Introduction
Self Actual was born out of my desire for a creative outlet. You may recall that self-help was all the rage in the mid-2010s, so naturally I created a knockoff Thought Catalog and populated it with the sort of self-indulgent, half-baked anecdotal wisdom you’d expect. Nevertheless, the site was somewhat successful, attracting a combined email/social following of 20,000 and reaching more than two million readers over its three year lifespan.
Summary
I designed the Self Actual brand identity and assets and built the website on top of the SimpleMag WordPress theme. Originally, all of the content was written by me, and later on I sourced posts from a variety of contributors.
The name Self Actual refers Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Selfactual.com consistently ranked in the top 5 Google results for “self actualization definition” and “what is self actualization?”, pointing to a post specifically optimized for those queries.
The primary social growth strategy involved posting shareable quote images to Facebook (popular at the time), promoting the posts, and inviting those who liked the post to follow the page. For the high performing posts, I created lookalike audiences based on page engagement and repeated the promotion process, continually growing an audience of likeminded people. I used engagement bots to grow the Instagram page (it was too easy back then) and onsite CTAs to collect emails.
Confronted with the need to further monetize the project to justify my time spent, I eventually abandoned Self Actual in favour of moving to British Columbia to spend all my free time playing in the mountains (quarter life crisis). Sometimes I wonder if I should have kept with it (and pivoted to focusing primarily on YouTube content), but I have no regrets. Operating the site was a great experience that allowed me to connect with some awesome people.
Samples
