My Story: Small Time Blogger with Big Dreams
My name is Will and this is my blog.
I started my first blog Health And Willness in 2018. I had just graduated with my Nurse Practitioner degree, and I knew that I wanted to do some form of social media as a business.
I was always a nerdy kid growing up, and I was ALWAYS on the computer learning how to edit videos, make funny photoshops, and even animate little cartoons. I was OBSESSED with Youtube (Shane Dawson was #GOALS back then).
Over the years I tried to do something on social media MANY times. Here’s some examples of tries (and fails) that I’ve made:
- Funny videos on Youtube when I was age 13
- Animated Harry Potter videos at age 15
- My music career Youtube Videos at ages 20-24
- My quarter-life-crisis “Youtuber personality” at age 25
I realized in my grad program that I was able to synthesize large complex pieces of info and turn it into easily digestable content. This is when I had the idea to create my blog – Health and Willness.
Yes – I have a thing for puns…
I started off primarily making YouTube videos, because video is what I excelled at. But I started realizing just how much money can be made with a blog, and I wasn’t sure I’d always want to be on camera anyway.
When I start something – I go ALL in. We’re talking hyperfocus to the max. I blame the ADHD, but honestly it can be very benefial in some circumstances. The downside… once I lose momentum it’s VERY DIFFICULT for me to get back on track. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My initial blogging success
I learned a lot from a course I bought from bloggers who were making over $100K per month, so I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing.
Don’t get me wrong – I still had a TON to learn. But I felt pretty prepared.
My blog did get some traffic, primarily from pinterest as I was good at graphic creation (thanks to having no friends in high school).
My YouTube started to see even more success, and it was really popping off. I had some videos get hundreds of thousands of views, and I was starting to make consistent income from adsense alone – close to $500/mo!
But then something unexpected happened…
I did have a video become popular and ended up on the wrong side of the internet – I was bullied by colleagues in my same field. I stumbled upon a reddit thread all about my video, making fun of my intelligence, my looks, my sexuality…
I thought I had tougher skin, but you don’t realize what kind of affect that will have on you until it happens.
So I stopped filming videos – or stopping doing it consistently anyway. Which killed my momentum and my drive.
I still continued to post occasional blog posts, but sometimes I would go 2, 3, sometimes even 6 months without posting again.
And yet my blog continued to persist.