Having a blog has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life so far. I’ve been able to connect with lots of great, adventurous people. Every week I’m answering a dozen or so emails from readers who want advice about this or that and I’m even pulling in a decent amount of money each month! It’s been an awesome ride and I honestly believe anyone who wants to make money online needs to start with blogging.
I used to not be a very successful blogger. That’s not to say I’m successful now or that I’m where I want to be, but before Wage Slave Rebel I had a very hard time making anything work. Why? Partly because I’d never bothered researching how to run a successful blog (I wish I had read Problogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog back then) and partly because of an abundance of doubts about who I was and what I had to offer and an immense fear of being rejected.
I had started several blogs before this one, but just halfheartedly. Instead of registering a domain or getting a paid host or planning out some posts, I launched ugly, pathetic, and empty Blogger and WordPress.com sites that mostly contained only introduction posts talking about how awesome the blog would eventually be. If I was able to overcome my laziness and the inevitable boredom such an anonymous project offers, the subsequent posts I managed to write were what I found at the time to be profound, gut-wrenching accounts of the human spirit. In reality, they amounted to cryptic emo lyrics.
Most lifestyle design or self-development bloggers are well-intentioned liars. I know because I’m one of them. While it’s true that I’ve never claimed to be exactly who I want to be or where I want to be, I haven’t exactly been forthcoming with the reality of my situation either.
My last post, Bullshit with Bullets, was meant as a call to action for lifestyle design and self-development bloggers to ditch giving unrealistic, unimaginative and cliched advice and to instead strive to explore more profound ideas and philosophies and how they can be practically applied to our lives. I was incredibly happy to see that this call to action partially inspired Corbett Barr of Free Pursuits to implement a policy of radical transparency.
With this post I’d like to follow suit.
Hey, I'm JD. Last year, I started Wage Slave Rebel as a resource for those who are dying to escape from conformity and design the lifestyles they dream of! I write about online entrepreneurship, productivity, and lifestyle design. Learn more about Wage Slave Rebel