How can I use my skills without biting off more than I can chew?
Hello everyone, sorry if the title is a little vague but I honestly couldn't think of anything more accurate.
A bit of an introduction, my name is Omar Alawdy and I've been self-teaching myself coding for about 4 years now, built some things along the way, some of them were successful, some not, some were then not.
I'm currently trying to make some passive income, and recently launched a saas that I eventually realized i had no time for, to maintain or promote, due to college and other life stuff.
ultimately i decided to just go the simple(not really) route of blogging and giving seo a go, maybe that will result in a passive income while giving me enough time to focus on studying.
The problem here is that i don't want to start a coding blog, I do know multiple languages and frameworks, but not enough to guide others.
So I thought the right thing to do was to find a low competition niche and just start writing, but at the same time whenever I think about starting I feel bad about all the time i spent learning those languages and frameworks in the hope of making website and apps.
In conclusion, how do i make a blog that isn't about coding while at the same time using the knowledge I've collected over the last 4 years.
If you have other suggestions beside making a blog please do tell, but please don't suggest freelancing as I've tried it and found it not worth the headaches.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure "passive income without any work" is possible. It sounds to me like something for nothing.
There are a few blogs on self-taught development but I think there's always room for me b/c self taught devs always deserve more encouragement (I'm self taught too and have constant imposter syndrome).
If you want to further develop your knowledge you could learn and write posts similar to The Joel Test or Joel's guide to functional specs. Both of those topics are not specifically code but are very important for a developer if they are going to be more than just a code monkey.
Finally, not sure if would work but I've been noticing there's nothing like "Indie Hackers for data anlysis/BI". So that appears to me to be an underserver niche but not sure if the demographic is right for engagement and constructive dialogue.
Hope that helps and good luck,
Thank you for the response.
I absolutely would work hard to reach that stage of passive income, I was just saying that I'd like to reach that stage not from just blogging but by also somehow integrating coding into it.
on an unrelated note, I've been thinking about starting some sort of a community website but don't know if it'd be worth the time or would end up just being a blog where I'm the only one writing posts.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I took "maybe that will result in a passive income while giving me enough time to focus on studying" to mean you have very little time for it but want to earn income.
It seems to me a massive amount of community vs. blog is just in the UI/UX. If you break it down, there's not much difference in functionality between IH, WordPress, phpBB forum, Twitter, etc. It's all just post/comment/upvote. But for some reason some become communities with a lot of two-way engagement while others are blogs with one-way posting. It's an odd thing that I can't necessarily explain.
From my perspective, you're making some assumptions that might be holding you back.
Assumption #1: you can't guide others unless you're an expert. Not true! People often enjoy learning from those who are themselves learning. Some of the most successful educators I've talked to were often complete novices just a short time before. And some of the top tier experts I've met are horrible educators. If you want to start a coding blog, you absolutely can. Just target people who know less than you do right now.
Assumption #2: you had a bad time freelancing, so it's not worth the headaches. I personally had a great time freelancing myself. It was extremely lucrative, and I had almost no headaches. It might be a tragedy for you to write freelancing off as a result of your bad experience. Perhaps you got unlucky, or perhaps there were strategies you could follow in the future to have a much better experience.
Good luck!