Depressed factory worker
As a kid I never really wanted to be rich, I just remember always wanting to have time freedom.
That’s all I cared about.
I loved the idea of being able to work when I wanted, where I wanted, and to earn decent money doing it.
I dreamed of becoming an online poker player – the idea of sitting in my underwear playing what is effectively a computer game for hundreds of dollars an hour seemed like the definition of freedom to me!
We’ll get to poker in a minute…
My first full time job was as a laborer in a glass factory.
It was tough.
Here’s a picture of me in the toilet hiding from my boss.
Every single morning I would wake up and drag myself to a job that was sucking the life from me.
I was making about $19/hour after taxes doing a lot of physically draining tasks which would leave me completely exhausted at the end of the day.
I hadn’t planned on working in this factory forever, but what really motivated me was seeing old men in that very factory who had been working there for 40 years!
They were doing the same soul-crushing work as me for the same amount of money.
We were cogs in a machine, modern day slave laborers.
Stressed poker pro
After 8 months slaving away at the factory, I quit my job and hit the casino to earn a living as a professional poker player.
Live poker was a lot easier than online poker, so even though I didn’t cut it as an online pro, I figured I was good enough to earn a living in real life.
I actually had decent success doing this and was able to earn a much higher hourly rate doing much easier work than grinding away at the factory.
While I was a decent poker player, I was never exceptionally talented at it, and regardless of how hard I worked to improve, my results were only ever mediocre at best.
Poker is a very stressful profession, especially when you only have a relatively small edge on your competition.
Even though I had freedom over my time and a much more enjoyable lifestyle, I was still constantly stressed out and never really found the idea of exploiting drunk people with gambling problems for a living to be particularly rewarding.
COVID Hits & I Start A Niche Site
During lockdown I found myself with some spare time on my hands, so I decided to restart that childhood blog talking about how athletes can increase their vertical jump…
I figured it was something I knew a fair bit about and would find enjoyable to dive deeper into.
Although there was relatively low search volume, I had identified that there was very minimal competition and the few articles that did exist weren’t very good.
So I started writing.
Eventually I wrote a roundup article discussing a certain type of equipment athletes use to train their shins.
Within 2 months that 1 article was making over $1,000 per month!
That’s when I realized I was about to make a lot of money blogging.
Rapid success blogging
I continued writing roundup articles for all of the different types of equipment athletes needed to increase their vertical jump and the commissions kept coming.
I had an initial goal of earning $2,100 per month, since that was about my monthly living expenses at the time.
After monetizing the site, it took me only 4 months to reach that goal.
I was absolutely beaming!
Just 4 months after that I hit my first 5-figure month, earning $11,117.82 in November 2022.
I had heard about hockey-stick traffic growth, but no one had prepared me for how quickly the profit would grow.
In July I earned $2,184 and just 2 months later in September I pulled in $4,821. The very next month it was $8,009!
I was making extremely good money writing about topics that I found really interesting, and over that first year I only spent about 4 hours working per day!
Within 2 years of publishing my first article, I had 2 sites bringing in $10k+ every month and a business worth close to $500k.
My childhood dream of having time freedom, while earning great money, had finally come true.
And it took less than 2 years.
Writing a killer newsletter
Being able to actually live the life I had once dreamed of has made me incredibly grateful to all the people who I learned from along the way.
I have a lot to contribute to the niche site/blogging world and I’m sharing all of my best ideas for free in the Niche Whisperer Newsletter.
You can opt in below.