Your decision to stay away from social media, any reason for that? I ask this only because for someone in your twenties, the pressure to get on social media must be extremely high.
I actually see the rise of social media as a double edged sword when it comes to blogging.
On one hand, you have people spending more time updating their feeds.
On the other hand, it also means people are less compelled to start a personal blog describing their day to day lives (remember the days of livejournal?).
Same, i recently decided to overhaul my RSS addiction. I did a ruthless curation of my RSS feeds and picked only a select few that i truly enjoyed. Then, i looked for the publication's Twitter and added the accounts to the relevant list.
The upside is i no longer feel compelled to finish reading everything in Feedly. Before, the unread markers was distracting.
I agree. I started on an affiliate site and while i consider it passive income, there is some level of involvement on a regular basic. I realised that frequent updates keep Google's indexing bots happy. Stagnating content tends to drop in rank after a while.