How Starting a Blog Changed My Life

It's funny how one crazy little thing can snowball into a life-changing monster.

Take this blog for example. The decision to start writing a blog literally changed my life in some pretty big and awesome ways. But it all started very innocently. In the beginning I had no idea what was ahead...

It all started way back around 2006. I had moved to San Diego and was working at a (what I thought was) comfortable job. At said job, I had entirely not enough do, so I had some free time to do some internet cruising. At the time, I was relatively unaware of the existence of blogs. I knew a couple of people who had online journals, but those were boring and packed with mundane and trivial details of days activities that I didn't care about.

Somehow I stumbled onto a blog that was called at the time "Better Than Your Boyfriend."

Hmmm...a name I can relate with.

It was chalk full of wild and crazy stories of this guy Tynan who tried to buy a penguin and created an indoor swimming pool for it, moved to Hollywood on a whim to become a pickup artist, built a swing hanging off the balcony of his highrise condo, and climbed radio towers for fun.

Huh....Here's a guy who's adventures border on lunacy. Sounds like me (only not quite as devilishly good looking and charming ;)

One day I stumbled across a post in which Tynan mentioned monetizing his blog and making money.

Dollar signs in my eyes. At the time, since I had just started working a job in which I actually made somewhat serious money, I was reading all about finance and two words resounded with me:

Passive Income. Money coming in without doing anything in particular. Obviously this sounded like an unbelievably awesome plan.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how many adventures, stories, and rants I had to write about. Furthermore, I thought about how awesome I think I am and "why the heck wouldn't the whole world want to read about me!?"

Ok. So. Maybe I got a smidgen carried away.

But I started Your Daily Remedy. Your Daily Remedy was a way for me to tell stories, give advice that my friends didn't want to always here, and rant about things on a whim. My audience grew, and my writing improved. Everything was hunky-dory except for one little detail.

I wasn't making any money.

At the point I realized I wasn't really making much, I was already in love with writing so I didn't really care too much. However, I really wanted to expand on my audience.

So, I submitted expanded versions of this post as well as this post to a couple of local magazines here in San Diego. Low and behold, they got published.

Woot! A new career as a writer!???

Well, not exactly. You see, it turns out, writers do not get paid nearly enough. For the amount of time I was spending thinking up unique article slants and trying to make things perfect, the money was not exactly changing my tax bracket.

Then, I began noticing something. A post I wrote, The Power of Being Social, was blowing up. In fact, if you type the search terms "being social" in google, my post is actually the number one result.

This got the "Arun Brain Gears of Awesome Ideas" turning. A growing innovation on the internet was the idea of downloadable books - ebooks. Since being extremely social is something I know a lot about, why don't I just write about it?

Rule number 63 in "Arun's Guide to Lifetime Awesomeness": ALWAYS pursue ideas that seem awesome.

At the time when I made the decision to go full steam ahead, I really knew nothing about what I was doing. But, I figured I could either toil for a long time trying to figure out the best way to go forward, or I could go full steam ahead and figure things out as I go.

I chose the latter. And thus was born my ebook, The Social Charmer.

Now I will admit, because of my eagerness, I did a LOT of things wrong in publishing it. I've since fixed some of those things, but I still have quite a few things to improve on / add this summer that will improve the whole experience for customers and newsletter subscribers (I've been ridiculously bad about publishing newsletters) as well as increase my income.

So here I am, its 2009 and I'm working as an Engineer, writing a blog, writing for magazines, and getting some (kind of) passive income from an ebook all because I decided to start a blog three years before.

But I wasn't finished.

Soon thereafter a guy named Gabriel Angelo contacted me about doing an interview on being social for his customers. His website "The Social Natural, by the way has a lot great resources for becoming more social. I'm not exactly sure what happened to the interview but I believe he distributed it to his customers.

Then, in early 2010 I exchanged a few emails with a VERY well known guy in the "Pickup/Dating Community" who was interested in someone with my experiences of being social, writing, and internet marketing.

One thing lead to another and all of a sudden I became the marketing manager for his company. The best part was that I was working from home, whenever/where ever I wanted.

Now it was around February 2010, and I was making enough money where I could quit Engineering forever! Not only that, but as long as I am working remotely, why confine myself to San Diego? Why not Palm Springs, or Alaska, or France, or China, or Australia?

Suffice it to say, I went to all of those places over the summer, all the while "working."

Then it was time to start my MBA program. For me, this was the next logical step in my path to World Domination. Plus, I needed to get some more tools to feed my inner entrepreneur. The funny thing is, in all of my interviews, people were extremely intrigued with my whole story.

From Manager to Engineer to Blogger to Writer to book publisher to Internet Marketer and all of my other adventures in between.

I really can't imagine where I'd be write now had I not started this blog, but I can't imagine that I'd be in a better position than I am now. I never imagined things would happen as they did, but with a little ambition, a few crazy ideas, and some social savvy anyone can go far.

So in case you haven't done this already, your homework assignment is to start a blog (or, if you'd prefer, the "Arun Fanclub of Awesomeness Homepage").