push myself higher within the developer community. By creating high-quality content that helps developers at different stages of their careers, I will push the boundaries for myself and establish myself as a top developer. This, in turn, will open opportunities for me, helping me earn more.
In addition to the foregoing, I also want to use writing as a means to create revenue. I plan to do that in two ways: earn directly from the blog by means of ad placements, affiliate marketing, and other available means; and earn money as a technical writer, writing for companies.
6 months from now – where I want to be
Writing is not easy, but it’s something I enjoy doing. No matter how much you enjoy doing something, it could easily be sidelined by other things. Talking about writing, I’m building for the future. I have a lot to do right now that takes much of my time, and I’ve got lots of bills to pay. However, I want to give this all I can.
In the next six months, I want to have up to 10k pageviews per month. While this is fairly ambitious, it is achievable. I’m not exactly an SEO guru, however, I’ll consistently create high-quality content and learn the ropes of SEO along the way. Along the way, I intend to grow my Twitter followership significantly in 6 months too.
With such traffic and a good Twitter followership, I should be able to make a decent income from my blog and position myself as an authority in my niche. I hope to open myself up to opportunities, create courses, and become either fully self-employed, or be able to choose who I work for and when. Of course this may not necessarily happen in six months, but that should be a good time to track my progress and see how well I’m doing.