This is my journey going from 0 views and 0 subscribers to over 10,000 blog subscribers and earning a FULL TIME income from blogging. Not only that, but I’ve been linked to by the New York Times, the Wallstreet Journal, and more!

I started blogging in high school, when I was 16 years old. I wanted a place to share my thoughts, experiences, and feelings with other people. I didn’t actually think that anyone would read it, and I secretly hoped that no one would. A lot of the thoughts were personal!

One day, I set up a free WordPress blog with the title The Thought Hole and started to write down my thoughts! I’d say I averaged about one post a week over the years. It was something that I looked forward to every weekend. I’d go to a cafe by my house called The Java Room and write out a long post while enjoying a steaming hot cup of coffee.

I started out by sharing thoughts and ideas that I had, but I then transitioned to writing book reviews. I also started reading other people’s blogs on WordPress. Pretty much, other wordpress users and close friends were the ONLY people reading my blog.

Blogging was never something that I thought I could make a living from. It was more of a hobby. I thought that I could maybe make a couple of bucks a month, but certainly nothing serious. I wrote blog posts for the sheer joy of writing and sharing my ideas with the world.

Soon enough, there was one moment that would redefine my “blogging career” and make me start to wonder what was possible online. Here’s the story.

I was applying to Harvard during my senior year of high school. Even though I didn’t have the grades to make it in, I wanted to make a point to myself and the people around me. I also had done well in the Harvard summer school classes I had taken in creative writing, and I liked the college.

In the course of applying to Harvard, every student has to go to an in-person interview with a Harvard alumni, who will judge you and give you an idea of what the school is like. My interview was nothing special, though I really connected with my interviewer and enjoyed the process.

Little did I know that this simple act of taking a chance would lead to greater things! I decided to write a blog post on how to do well on your Harvard interview. It was just my thoughts and advice from having gone through the process.

I hit publish and went about my day. One morning, a few weeks later, I woke up, logged into my wordpress dashboard, and almost fell off my chair. There was a huge traffic spike.

Where was all this traffic coming from? I thought that there must be some kind of error.

It turns out that I was cited by another blogger from a major publication. I was getting all this traffic to my blog from google and from the publication. All of a sudden, I was getting comments, views, and subscribers.

Weird! These were people that I didn’t know in person!

At the time, I had no idea how to monetize my blog or even what to do next. I was just super happy that I could show off the visitor stats to my friends. Looking back, this moment opened up my mind to what was possible with blogging and how I could reach strangers around the web.

Lesson: You can become an authority with blogging and get traffic from google.

Over the next two years, I kept up with blogging as a hobby. I’d share thoughts I had while in college, experiences, post pictures, and even tried starting a few other blogs, but I didn’t keep up with them. I was still working off the wordpress.com free dashboard and didn’t yet have my own domain name.

Even though I still had no intentions to make blogging a full time job, soon, I was about to have another meaningful moment that would help define my blogging career.

You see, I was launching my first business, called Books2eBooks. Using the website, you could send in your books to be scanned/copied into a PDF ebook format so that you didn’t have to buy a kindle version. I coded the entire site. It was mad ghetto.s

Haha, seems like a dumb idea, right? Wrong!

All of a sudden, I started getting orders for my service from around the web. There were legitimate established companies out there that provided these book scanning services, but for some reason, people were choosing to go with my newly launched service. Why?

I got traffic instantly and started getting orders for this service because I announced the launch of the new website on my blog!

In time, people who were looking for a service to scan their books happened upon my blog, read my story, and then checked out the website I launched. Cool, huh?

In case you’re wondering, I never filled any orders or took any money. I quickly discovered the economics of the business didn’t make sense. I’d be making pennies and it would be very labor intensive. So I just told everyone that I had decided to close down the business.

Even though my business wasn’t successful, I learned something very valuable

Lesson: You can use a blog to drive traffic to a website and as a launch pad to start a new business.

Looking back, it seems like I was being sent little signs that I should probably stick with this blogging thing, but I still didn’t consider it a serious profession AT ALL. It was a hobby.

I might have had more fun than I care to admit with blogging. In fact, I was almost fired from a job because of my blog…haha…here’s the story.

One summer, I decided to stay in Washington, DC and intern at a nonprofit organization that helped women entrepreneurs get funding from venture capitalists. It was a great internship. It paid. It was close to my college campus at George Washington University. Waking up early sucked, but that’s the working life.

