Hi, my name is Stephen and I the person behind The Blogging Academy. I am a real person living a real life; mostly in north west England. I earn a living from my online activities, but I am not an internet millionaire.
I connected to the internet in 2001 and pretty soon afterwards my first site was born. I didn’t know anything about HTML or coding at the time, but I managed to put a site together using Front Page and online guides. The site mostly consisted of (very poor) abstract images I had created whilst experimenting with a cracked version of Photoshop.
After the site had gone live I started researching how a website got traffic and stumbled upon the then fledgling world of search engine optimisation (SEO). I adopted some of the strategies required for high rankings and pretty soon the site was getting a few hundred visitors a day. This soon escalated into the thousands and after a while I had a number of sites making a fairly decent amount of money from AdSense. It wasn’t enough to pay the bills, but it was enough to put some extra cash in my pocket each month.
It took a year or two to get to this stage. For the first couple of years I made no money from my sites as the only real way to monetize them back then was through banner ads – and they never worked for me – but I carried on developing the sites as I had grown to love the process.
In Dec 2003 I joined AdSense. That was when I realized it was possible to make money from my sites. In my first three weeks of running AdSense ads I made £140 ($200 at today’s rate).
Fast forward a year or two and I am working full time in the SEO industry whilst continuing to run my sites as a hobby and getting to know this new fangled way of communicating they call blogging.
I created my first blog on Blogger on 30 Dec 2005, and if I am honest with you, I didn’t get it at the time. I just used the blog as a way to generate links and boost rankings for the site it was promoting.
I carried on working my full time job and dreamed of the day I would be able to leave and run my sites as a full time business. Many times I came close. There where months when my AdSense earnings were just as much as my wage, but I never jumped ship. It was too safe.
In 2007 all of that changed.
My sister died from cancer and my dad died three weeks later.
That was the signal for me to make a move. I kept saying to myself “you never know what’s around the corner”, and you don’t.
I quit my job in December 2007 and started 2008 as a self employed person running websites and blogs (I have never been able to give myself a proper title).
Since I left my job it has been tough. We have always been able to pay the bills, but there have been more family traumas to deal with. It has been hard to work on the business side of blogging and running those sites I mentioned whilst dealing with family matters, and as a result the past couple of years have been a bit hit and miss.
Now the ship is a bit steadier I feel as though I can really concentrate all my efforts on creating a quality blog that people can hopefully benefit from reading, hence the Blogging Academy.
On a much more positive note, my partner and I now have a wonderful son (after trying for a couple of years), Thomas, who was born in December 2009. He has brought great joy into our lives and has given us a reason to keep on keeping on.
Thomas isn’t a blogger yet, but maybe one day he will be.
I hope you enjoy the blog and can learn something from it.
Stephen
