Why I Stopped “Creating Content” and What I Built Instead…
How I quit trading my time for money, and found purpose.
I was a young, broke blogger living in a half-sized studio trying to make my way in the world, writing a blog, just making enough money to survive.
I really wanted to make extra money online and become an influential writer so I wouldn’t have to quit freelancing, and get a “real job”.
At the time, I wanted to be able to impress my new girlfriend who told me, “you should write a book” — but I also wanted to enjoy the freedom of passive income, and one day, focus on creating new family that I could support.
The thing is, like most writers, I wasn’t finding the time to actually write content… or even publish the drafts I already wrote. That meant I wasn’t able to impress the girlfriend, let alone enjoy the freedom of passive income, or find any time at all to focus on supporting a future family.
I remember feeling as if everyone seemed to have it together…everyone except for me.
To make things worse, I felt like I was on a never ending treadmill trying to get this giant list of endless tasks done. I felt even worse about the situation because I had no clue if the years of content creation was going to be in vain and just be an embarrassing flop. I felt like a failure because my blog was taking forever to get off the ground with only a handful of visitors per day.
I genuinely thought no one cared about what I was writing about.
The problem was that after 4 years of writing this blog, I wasn’t making any money and I was bleeding cash, leaving me unable to focus on what mattered to me. I realized I had to start making money or my life was about to get even worse; I had to close my freelance business and get a full-time job — taking all my time away from writing…
If I didn’t fix this I was going to have to slave away job that I hated and kill my dreams forever.
Then, as if by chance, something amazing happened…
That’s when I realized the key to my success was that I didn’t need a blog that I rented, I needed a platform that I OWNED — about using WordPress to build websites that bring in tons of traffic without wasting a ton of money on advertising.
It was now crystal clear to me how to stop “paying rent” for my blog, and use specific blueprints to build a platform that pays ME, because I could just plug my blog content into these blueprints to create a platform that brings in PAYING traffic.
I also learned that you didn’t need to invest in a computer science degree or become a coder to build a website, you just need know how to use the RIGHT tools effectively.
As a result I built my blog on my own WordPress website along with a storefront using WooCommerce.
After I did that, I started making money from digital products that I created myself.
Suddenly, I was making enough money to cover rent, utilities, and the phone bill every month.
That’s when I realized that the secret to create content on my blog, and make a passive income was to use WordPress SEO to BYPASS traditional blogging algorithms and go straight to the people who had the problem I could solve with my content.
My plan was to start by converting my blog into a search engine friendly WordPress website.
So my friends and I started creating our own websites; learning everything we could about WordPress and SEO. But we didn’t stop there.
We created and started selling products online — so we could stop trading our time for money.
After that, we started creating NEW digital products to sell because we had paying audiences who actually needed what we offered.
But there was still a problem…
It still took a LONG time to sit down at the keyboard and type up new content. It took weeks of 12-hour days to get it done and it was NO fun. Some posts took off, others tanked and hardly got any traffic. And every time I wanted to build a new blog I had to start over from scratch. And I had to glue together about 13 different plugins just to create one website. I even had to custom code a theme just to make it look right. So even though it was effective at getting more paying traffic, it was eating up 10–12 hours a day every time I built a new site up and running.
My friends and I ended up getting so frustrated that we decided to create a better process, using technology, strategy, and the right plugins, to help build new websites not in years, months, or weeks… but in just a few days!
We chose to call it WEBcademy Online.
We thought if we could make it easier to learn than endlessly searching youtube for tutorial videos, that would actually make it possible to get really good at building WordPress websites… to become the ultimate student of what worked and what didn’t — NOT so we could build websites for other people… but to create a course that taught everything we learned about how to build a traffic generating platform yourself, no matter what Zuckerberg decides to change on Social Media, we’d be really happy.
After creating and publishing over 50 websites, blogs, sales funnels and thousands of social media posts, we created WEBcademy Online.
Using the same methods, you can now create a great WordPress website, and write blog posts that get seen by thousands.
We then started to invite other aspiring bloggers use WEBcademy Online.
As a result of all this we were able to achieve the following:
- Help over a thousand people use the exact process and plugins we now use to create an effective platform for your blog — with no coding experience needed.
- Get tons of free organic traffic without spending money on paid ads or social media
- Create an easy path for any blogger who wants to help a specific group of people solve a problem.
- Assist any writer to create a blog they can use as a tool to build their credibility, sell products online, and build an online business.
After creating WEBcademy Online, I was not only able to create the content and products for any audience I needed, I’ve also been able to stop spending all my time freelancing, ultimately dropping that dreaded full-time job — even paying off all my credit card debt, because I’m able use WordPress so quickly using a proven process and the right tools.
And in the end, all of this means I’m now able to help a lot more people achieve their dream of publishing their own blogging platform with a lot less pain and effort than I spent over the 4 years I was writing my blog.
If you’re a writer (you might be if you’re on Medium) I’d like to extend that invitation to you too.
To no more boring jobs,
— Bryan J. Switalski