One day, while I was working, I noticed a bunch of books in the corner written by the chairman/founder of the nonprofit organization. She was an accomplished entrepreneur and well respected in the business community.

I took a look at the book and decided to read it. I thought it’d be cool to learn a little bit more about the company I was working at and the founder. She also had a very inspiring story.

Fast forward a week or so and I’ve finished the book. Now, keep in mind that I was in my learning-hustler phase and reading everything that I could get my hands on about business, chiefly biographies, like those on Richard Branson’s biography, Andrew Carnegie, Steve Jobs, Rockefeller, you name it. I had high standards for books about entrepreneurs.

After I closed the book, I did something that makes me cringe to this day.

I wrote a blog post about it.

It wasn’t a glowingly positive blog post. I brought up honest criticism and thoughts I had, as well as praise. That’s one way of saying that it was a mixed review, but I sure did underline how much I admired the founder….but other sections had…interesting language.

I hit publish and didn’t think anything of it.

All of a sudden, I wake up the next morning, and my blog was getting thousands and thousands of visitors. Like, it’s a lot of traffic.

I’m thinking “Holy shit!” At first, I’m super stoked and happy. People liked my post! But then, the sinking realization came to mind, that maybe someone from the organization had read it.

I go into work that day and am confronted by one of the managers who had printed out my blog post. He pulls me aside and we have a long discussion.

I’m very apologetic. I tell him I’m happy to take the post down. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking that I’m totally fired and that they’re going to give me a really bad recommendation to future employers.

Finally, after some blunt conversation, he comes around to saying that for some odd reason, the founder, who usually would be quick to fire me or get angry about it, laughed it off.

I was shocked.

He goes on to say that it seems like I have a talent for writing and wonders if I’d like to help them with their blog or write for their site in some way.

Lesson: You can get the attention of others with blogging. He kept referring to me as “press,” when I was just this dude writing things online.

Man, I was very lucky to get a good recommendation from that internship and leave on good terms. Phew. It was a close one.

At this point in time, I still didn’t know anything about monetizing a blog, but as you can see, I was getting a crash course in driving traffic.

Eventually, I retired the blog, but as you’ll see, it racked up a good amount of traffic. The visitor traffic below is a little skewed. Not sure why, but I think WordPress didn’t incorporate visitor traffic until much later. For a while, it just displayed views.

My next internship in college was at an established media company. They actually were reporters for a living. How cool!

While I still didn’t know it, I was slowly learning how to monetize content online and ways to go about building a sustainable business around content. But, I wasn’t all in with blogging yet.

I was trying to build several tech startups including a recruitment software company, restaurant loyalty app, and music discovery platform. I also did a business competition while in London for study abroad and won the title of “London’s Rising Star” with my teammates.

Trying and failing at different tech startups made me grow up fast. I was actively selling our products, going to events, and even doing “cold sales” by just going into restaurants and food venues for the loyalty app and trying to talk up the owners.

In the course of my entrepreneurial journey, I happened to make friends with an entrepreneur who was on the founding team of Priceline. He shared with me a story that would change the way I thought about content creation, yet again.

Here’s what he said, paraphrased.

“When I was trying to get into the travel industry, I’d write these pieces for travel magazines to develop a relationship with the editors and different people in the organization.

I started sending them in A LOT, and the magazines seemed to like it. One day, I was at a networking event, and I heard the microphone come on.

The man said…’I’m about to introduce you to one of the foremost experts in the world of travel and this exploding industry.’

I started looked around, really curious about who this expert was. Then, the guy said my name and handed me the microphone.

I never considered myself an expert, but I learned that if you put your thoughts, ideas, and commentary out into the world, others can see you as an expert. I guess I do know a lot about the industry, but I don’t see myself as an expert.”

Lesson: You can show that you know a lot about a topic with blogging or writing, and therefore be an expert.

Around this time, I registered the domain name of my first official serious blog and started blogging in a niche. You can check out my blog at CrowdCrux.com

Since that moment of registering the domain name, I’ve learned SO MUCH about blogging. These are things that I wish I knew when I started. I’ve put together some content to share them with you, in the hopes that you’ll learn something, or at the very least, be inspired to give blogging a shot!

Believe it or not, my email list has now grown to over 20,000 subscribers! Although these are “vanity metrics” they do make me proud that I’ve been able to connect with and help so many people over the last several years.

As you can see, it takes time to get serious about your dreams. But, if you’re finally ready to buckle down and invest in learning this profession/career, you can subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll guide you step by step through the process!