Jump to content

Am I the only CR blogger left?


Matt

Recommended Posts

I was doing a bit of searching tonight for some CR bloggers to see if anyone was active. But it seems that there's just a CR blog graveyard. Everyone basically quit blogging about CR a long time ago. How come?

 

The reason I've not posted on mine in some months is that I'm currently working on other niche websites which are starting to bring in a passive income for me, and should allow me to be self employed soon. And then I'll be back creating content for my CR site. And I know a lot more about building sites and SEO now, so hopefully I can bring in a bit more interest to CR.

 

I seem to have a disinclination towards posting too much content with (and pushing) affiliate products on my CR site, although there is a small amount which helps pay for website hosting at least. And they're mainly things I use or have used.

 

Anyway it would be nice to have a bit more visibility of CR on the web and a network / community of blogs. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Matt,

 

Nice to hear from you. 

 

Matt wrote:

Everyone basically quit blogging about CR a long time ago. How come?

 

I know there are still a few who continue to practice serious CR, but they happen to be relatively quiet folks, disinclined to post very often. Personally, I've come to the conclusion after careful consideration of the data on CR in mammals, that the benefits of serious CR relative to a healthy, obesity-avoiding diet and lifestyle are likely to be marginal (at best). As a result, I believe it unlikely that serious CR will make a difference when it comes to riding the wave of lifespan/healthspan advances that may materialize in the decades or centuries to come.

 

Therefore I've stopped crowing about CR, and have moderated my own practice.

 

--Dean

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think blogging in general is sort of a dying art.  If you really want to get your message out (I'm with Dean on this one but that's another story) you should do a YouTube channel, your audience will be much bigger and you might even be the first channel of this kind which would be a nice way to start (I haven't actually searched so I don't know).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

mccoy:

 

 

Matt, do you mean strict CR à la Walford-Rae or generic CR/ DR/longevity (or both?)

 

I mean both. There were quite a few very active blogs a few years ago, and it was a mix of CR/health bloggers. I don't think it was lack of engagement on the blogs, so maybe people just quit or just lost interest for whatever reason.

 

Dean:

 

 

 

I know there are still a few who continue to practice serious CR, but they happen to be relatively quiet folks, disinclined to post very often. Personally, I've come to the conclusion after careful consideration of the data on CR in mammals, that the benefits of serious CR relative to a healthy, obesity-avoiding diet and lifestyle are likely to be marginal (at best). As a result, I believe it unlikely that serious CR will make a difference when it comes to riding the wave of lifespan/healthspan advances that may materialize in the decades or centuries to come.

 

Yeah, I think the results which have come in over the last few years definitely dampened the enthusiasm regarding any life prolonging effects translating to humans. I'm still on the optimistic side that calorie restriction is worth doing and the effect will be significant enough compared to just an obesity avoidance diet.

 

That being said, I've also modified my CR practice to less strict form, but my BMI is still pretty low at 17.9 right now.  I did get as low as 16.3 (if I remember correctly), but I just did not like how I looked. And it looks worse when I look back at how thin I was.  I have a small body frame, so this is fine for me and I never get negative comments anymore. I also think that my diet right now will enable me to reach a point when these age reversal technologies become available. 

 

Anecdotally, I am approaching my mid 30s now but people still think I am 22-23. I know looking young doesn't always mean CR is definitely slowing aging, but I like the effect and I think CR has something to do with it.

 

Before I write about the rhesus monkey study, I think I'm just going to wait until the study concludes. It shouldn't be too long now I imagine. I know a lot of people were disappointed by the results, but I also think there are good reasons why we shouldn't be and why CR in humans looks more promising. 

 

Mechanism said:

 

 

Thank you for the post. My sense is in the post monkey trial and TRF era, that the CR commmunity is smaller and perhaps a bit fractured. Case in point the volume of posts here. Ditto for no organized annual meeting. Ironic I’m the 4th respondent to your question and to the best of my knowledge none of the 4 of us practice traditional CR like you ( apparently) do. 

Many variables at play here, IIRC Dean polled the old timers some time ago on the forum and “moving on” may have explained part of it. 

