What have I done this year? I will always be able to say that 2011 was a great year for me. I have had some of the greatest times of my life, as well as some of the most painful.
Lets see what I can remember of this year..
I guess we will actually start this year with a little layover into last year. Since these past two years have really changed my life. For better or worse who knows. I would say for the better but there comes the drawback of making too much money at a young age. Then again been there and done that, the second time around is twice as sweet.
Kinda bitter sweet that this post id’s number would be 25. I write here finishing up my 25th year of life… (I would say 24 days over due since I’m 26). This year had a crazy story, to show you what life is like.. On this day last year I had made $1.48 in online income. It was the start of my break through in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I was working insane hours researching and testing and site were starting to move up… Just wasn’t sure how long it would take till I got to a liveable amount. It all seemed like a dream really, but I became really knowledgeable the year before on everything SEO i could get my hands on as well domains and values.
Then came my break through, within one month I had been able to get some sites ranking a bit higher, I was up to $8 a day! Now you may not think this is much, but at this time I decided there was only way to live poor in style.. Ski bum. I took a job at Vail washing dishes (Although since I had won a poker tourney in Atlantic city on my road trip I was flush with cash, but busy hands make the mind work twice as fast). Civil Engineering degree and here I am washing dishes. Making $8 a hour, well the day hits January 27th. That’s when I realized I was alright at what I did. I kept working anyways as I needed the cash to bankroll more projects, more domains, more everything, since even though I had my poker cash that was my living reserve and my fall back income in case i didn’t want to wash dishes anymore.
I still remember the day I woke up checked my stats and saw that one of my sites had done more vistors by the time I had woken up than the entire day previous. That’s when I realized that I needed to make sure my products could withstand the test of time. Cause I may have been able to get it in front of visitors for a second or two, but in the end you can have the entire budget and still make products that fail. I learned this in college the hard way.. So I started working on making my site better.
Always dumping every penny I was making into the sites while taking occasional sanity snow board breaks. Dedicating my entire time to my sites and thinking about what projects to do during the day all the time makes a man go insane, cause being a entrepreneur since I was a kid its always extremely difficult to not have enough resources to do everything you are thinking of.
As I started making more sites my revenue started increasing slowly but surely. I was working on my proven methods and my strategy was working. I was growing at a decent pace, and then I crashed into a tree while snowboarding. Hospitalized.
That was a reality check, not the first, and I’m sure last time, I have had a near death experience or painful at the very least. So I took some time off, smoked a crap ton of weed. Took my Soma and my perc’s. Nothing was enough the pain was pretty brutal, I had dislocated my femur and it took a few weeks for it to heal.
Finally got to the point were I was able to ride again. I had just bought myself a new board and bindings and on a powder day it got stolen. At that moment I realized it wasn’t time to yet appreciate life, needed to work a bit harder. So I quit my job washing dishes and proceded to dedicate full time the next few months doing what I do best.
My earnings started growing 30% a month, I brought my friend Dan into this and now we are the cusp of what will probably be history. We will incorporate in 2012, having the company be profitable since the start. And hopefully have insane growth year over year.
I have a lot to be thankful and a lot to say but I figure that’s for other posts. Hope everyone enjoys their new year, and remember when you are about to put anything and everything you have into a business think “I have been poor before, it does not suck” So go all in, cause if there is anything I have learned, going from having 100k by the time I was 18 from business/poker and going 100k into debt by the time you are 22 cause you made bad investment decisions and coming back out of it to be well beyond anything you had ever achived before coming out of the black, all it took was realize that being poor aint so bad after all, just got to work smart 
