I agree 100% with your statement about living live on one's own terms.
Usually I write out a bunch of headlines, and then eliminate the ones that are horrible.
My goal is to condense the essence of the entire post in as little characters as possible. I often ignore any type of SEO tactics, and optimize it for humans.
There's definitely way more I could write on this (there's a whole process, tons of things to research, etc.), I'll add it to a Google Keep note for a future post (if you read some posts you know what I mean!).
For most of 2016 I didn't really try to build an audience. I just posted on topics that interested me while not paying attention to anything.
Then I stopped blogging for a few months and really started to think about what I want to do (this happened about mid-year).
During that time I re-did my site and completely changed my mindset from "I want to make money" to "I want to create the best content I can on a specific subject".
I don't really use twitter or other platforms. I just post content on my site, and try to reply to comments on relevant sites (like HN and other tech sites) when it makes sense.
I'll tell you a secret, I haven't even e-mailed my list once. Why? Because I'm still figuring this stuff out as I go. I don't have years of content to create marketing auto-responders and dozens of products to push to people.
Just yesterday I was thinking about the problem of "you have all these people on your list, if you don't message them, they are going to forget about you", so I thought maybe I should be spinning off newsletters based on the weekly blog posts I create -- and at worst send maybe something out every 2 weeks.
That's why when I stumbled on this ASK HN thread I thought I'd ask if people wanted to hear this stuff, and then figured by publicly posting something like this, I'll have accountability to actually start messaging my list.
P.S,
I'm just a dude who cannot accept wasting his life away to make another company rich so I can "retire" when I'm nearly dead. I want to live life right now on my own terms and have the self reliance and freedom to work anywhere in the world, and never have to worry about money again.
My income comes from a few streams. Course sales (related to tech), affiliate sales, book sales and consulting. I don't have ads on my blog and never will.
All of the content can be found on my site at https://nickjanetakis.com/. I recommend reading the home page because it better describes what I just wrote here.