 

Critical mistake earlier on when CR was getting a lot of media attention is that the forums were basically hidden away on an out-dated *email list* which wasn't even indexed by google. I could be mistaken, but I'm sure that there was resistance to moving over to a forum. It meant that even though CR was getting lots of searches, people weren't finding support forums which were very popular back then. Longecity or imminst at the time was the closest thing that was more visible. 

 

 

 

Limited efficacy ( the thread Dean pointed to) is no doubt a factor - my own take of it is it is very possible that CR has some LE and or morbidity reducing benefit for some people ( you always need to define relative to what, and even Dean’s helpful suggested comparator of a “heathy obesity avoiding diet and lifestyle” maintains some room for interpretation), but the NIA vs UW data suggests a much more modest effect size, if any, than originally suggested by earlier work

 

I think there were just many issues with the monkey study that really weren't helpful in determining CR's effect on ageing itself. I'm not going to go into details here (I have work soon), but it seems a few monkeys in the CR group have lived way longer than normal. I think the oldest monkey was 43 last year. Quite a few of them lived beyond 40 in the CR group. I do want to give my thoughts on the study but my time is wrapped up in trying to build a business atm. 

 

I do think that for older people it might be worth risking a higher degree of CR. For someone under 50, it might be better to be slightly conservative and just keep at a low weight and eat as healthy as you can. It's really about weighing up the risk / benefits. 

 

 

 

I think it is wonderful you are contributing to the blogosphere with your posts and It would be great for you to keep the site active, particularly minimizing conflicts of interest as you suggested. I personally enjoy “talking health” / lifestyle with fellow aficionados of optimizing health and welcome any exchange and/or get together as they arise.

 

Thank you :) I definitely intend to pick up on blogging about CR and health soon. I'm starting my garden again soon, I think I'll blog about that to get me in the habit of posting on my CR blog again. Right now I'm creating other sites which already have more traffic and are earning me quite a bit of passive income. Not enough to quit my job yet, but the trajectory is encouraging. I'm being pulled in that direction right now because it just makes sense financially, until I'm more free to blog about my interests. 

 

In the future it'd be nice if some of you left comments on my site though. It helps and makes me feel happy haha. 

 

 

Gordo said:

 

 

 

I think blogging in general is sort of a dying art.  If you really want to get your message out (I'm with Dean on this one but that's another story) you should do a YouTube channel, your audience will be much bigger and you might even be the first channel of this kind which would be a nice way to start (I haven't actually searched so I don't know).

 

Nah, there are still very popular blogs out there. By the rate of growth of my traffic on one of my new sites, it seems before the summer I'll be up somewhere around 30,000 page views per month. Most of my traffic is google (99%) and that's just from SEO, no back linking for this particular site. I know 30k per month might not sound like a lot, but it seems plausible I'll be be making quite a bit of passive income on that site by then (enough to quit my job from that site alone). So there is *definitely* a reason to continue blogging - not just to be helpful for people who don't want to watch videos, but it's pretty easy to make an income from the traffic if you've got it and are in a niche that you can monetise. There's certainly good incentives for people to continue blogging, so blogs aren't going anywhere... imo. 

 

But sure, a youtube channel is on my list of things to do, not only for that site, but for my CR as well. I already have a youtube channel but I've never really done anything with it. Still not sure if I want to brand it under my actual CR site name or just my personal youtube channel. 

 

As for CR: I did some keyword research on "calorie restriction" and it's saying that it's getting around 4000 local monthly searches (US) right now. So there is some interest in it (haven't checked google trends though), and right now it's all mainly news sites in the SERPs (first page of google). So, I'm not capturing that traffic, but other people are coming on my site from other keywords. I'd probably have more luck on youtube at this point as you said, Gordo.

 

I guess if I was more active I'd get some good backlinks to my articles naturally and could get to the first page eventually. 

What I'm saying is that you need people, personalities, to grow a community and get interest. Blogs and youtube is a good way to do that. I think looking at the vegan / raw food groups, it's mostly from youtube that it grew. And engagement is higher in comments on youtube as well compared to blogs.

 

It's just trying to find what I need to put my energy into right now. Plus I want to be more free so I can do LE advocacy, attend conferences / events and help SENS. If I ever become rich lol. I'm working on it. :p 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It had been a while since I visited your blog - the last time I was there the photo on the title page was a green smoothie with what appeared to be dark chocolate chunks in it. I really like how the blog is looking and the recent articles.

