Back in 2010, I set a bold goal for myself. I took one of my websites and decided that I wanted to publish over 100 articles on it that year. I decided that by doing this, my goal was to accumulate more than a million readers by the end of the year.

To do this, I decided to take what, at the time, had been a modestly successful blog, and turn it into a kind of men’s magazine for millennials. I found half a dozen people to write articles for me. I redesigned the site. I created a pipeline of con...