Finally Finding My Blog’s Direction: Turning It into a Content Factory#

2026-01-10

I’ve finally found the direction for my blog. It took longer than I expected (much longer, honestly). I’ve consistently had the desire to write, but the answers to why I write, what I should write, and how I should keep it going were always blurry. So there were always beginnings, short bursts of enthusiasm, and then long pauses. Now, after enough trial and error, I’m starting to see a shape that feels like “this might actually last.”

My first blog was in 2007. Back then, it was simply, “Everyone has a blog—maybe I should too.” I opened a Naver blog (Learning as I Go). Blogging was booming at the time, and I vaguely dreamed of becoming a “power blogger.” But looking back, I had ambition without commitment. I hadn’t decided what I wanted to accumulate, what I wanted to give to readers, or what role a blog should play in my life. It was closer to “just setting it up” than truly starting it.

Around 2015, I wanted to try something more meaningful. I created a Tistory blog (Android-KR) with the idea of translating the Android developer documentation, and I wrote a decent amount. At the time, I was developing Android apps, and I had confidence both in development and in explaining things to others. I believed there was value in not just mechanically translating the English original, but paraphrasing it in my own way, adding context, and including extra explanations like “this is the confusing part here.”

But once I started, adding even a single page took far too long. Even if I thought I already knew the content, the moment I tried to explain it in my own words, I felt responsible for every sentence. A small wording change could subtly distort meaning, and my added explanations could even introduce misunderstandings. Writing became less about “moving what I know onto a page” and more about “re-checking whether I truly know it.” On top of that, Android was evolving rapidly at the time. I repeatedly faced situations where already-written pages needed updates, and the question “Is this the right approach?” kept growing. Eventually, I stopped.

Then in 2023, when ChatGPT emerged, my motivation returned. I created another Naver blog (GPT and Blah Blah) thinking, “Let’s do something this time.” My original Naver blog had become more like a private diary, and this new one was meant to record what prompts I used, what responses I got, and how I wrote prompts to achieve specific goals. I also hoped these records might help people who search on Naver.

For a while, I worked on it quite diligently. But over time, I noticed the view counts were simply too low. Of course, I know I shouldn’t write only for exposure—but motivation is still tied to real-world signals. When no signal comes back at all, it’s harder than expected to keep telling yourself, “I should keep going.” So once again I asked, “Is this right?” and eventually concluded it wasn’t—and postponed it for “next time.”

Around mid-2025, I began thinking seriously about restarting again. This time, I strongly wanted to begin with a clear direction, learning from past failures. In the past, I didn’t really care about monetization. But now I felt I needed the freedom to add monetization options—ads, sponsorship, sales—if only to stay motivated. At the same time, I wanted a setup where publishing is easy. I’d already learned, multiple times, that if writing and publishing are inconvenient, I eventually stop.

So I considered options like (Jekyll + GitHub Pages) and Notion-based blogging, and I ended up choosing a static site built with Hugo. What pushed me over the line was my “development environment.” I was already using Cursor for development work, and over time I became convinced it could be useful far beyond programming. Writing and editing are mostly text-based tasks, and when you organize materials in folders, the AI can understand the context—leading to a big productivity boost. In that case, why rely on an external platform and accept its constraints? Keeping my materials in my own folders, organizing them with my own rules, and reshaping the structure whenever necessary simply felt more natural.

That’s when I decided on a core concept: a “content factory.” Here, “content” doesn’t mean only blog posts. I want to produce various kinds of digital content—books, apps, games—and use them to expand my personal business. In other words, the blog isn’t merely a place to “post finished results.” It’s a system that records and organizes the entire production process, so I can keep creating what I want to create. Writing is the basic unit, books are structured writing, and apps/games are ideas turned into something executable. I want to connect all of that in one place.

What I like about this direction is that it starts with a system, not a topic. Instead of narrowing down to “topics I can write well about,” I’m choosing a way of working that lets me keep making things. Some days I’ll collect technical notes, some days I’ll write a chapter of a book, some days I’ll build a small tool, and some days I’ll record failures. Over time, unexpected connections emerge—and those connections become seeds for the next content. What accumulates from that process becomes an asset.

Of course, this is still just the beginning. Right now, I don’t have a solid way to collect feedback from visitors, and I haven’t added monetization options like ads. But from here, I plan to add things one by one. Comments, email, forms, newsletters, ads, paid content, small product sales—whatever helps become a “mechanism that makes it sustainable,” I’ll test it step by step. Most importantly, this time I plan to see it through without giving up midway. It took a long time, but now I can finally see the direction. From here on, it’s not about speed—it’s about consistency.