I was in college when I discovered craft beer or at that time, “microbrews.” This would’ve been 2006 or so. Social media was just getting started up and blogs were all the rage.
Then I was behind a desk or in a conference room with a team of people auditing companies. That work would lead to a booklet of charts, graphs and paragraphs about the company’s financials, balance sheet, income statement, etc. At the end would be a signature from my firm’s partner attesting to the accuracy of the financial statements. These were not particularly large companies like Apple or Google but rather small companies. So who would read these reports is anyone’s guess. Probably someone at the bank managing the company’s credit lines. It felt like an important job but I was also so far removed from the end user of my work in many ways. Writing and publishing, contributing to the public space just felt so energizing.
The internet was exciting and innocent at that time, too. I was enamored with the beer industry and the web so I went full throttle into developing a site called beernews.org and later transformed it into beerpulse.com. Tech-wise, it was primitive by today’s standards but I managed to pull tweets into the site back in the early 2010s which was cool. I learned how to set the site up through WordPress and I did not have the help of modern tutorials or YouTube videos or AI to answer tech questions quickly. Learning how to code is just so different in 2024. I can’t count the number of times that I spent a day being stuck on something and gave up due to the lack of help. I ended up outsourcing some light coding work which was a learning experience in itself but it was always frustrating to not make progress toward learning how to code.
So I focused hard on content. I found a key angle which was a public treasure trove of pre-release data. Alcoholic beverage producers are required to submit labels to a federal agency called the TTB prior to approval for interstate sale. The TTB, for some reason, put all these labels up online. Others found it as well but it was just hard enough to search & navigate that most who had found it didn’t bother to go back often. So I learned how to efficiently grab and download the information. When I found the TTB site, the agency had just started allowing breweries and other manufacturers to submit digital images of the labels instead of black and white scanned documents. This made it an amazing source for generating content because I now had images and could draft a few paragraph of content around those images like whether it was a new type of product or a hype-worthy product, etc.
There are two keys there: one is public government source data and two is finding a wedge in the attention market. In 2024, business-focused content creators are especially locked into public source data. Saving and accumulating ephemeral government release data has actually made some sites essential services in some industries. Reporters watch S-1 filings like a hawk to break news when private companies are announcing IPOs. Think about fundraising announcements. New business licenses. New bills filed that will impact businesses and society. There are countless examples where public data can power a content business.
So I found a consumer niche with lots of energy and enthusiasm and an endless source of data that would allow me to “break news” by contextualizing upcoming product launches. Every single day, I combed the TTB for images and wrote stories. At the site’s peak, I wrote 20 stories a day. Some of that volume did come thanks to abstracts from fresh news reports about the beer business. I also worked in announcements from breweries on social media when they started their accounts and posting news. This mix of my own content with pulling the best of the web made BeerPulse a top beer news hub for a period of 4-5 years.
But where did the people come from?
The first thing was that I was already a member of a couple popular beer forums. It was very difficult to build through these sites because when I’d post a link to my own blog, it felt like I was pulling people off of their platform. Now, so many years later, I understand it is a much better strategy to post a link to your site in your bio and keep most, if not all, of your content native on that platform. You will keep the site owners happy, too, because you are not pulling people away from them but instead are enhancing their site and being a complimentary contributor. Engaging organically in communities and establishing yourself well before you build your tower is key.
I also had a built-in glitch thanks to Google as I would write about the beers before anyone else. When beers eventually came out and especially during the time of pre-release when industry professionals would learn about them coming through the supply chain, people would search the beer names on Google. I set up a page for each beer and that page would be a collection of all posts related to that beer. I would often rank on the first page of Google, if not the top result for many beer releases.
Finally, I was early on social media. I started pages for BeerPulse. I even started brewery pages before their marketing teams got to them, not to front-run them but because I felt there should be content hubs for these top brands. Posting breaking news to Twitter (now X) and Facebook became so addicting. The immediate feedback loop was incredible and energized me in a way that doing corporate work hadn’t.
At its peak, I had over 100,000 monthly visitors to BeerPulse and over 400,000 monthly pageviews. It was not a particularly pretty website but an attention monster. As it grew, my coverage expanded and I posted more gossip content I was hearing and finding online. This is really what took it to the next level but that’s also what took a toll on me mentally. I felt the pressure, as many successful content creators do, to continue to keep those pageviews high. You lose a sense of yourself and feel the need to keep feeding the machine. You get burnt out. Many content folks have posted videos on YouTube about this phenomenon.
I burned out and took some days off. This started to break readers’ trust. Suddenly, I was not delivering on my prior inferred promise of delivering readers everything they wanted everyday. I took more time to myself to live life and take care of my health.
It wasn’t long enough.
So I took off more time. I tried to streamline my website more with generic press releases that breweries would send. I combed the TTB less frequently. And then I stopped. I basically took a sabbatical. And I started focusing more on the business consulting I was doing to support the writing. That part was becoming more interesting to me and felt like less of a grind. So I transitioned over to that full-time. And I never posted again after that.
That’s the rise and fall of BeerPulse right there or how to grow a content site to 400k views a month.
How would I apply this story that took place largely a decade ago to 2025 & beyond? I think you need to parlay content into a job or business such as consulting. I think content needs to be a part of that. All companies now have a media component to drive their goals and media people & journalists need to become businesses. It’s all blended and meshed together now. There isn’t enough value in starting up a content site and hitting publish and your thing being just *that* nowadays. There are exceptions for charismatic people who have influencer potential on video platforms like Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube. That’s a different world and not something I’m covering here. So here goes:
1) Focus on an area you are really passionate and interested about (and have been) for an extended period of time.
2) Dive into the communities where people discuss these things. Message boards. Social media groups. Stay quiet. Learn. When you know, start to offer your contributions.
3) Reply and respond quickly with your insights when influencers post. Start your own posts and threads when you think you have fresh insights.
4) Hone your video skills. Either or both in video producing, editing and/or appearing in your videos. Learn how to cut up and stitch together clips. This will make your content more interesting, algo-friendly, multimedia-like.
5) Have your home base like a website but know that you will need to build your brand natively on different social media platforms. This means you won’t be able to funnel traffic back to your home base easily.
6) Think of your wedge. What are you contributing that is special and worthy of gaining and keeping peoples’ attention. What is your information or your insights?
7) Sustain your energy. Think about how you balance your life and don’t go too hard into setting expectations for your community that you can’t sustain. Or be honest and personal when you are going to drop off so that people know when to come back. Don’t leave ’em hanging.
8) Diversify your media and your platforms. Consider publishing everywhere and in audio, video, etc. Even if you have a blog, think about whether you can gain traction on Substack, etc.
9) Keep it fun and when it’s starting not to be fun, look in the mirror, and make a plan to exit. Don’t let your thing you built languish and lose value. It’s possible someone else will be willing to buy it from you.
10) On that note, think about a succession plan. Will this be something you sell and retire from to do something else or will you use it to get a full-time gig? Can you be an acquihire where your thing can live on in new hands and you are still part of it or part of the acquiring company?
Ok, that’s it. There is some useful knowledge here from years of my own experience as well a cautionary tale of the burnout that I think happened to many bloggers of my era and is still the case today.
It’s all about your energy and how you manage it.