 

I assume you are able to see which posts have the greatest viewcount and I'm curious if you would mind sharing your top 3? Or something along those lines.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, I'll tell you my top one... it's my post about growing hair on a vegan diet.  Google: vegan hair growth

 

I made countless mistakes on my blog. Even just as recent as a few days ago I was correcting some of them. 

For example: I had a 10 MB image as a featured image on one of my posts, and a few 2-3 MB images. On my home page! I'm sure google bots loved that D:  And mobile users  :huh:  With my 200 mb internet connection, I never saw little mistakes like this.

 

I'm going to try to do a sprint of new posts regarding my own CR practice, my gardening, and answering various questions people have about CR, diet, supplements etc..  I was going to create a niche site around gardening, but I suppose it would fit fine with my CR blog.

Idk why I've had a weird negative association with earning from the content I create on my blog. As long as I'm creating some value for someone who wants help and their questioned answered. I guess it's not an issue. Sometimes the research I have to do takes quite a bit of my time, and then to write and publish. I'll try to keep the affiliate posts no more than about 30% of posts though for this site.  

 

I just realized I had an email list with over 400 people on it as well... :o Need to sort that out.

 

Thanks drewab. I appreciate it. I've learned so much over the last year, I'm trying to implement everything I've learned on my sites, including my CR site. I'm still experimenting a bit, seeing how things rank and stuff. I haven't got it all figured out, but I'm always learning to be better. :)

 

I've gone back to a few old posts and made them better. Some I just deleted. The quality of some of my old posts... eek! They were bad! lol  :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for all the suggestions, Mechanism.

I've thought about a few of these already, and will probably pursue them at some point this year. Right now I'm still tied up with my other projects as well, but they'll be more passive and I'll probably hire writers to continue to add content for them, so then I can focus more on CR and more active income. Maybe even write and ebook or something also. 

I used to get a lot of requests for media interviews for magazines, newspapers, radio and so on, but not much anymore. I guess that's because CR has died down. But to be honest, I'm not sure I felt comfortable with that attention at that point.

 

I think I'll have a good chance of getting noticed. I do look and sound pretty young, and I think people will be intrigued (more so as I get older). 

 

I've been so out of "health" related stuff for a while though, and focusing on other things, that I'm in the process of catching up with what's going on.

 

Yeah, you're right. I followed the raw food movement for a while but it was too much of that "woo-woo" stuff going on haha. I think that's one of the reasons why I found it hard to push products, because I can't exaggerate the claims as many of these people do. I'd be a bad sales person? lol  Although, I do raise money for charity on the phone every day :p 

 

Since making fixes on my site, it seems my traffic on my CR site is increasing a little and even noticing visits to old blog posts! Something I hadn't seen in a long time.

 

I was also thinking about doing some guest posts on health blogs if possible. I have fairly good knowledge of CR and health and could probably contribute decent articles. I could possibly get links back to some of my past and future articles this way.

 

I've got plenty of links to my homepage, which is great, but hardly any to my inner pages / posts. I didn't realize before that it's a big factor in ranking on google.  Although, hopefully I can build my site up naturally through the channels you mentioned and get links mostly that way.

I thought about creating my own FB page at one time, where I could more easily share my thoughts on news stories and post my articles.  I wish I had continued to blog regularly all those years :/

 

Anyway, I hope the quality of my posts are a little better now. 

 

My mindset has certainly changed. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just curious, what is the topic (can you give a link) to your "other website" (the one getting 30,000 views a month)?  That is pretty good.   I assume with your CR site there are a lot of hits from people just trying to lose weight in general, the vegan thing is really trending higher these days though as well.  You should really do the YouTube channel and just see how it works out, doesn't have to be elaborate, maybe just every time you do a new blog post/article basically read it or deliver that content as a monolog with a few pictures, and see if you can get any traction that way.

 

More feedback on your website - the top banner is so long that when I click the navigation buttons at the top it seems like nothing is happening because I can't see any content changing (because I have to scroll down past the "milkshake" picture to see any content!).  Also your "about" picture should be changed to one of those "OMG he's 33 but looks like a teenage girl" pictures, the one there seems like a strange choice to me.

