I’m Breaking Out of My Shell

Photo by Lex in the City

My new Wordpress theme is finally ready! Well… I still have some details to tweak, plugins to add and some content to write, but I’ll do that in the next couple of days.

For now, I’m just happy I finally managed to put together a portfolio page (still have to add the big size version of the screenshots). If you’d like to know more about me, you can also check out the About page. I’ll be adding more content there too.

The first contact: “Blog? What’s that? Sounds funny.”

Sometime around the end of 2005 was the first time I heard the word “blog”. I started documenting myself about what a blog really is and how it works. After a couple of months reading other people’s blogs, I even started my own blog, in Romanian. Despite that, I spend 80% of my “blogging time” reading other people’s blogs and posting comments on other people’s blogs. I read a lot of web design blogs, since this is what I do for a living and I always enjoy reading about what my fellow designers are doing.

The revelation: “People make money from blogging? No way!”

About 1 year ago I found a reference on a blog, about a guy who makes a whole lot of money from blogging. I was sure this has got to be a scam or something. There’s no way someone can earn a six figure income each month, just by “writing stuff”. If it were so, anyone would quit his job to do it.

So I went to that guy’s website and started reading. I probably spent a couple of hours reading article after article, captivated by his stories. I was even more amazed to find out he was just an average person when he first started blogging. He was not a web guru or anything like that. Well… I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say he is a guru now. He’s mister “make money blogging” himself, Darren Rowse (ProBlogger).

I soon learned that there were more people like him. People like Shoemoney, John Chow, Steve Pavlina and Yaro Starek, who have one thing in common, besides the fact they made big money online: they shared their knowledge with fellow bloggers, making them even more popular.

The preparation: “Oooh… Very interesting! Gotta bookmark this one!”

During the last year I read a lot about what it takes to make money from blogging. I know the technical aspects (those were easy, since I’m a web programmer / designer), I learned a lot about copyrighting, about online advertising, about what it takes to monetize a blog, etc. My freelance work and my other offline project took most of my time, so I never got the chance to put all that knowledge to work. Well… all this information has to come out, otherwise my head will explode.

The final countdown!

Time to flex my blogging muscles! I’m launching this blog and here’s what I intend to achieve:

• find more freelance gigs
• create a free Wordpress theme and reach 100 downloads
• generate some traffic to this blog
• make my first $100 from blogging
• be the first Romanian blogger who’s internationally famous
• use my design skills to achieve all of the above

So stick around, as I will document every aspect of my journey and post updates right here, on my blog.