Yes, 10 years ago today, I came to ActiveRain and decided to start a blog. It was July 4th weekend and my business needed some help.
It was tacky to call customers over July 4th weekend, so I learned how to blog. Well sort of. I really had no clue what I was doing. I wrote my 1st blog post on July 3rd. And, it was awful.
Originally, I came to ActiveRain to meet and network w/ real estate agents. And, that was helpful. I eventually met several in my area and some became very good friends, and we even helped each other out by sharing marketing tips and referring clients/customers.
But later that weekend, I stumbled on a little acronym. It was SEO. At the time I didn't even know what it stood for let alone how to do it.
When I realized the potential, I read and learned all that I could about the topic. I came across tons of articles from Bob Stewart , Brad Andersohn and Katerina Gasset (and some others that are no longer here.
I read and read, and implemented, and rinse and repeat. A couple of months later, I met some guy named J. Philip Faranda in person (because we live in the same county and he was a speaker at a local Rebar camp. He said I was like a sponge...and that I soaked it all in...but then unlike most, I actually executed against it.
A year later, I started my own wordpress site at TheFlooringGirl.com. I was still learning SEO and kept learning more and more. And, I experimented and adapted.
Soon enough, and a lot of this started around the 6 month mark, I really started to get a lot of appointments for my flooring business thanks to ActiveRain and my blog. At the time, it was 3 appointments per week.
As I learned more and gained more traffic...and than turned it into better more targeted traffic, that became 5 appointments a week. And, then soon 5 very good appointments per week as we had to screen people out. Yes, we got too many leads. I guess that's a good problem to have.
Because I knew SEO, my website got a lot of traffic - maybe 100,000-150,000 pageviews a month. And, no I did not blog every day. (Well at the beginning I did...until I really mastered SEO). Then, it was once a week...and then just once a month. It's more about quality over quantity.
Years later, I found myself in a huge mess. Due to a legal agreement, I can't disclose the details.
But, I found myself 238,000 in debt, without a means of income (as I had a 2 year non compete clause that I signed many years ago) and living in a high cost of living area. I had to pivot big time and restart my career.
All that I had was my blog and my brain.
Thanks to all the skills I learned here on ActiveRain, my SEO knowledge and learning that some people were able to make money from their blog, I decided to try that.
I knew it would take a while, so I took on 2 part-time jobs while learning how to grow and monetize my blog.
Thankfully it worked.
Here I am 3.5 years later. Thanks to SEO (and Pinterest), my blog now gets over 600,000 pageviews/month. And, for the last 16 months, I've been earning over $20,000 net profit per month on my blog.
I'm almost out of debt....that $238,000 of debt is now down to a bit under $7,800. And, later this month when all the payments and transfer come through, that will all be gone, too!
It all started here. Yes, I've had to pivot during this Pandemic thing...in March, then again in April, some more in May and even last month. But, it looks like I've done it!!
Thanks to ActiveRain, I've learned how to blog, how to do SEO, how to improve my marketing and how to pivot, even when it seems like all is lost.
Thank you Bob Stewart for always being there. And, thank you to my whole ActiveRain family. There are too many of you to name, and I can't tag you all. I think you know who you are. And, I am so thankful for the phone calls, messages and emails I never could have done it without your love and support!
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