It just makes things a whole lot more enjoyable and increases your likelihood of pushing through hard times.
They say there is no fast money in the world or no fast and easy money in the world. And after 25 years in digital marketing, I can say that that is in 99.75% of the cases, absolutely true.
Sometimes the concepts are easy and these are sold to us as a get-rich-quick opportunity.
But while the techniques and methodologies might be easy to set up, growing the business they support can be really hard work.
Some estimate 80% of bloggers give up after the first year, and similar in the second.
Why? Because it’s hard.
There are always exceptions to the rule, and as we’ve seen in more recent years, the virality of some content can thrust others into the light of success earlier than others.
But for the bulk of us, success in business is just hard work.
My personal experience
I’ve grown businesses from nothing to a quarter million dollars a year. I’ve built businesses from $200,000 to $10 million a year, and I’ve built businesses from $12 million to $40 million a year.
And along with a lot of other smaller projects that grew at less impressive rates, all of them took time and consistent effort to get them to grow.
There are some tools and levers that can be pulled and a lot of those are low-hanging fruit for a lot of people, but you just have to prepare yourself for the long, hard road, especially if you are an entrepreneur.
A wealthy friend once said to me, “Smart people never spend their own money.”
That has not been something I’ve ever really been comfortable with doing.
I think taking on the pressure of using other people’s money to grow a business is probably why I have not built the next Uber.
I think my wiring means that I need to be able to look people in the eye and tell them honestly whether I can increase their money or not.
And while it’s likely in most cases that I absolutely can, I also don’t want to put that pressure on myself.
Bootstrapping your blogging endeavors
So I’m an organic grower. I like to grow things organically and I usually like to bootstrap everything where possible.
So all of my side hustles have always been 100% bootstrapped.
The benefit of that is that any profits are mine. The negative is that if I backed myself, I could probably scale much faster.
When you’re working on a side hustle, knowing that it’s probably going to take you a lot longer than you think to reach a measure of success depending on your effort and output, you need to have an interest and I would definitely say a passion in the area to make it a real success.
When I started reselling consumer electronics on eBay in about 2002 even that took effort. I also had a full-time job.
I was buying consumer electronics as a retailer of a wholesaler and when things sold, I had to drive all the way across town to the distributor and pick up the items, then drive all the way back in my lunch hour, package it, send it.
And as that grew, so did the customer inquiries, so did the number of trips across town, and it eventually became quite a time-consuming activity.
I ended that because I moved country.
Passion keeps you up at night
In the next country I moved to, started a side hustle with a coupon and deal site.
This site was an absolute passion for me because I love building websites and online destinations that people come and engage with.
This is one of the passions that drive me, being a creator, not only of front-facing content but also of the engines that drive those platforms.
I took all of the skills that I had learned from self-teaching myself PHP programming in addition to an open-source content management system and built out what was really a very comprehensive site that was heavily trafficked and was making me decent money.
I was employing three part-time student writers and had moved country again, not needing to worry about income and living off the fruits of that.
But this took passion, and because I loved doing what I was doing, I could push through.
I had a full-time job still, and in the evenings I would go home, eat and work until 1:00 am, 2:00 am, 3:00 am in the morning on the website, developing improved user experience and automation that would simplify the site as it scaled, but it was an enormous amount of work.
And had I not been passionate about building such a platform, and had I not been passionate about the way that traffic was growing, I never could have succeeded at it.
Sometimes you have to get up again, and again, and again
Unfortunately, the 2009 Google update wiped me off the face of the earth, and I didn’t have quite enough passion to restart that project, feeling like I could never see it being a sustainable, long-term success.
It felt ‘thin’ and wasn’t very fulfilling.
That was a mistake because had I just continued with it, restructured it, and kept going, I probably would have created a platform that no longer meant I’d need to work today.
I’ll skip through a few of the other e-commerce businesses that I either built and closed down or built and sold and exited from.
My current side hustle is making money from blogging.
It’s not too dissimilar from my deals and discounts website, which was really just blogging whatever good deals people could have around the web, but it is much more in-depth.
See, I’ve had a couple of sites now that didn’t like Google or Google didn’t like them, they have grown and then had updates wipe them out.
With this current project, I’m committed to creating the best content I physically can.
I still have a job now and I keep my job because I like my job. I like working with people and if I quit and go full time just on my project, it will just be me, and my extroverted personality type likes to be around people.
So once again, I am in the position of technically working two jobs, but now I also have a family and two kids.
Coming home from work and spending time with family and then continuing on in my studio until late at night, most nights, requires passion.
The buzzword at the moment is grit, and I definitely think that the two work hand in hand.
You have to have the grit to push through, the grit to overcome your physical tiredness, the grit to make things happen and choose to do the hard thing every week or every day by continuing to try to build the side hustle that you’re on.
Your passion makes your grit bearable.
I’m not saying burn yourself out, I’m definitely saying take some time. But if you push yourself, then you’ll eventually see results – if you’re putting out good content (I know it’s hard to know what ‘good content’ means – but I can tell you).
Good content comes in bundles
But I couldn’t do this every night if I wasn’t passionate. Part of my current strategy is not just writing for the web, but it’s also doing all of my own HD photography and also matching all or a lot of my posts with YouTube videos that I produce for each individual article.
- Keyword Research
- Writing
- HD Photography + Editing
- Video Shooting + Editing
(Edit – I now have a few talented VAs helping me on this work. More on that later.)
I can tell you that when you’re just writing for the web or you have writers writing for you, that is one thing.
But when you put on your plate the need to then do all HD photography of anything that you’re working on in addition to recording videos, it’s an enormous step up.
But I firmly believe if I’m going to be successful in this space and with the way the web is going, needing all facets of media on your articles or blog – video + photography and writing is going to be, in my opinion, the way to dominate in the game.
Of course, all that content has to be good, but the more you do it, the better you get.
And if you think that it may be too late to start, it’s never too late to start.
I told myself that three years ago, but I persevered with the great stubbornness that is now reaping really great rewards.
The niche of my main side is incredibly competitive and there are a lot of supergiant websites that dominate the space.
The reason I’ve stuck with this niche is that I’m passionate about it, and I figure eventually my passion will shine through.
If I had a niche site that was talking about gardening, I would have flamed out long ago.
So keep your passion alive, and choose a side hustle that matches. And if you’re blogging to make money, then try to choose something that you really are passionate about.
And if you choose a highly competitive space or niche, be prepared to double the time it takes to make it successful.
But the reward is once you’re successful, the niche that you’re in will be undoubtedly large and hopefully offer you unlimited earning potential.
If you wonder about the tools and strategies I use to automate and streamline my workflow, then definitely check out this post.
