Back to Blogging: Plans for 2025

It's been a while. The last time I published here was a little bit more than a year ago, so it makes sense to reintroduce myself.

Two types of people will receive this e-mail: folks who know my nickname (friends, colleagues, SEOs), and dear readers who found me by reading my experience writing on Ghost, my book reviews, or my thoughts on tools for thinking.

It is not that I totally abandoned writing for the past year. Six years ago I started blogging in Hungarian. This blog you are currently reading was a pivot to challenge me to write in English and also to explore more "professionally relevant" topics besides books and productivity. In short: I didn't want to harass my readers in Hungarian with articles about content marketing if they signed up for reading about productivity books.

I had a long list of topics and ideas I wanted to cover like:

The Importance of Patterns in SEO

We all do the same in SEO. We observe often used components of websites, patterns in traffic and in keywords a competitor is ranking for. Then we reverse engineer the observed patterns in order to grow.

Norbert HiresNorbert Hires

What is good content (but really)?

With the rise of AI-generated content, with more useless SEO articles, and with Google’s attempt to promote good content, the importance of quality became an important topic. But what is good content and how to create it?

Norbert HiresNorbert Hires

On how AI might change SEO

The world doesn’t need another article about ChatGPT. I don’t want to deal with AI. But it is here to stay with its opportunities and challenges. So why not discuss them?

Norbert HiresNorbert Hires

And I did cover everything I had on the list. But I came to the realisation that I am not the kind of person who sits on the sofa on a Saturday afternoon and feel an urgent need to philosophise about SEO and marketing. I like reading thoroughly, trying new things and occasionally writing about them. So the clever distinction I made with my productivity blog (Hungarian) and this marketing blog compelled me to go back to writing in Hungarian.

Also my Hungarian audience was significantly bigger than the list of readers who receive these thoughts. Often it discouraged me to send out articles to 50-60 people when I had a half-abandoned audience of more thank 1k people. Not to mention I missed using Hungarian. I work in English, I spend a lot of time learning Spanish with more or less success and using my mother tongue a little bit more often was a way to satisfy my home sickness.

I published 52 issues on Substack in Hungarian since sending out my last e-mail here. I also wanted to try out making Youtube videos, so I spent a whole day recording and cutting a 20 minutes video in English. There were too many barriers of entry for me on this front. I did not know how to record a video, I did not know what software to use to cut it and also I didn't feel confident before the camera. Doing it all in English added an extra level of friction. So I pivoted to do the videos and Hungarian. I learned a lot about why doing video is so damn hard, but at the end I published 25 Youtube videos. I attracted 15k views and 240 subscribers which made me proud as a complete novice.

So why are you reading this? Because I am not someone who feels an urgent need to philosophise about SEO and marketing. I do things, learn from them and share the insights with you. Now I have things to say by covering my recent learnings.

Also I decided to forget my self-imposed limitations on topics and go all in with this blog. In the past year I felt like I was using a nail file to cut out an old tree when an axe is attached to my back.

I read and wrote reviews on books which was not translated to Hungarian. I made my notes in English, put them into my Zettelkasten in English and underwent the hassle to translate quotes and articulate my thoughts in Hungarian to publish them to an audience whose majority could not read the book because language limitations. I also abandoned writing about SEO and AI on which fronts enough experiment ideas and thoughts accumulated to cover them.

What you can expect in the coming months

• Substack vs. Ghost: My experience running newsletters on both platforms
• Writing Online: What I learned about writing online in the last 6 years and how trends shifted in the meantime.
• Helpful AI Generated Content: I tried to answer the question on how to use LLMs to generate content that can rank in search while being useful for the readers. I already published the content and waiting for data to roll in.

Book reviews on my best recent readings

• Radical Candor (Kim Scott)
• How to measure your life (Clayton Christensen)
• Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman)
• Mere Christianity (C. S. Lewis)
• How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (Harry Browne)

I also updated my Reading List with all books I read the past year.

I'm thrilled to be writing here again! If you'd like to say hello or share your thoughts on the article, feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment on the website.