 

Regards,

Gordo

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just curious, what is the topic (can you give a link) to your "other website" (the one getting 30,000 views a month)?  That is pretty good.   I assume if your CR site there are a lot of hits from people just trying to lose weight in general, the vegan thing is really trending higher these days though as well.  You should really do the YouTube channel and just see how it works out, doesn't have to be elaborate, maybe just every time you do a new blog post/article basically read it or deliver that content as a monolog with a few pictures, and see if you can get any traction that way.

 

More feedback on your website - the top banner is so long that when I click the navigation buttons at the top it seems like nothing is happening because I can't see any content changing (because I have to scroll down past the "milkshake" picture to see any content!).  Also your "about" picture should be changed to one of those "OMG he's 33 but looks like a teenage girl" pictures, the one there seems like a strange choice to me.

 

Regards,

Gordo

 

I'll share later, but not right now because I'm starting to see progress and I'm overly cautious, perhaps slightly paranoid that something will inevitably go wrong. My experience these last few years is just that. 

 

My CR site has performed very poorly because of a few reasons. It barely gets 50 organic searches per day (it used to be much higher), and most of them was on my vegan hair post until recently. I now know how to grow my site organically, but there are still a few issues I need to figure out.

 

Mistakes I made: 

 

a) bad or too competitive keywords

b) bad site design

c) infrequent posting 

d) poor overall domain authority and internal linking structure

 

Getting backlinks within other people's articles / content to my pages / posts on the CR site has been a massive failure and waste of my time.

 

I get rejected for a living on the phone raising money for heart research; but it's more frustrating when it's your own content and site getting rejected  :lol:  I think it's just the LE community, professionalism, and reputation of the sites and people who I'm asking. 

 

Now the fact I have affiliate posts on there, makes it even harder. And I know I'm CR'd, but I have to eat!... lol. Better selling / promoting a few skin products, getting paid from amazon, than being on benefits from the government. :p 

 

Speaking to raw food bloggers / vegan community is difficult because over the lats few years people like durianrider, freelee and others have been  constantly giving CR a really bad name (I guess you missed all that) - so when I'm associated with CR, nothing happens. But I'm really not that involved with that community, so I didn't really care too much. 

 

Those are some other reasons why my focus has gone elsewhere.

 

My other site grew exponentially, doubling in traffic every month, where my CR site has been in a decline. A lot of of that is my fault, but the keywords are so competitive in this area, I cannot grow the site in a time frame I need. The only other strategy I haven't properly tried is guest posting. Basically, posting articles on other sites and getting a link back to my articles. I'm new to this, so maybe my approach is just bad.

 

I hope I haven't put anyone off doing a CR blog if they were now thinking about it haha  :lol:

 

With my new posts, I basically look for keywords which get between 10-250 searches per month and target them to rank on google. It's slow going, but it works.

 

/end of rant hehe  :Pxyz

 

Re: Site and about page

 

Interesting. I'm using a 4K screen to look at the site, so I see everything and so I never saw an issue with the design. Thank you for the suggestion! My bounce rate has gone down significantly in the last few weeks... I'll do some testing soon to see if these metrics are improved further. :)

 

Hahaha :lol:  My about page is something I meant to update recently with a new picture. That one is really old (from 2012).  I actually get that IRL and on the phone. :p  One time I was on a call, signing up a girl to the charity, and she thought I sounded like her friend. She thought I was like a 19 year old girl  :rolleyes:  I know I don't have a deep voice or anything, it's more young boyish, but apparently on the phone I sound like a girl sometimes. *shrug*

 

I like smileys.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

.....ne time I was on a call, signing up a girl to the charity, and she thought I sounded like her friend. She thought I was like a 19 year old girl  :rolleyes:  I know I don't have a deep voice or anything, it's more young boyish, but apparently on the phone I sound like a girl sometimes. *shrug*

 

 

Actually the small phone/smartphone speakers tend to cut away most of the low frequencies, so it makes sense that the lack of the low frequencies intensity altered your voice. Very often I cannot recognize people on the phone. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah I pretty much figured that! xD I've not really heard people tell me that in person with regards to my voice. And some mics I sound different.

 

I do have some youtube videos though. So you can hear me on the, :)

Sorry about the delay in responding to your PM mccoy. Will get back to you shortly. I've been working almost nonstop.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...