I’ve been hinting at this for a while now, but it’s time to finally say something about it:
This blog is going to move.
The new site is called Didactic Mind (rather fitting, n’est-ce pas?), and the process of transferring everything over, including all of the old posts and pictures and whatnot, is underway. There is nothing at that link right now for you to fool around with – it’s just the default ugly WordPress theme with nothing to it. But that’s going to change over time.
If shitposting and answers to comments and so on all slow down for a few days to a week, don’t freak out, it’s just a site migration. I’m hoping that the move will be more or less seamless – that is to say, if you try to access https://didactsreach.blogspot.com, you’ll end up at https://didacticmind.com immediately.
As for why I’m doing this:
I’ve been on Blogger for 7.5 years and I’ve never had any major complaints about it. But it has become clear that the godawful “new” Blogger schema is going to become default very soon, whether we like it or not, and even though I could, and did, revert to the old setup, I figure that it’s time to move from this old and thoroughly outdated platform.
I’m also frankly very concerned that the SJWs who own Goolag are extending their slimy tentacles ever deeper into the very few non-converged parts of the company. Blogger was one of those few remaining parts, where you could still quite easily and happily post things that everyone else finds outrageous and crazy without fear of getting shut down the next day.
WordPress.com (the blogging platform, not the open-source software) has already proven itself to be even more converged than Google in some ways – they nuked Heartiste’s old site without any notice whatsoever for no good reason – so that was right out.
So I decided to start looking at hosting my own sites. I figured that it was well past time to do so.
Which brings us to the other, bigger news.
I started creating my own niche sites using WordPress and a hosting company a few months ago, and I’ve been working on my own sites ever since then. The first of these, Superb Shaving, is now fully live:
It’s all about giving yourself the best wet-shaving experience possible, using products and techniques that will give you a great shave every day, every time.
Much more importantly, it’s a way for you guys to support one of your own – without anyone begging for donations.
If you like my work and my writing, if you appreciate what I’ve done for you over nearly eight years of writing, and if you want to contribute to my future success, please head over there, take a look at the product reviews and articles that I’ve written up, send the link around to your male friends who want to save HUGE amounts of money every year on shaving products, and – most importantly – buy some stuff using my Amazon affiliate links.
If you click on one of the products and decide not to buy it, but buy something else in that same browser window, I still get a cut of the proceeds.
So, while I don’t much like Amazog and while they have done plenty to make it much harder for people to make money on their platform now, we might as well take advantage of it while it’s there.
There will be more such sites coming up in the near future. The next one will likely be a site called Didactic Strength, which will condense and consolidate the fitness knowledge and techniques that I have picked up over nearly 10 years of powerlifting and martial arts into a single place. I plan to sell my own products through that site, along with affiliate products and similar things.
After that, we’ll see. I’ve spent enough time in Russia by now to write a small book about how to date and deal with Russian women. And I’m pretty sure there would be demand for that, too.
The goal here is to establish my own business(es), so that eventually I will never have to deal with the, uh, “joys” of corporate life ever again.
And since I don’t believe in begging for money from the internet via Patreon and PayPal and so on – and I have it on reasonably good authority that Patreon, in particular, might, shall we say, suffer an existential crisis sooner rather than later – I’m going to go about this by providing value to people who matter.
That’s where you come in. As I said above, if you’ve gained value from all of the things that I’ve written and done over the years, then head on over to Superb Shaving and buy some of the products that I have featured there. You will be doing your part to ensure that one of your own prospers and succeeds in spite of every effort to hold him back.
So click on over to Superb Shaving, put some Proraso and Merkur and Muehle shaving products in your cart, and let’s help each other become stronger, tougher, and better as men.
7 Comments
If you don't fancy amazon affiliate, see if you can source products from cjdropshipping. You can make bigger margins. I would also suggest SEO (I know Goolag is unavoidable, but they created waves of millionaires like that) for promotion.
Dropshipping is a possibility, but my big problem with it is that the major players in that game are all Chinese. And I am NOT a fan of the Chinese way of doing things.
That said, if that site gets significant traffic, I'll consider it.
I'm using SEO techniques to build out that new site as it is. The real source of revenue and leads, though, is likely to be from email marketing – which I've never done and will need to start doing in the future once Didactic Mind gets fully up and running.
Chinese dropshipping will be dead with or without Trump negotiations with China and the corona virus on top of it. 'Cjdropshipping' (it's a brand look them up) is an American based company and there are more like them popping up within U.S soil.
There are also many U.S based print on demand shops as well and they do it at low cost, higher and more consistent quality than the Chinese and more importantly, faster shipping.
Aliexpress is not going to do very well with American and European businesses, especially with the moves that the CCP is pulling off on the sister company Alibaba.
I started my own print on demand store and I'm doing zero collaboration with Chinese people, not even digital services.
'Cjdropshipping' (it's a brand look them up) is an American based company and there are more like them popping up within U.S soil.
Are you sure about them not being Chinese? I looked up their website and not only is the English hilariously bad – it's like they hired an H-1B graduate from China to write it all up for them – but their About page makes it very clear that they originated in Yiwu City, Zhejiang Province. (Slightly related – that's where the Wuhan Bioresearch Lab team found several different bat coronaviruses that bear a significant resemblance to the Kung Flu.)
There are also many U.S based print on demand shops as well and they do it at low cost, higher and more consistent quality than the Chinese and more importantly, faster shipping.
I have no doubt about that. The Chinese are rapidly getting locked out of multiple markets. It's going to get bad for them pretty quickly.
Almost all dropshippers have warehouses in China, but since they have built some in the U.S and some them are starting to open business in Europe, the signs are clear. A lot of products on amazon.com are sourced from these dropshippers anyway, so if you plan on doing an affiliate deal aside from books, then find the product directly from the source. Amazon is also known to manufacture winning products by themselves and trip up the entrepreneurs who started off with these dropshipping products and took all the risk before hand. It sounds strange, but they don't give a crap about their sellers. Or at least Bezos doesn't care if his website goes down after making 100+ billion U.S.D.
Fair enough, then, I'll look into it as a possibility.
What is your new venture called and where is its website?
I have a print on demand store with t-shirts, mugs, canvas, etc. It's called adorablebuddies.com. My dropshipping partner is Printful, because they got warehouses around the world and they specialize in the kind of products I'm promoting. I'm thinking about CJDropshipping for other physical products in the future once I start making some sales. I will be doing Facebook ads next week (it's a necessary evil) and see how it goes.
The point is, when it comes to operating a store, you want to have your own domain hosted, because if it's a store on amazon, ebay, etsy, etc., you are not the owner and they can shut it down for whatever reason they want. You got this right off the start.
Now you need to find a way to source and ship products without touching inventory from someone who actually cares about his/her partners. Big online platforms like amazon don't care one bit about anyone. I don't know why. They will die by a thousand cuts as the saying goes.