Celebrating 3 years in the journey of Kickstart Commerce…

Dear KC Readers,

Today is the last day of March. This month marks the 3rd anniversary in the journey of KickstartCommerce.com.

The last 3 years have been amazing, to say the least. There have been ups and downs, big losses but even bigger wins.

My confidence as a writer has been boosted while my writing has grown leaps and bounds. I’m not perfect and there is still room for improvement.

This has been and will continue to be journey. I made some changes over the last 3 months that have drastically put the blog on a different course than when I first started.

I want to share with you and others in hopes that this story inspires each of you to maximize your potential towards achieving excellence and greatness in what you’re called to do in life.

On your mark, get set….READY…. GO!

3 years ago, I embarked upon the journey of helping small and medium-sized businesses figure out why their website was not ranking on page one of major search engines.

This was a HUGE leap of faith to start a business in a HIGHLY competitive market and one that is forever changing. But I trudged ahead and had a few wins.

The first year, I spent most of my time sharing thoughts about business owners and their take of how search engine optimization should work.  I did so using a bland WordPress Twenty Twelve theme.

Honestly, I wanted to test out my writing chops to see if I could grow a blog without a professional design. And what happened? A bit of success. I had a few pro bono customers, but nothing to write home about in terms of paid customers.

In the mean time, while waiting on customers to show up to my SEO field of dreams, I worked on my SEO chops developing and optimizing a handful of various websites.

And in between developing websites, I purchased and participated in expiring domain auctions, primarily focusing on buying two-word descriptive domains and geo service domains.

Content is good, but design matters!

The second year, I was able to land a few small account customers that paid well, but were short lived. In most cases, this type of customer base didn’t value doing SEO the right way to pay a monthly fee.

In fact, most paying customers settled having Kickstart Commerce provide their business with a proper SEO foundation only for them to manage ongoing SEO efforts in house.

Nevertheless, I begin to see the realities of trying to make a living in an industry that’s elusive.  My success depended solely on my knowledge wasn’t going to pay the bills, at least from a residual income vantage point. This was about half way through the year too.

And then, an unexpected twist of events occurred.  A friend that I had spent the last 9 or so months walking with in life gifted me with a theme and logo. Little did I realize that how much design matters.

I added popup not too long after launching the new design, and I started receiving 2-3 subscribers a week. I know it’s not much, but it’s better than ZERO. 😉

I was re-energized to slay the industry and replace my primary income as an Enterprise Architect with income from this blog.

So, I kept pressing ahead, writing articles and sharing thoughts about the latest SEO happenings in between growing my domain portfolio via expired domain auctions and hand registrations.

Content is good, but message matters!

As I started the 3rd year, the sobering reality that no one was going to show up at my SEO field of dreams began to chip away at my heart and passion to write.

There were more than a few occasions that I almost deleted this blog, removed the services page, or quit writing altogether.

But for whatever the reason, I didn’t. I’m glad that I stuck it out writing, even if nothing but posting once a month. I was down, but I was not out.

In the meantime, I kept participating in expired domain auctions and hand registering domains.

In fact, I wrote an ebook about domain names. I completed the draft, but never published for whatever reason. Oh wait, I remember why I didn’t publish it.

Well, I had created two ebooks that produced goose eggs, even though 30+ persons had said the thoughts outlined and strategies discussed transformed their website’s search rankings.

Dismal ebook performance it was, but thankfully, I kept writing when the going got tough.

It wasn’t until a few months ago that I started seeing profitable success known as passive income from the most unlikely source.

SEO had been the carrot to get me started and moving down the path I so desperately sought, which was owning and operating a profitable online business.

However, SEO was really like my training before I got to the real season. I learned a lot about the ins and outs of SEO. I learned what to do and boy, did I learn what not do too.

SEO strengthened my core as a writer. I may not be the best writer, but I’m not the writer I was once was. And as long as I keep progressing, improving everyday, then I’m more than pleased.

Nevertheless, I kept focused on writing SEO posts until the day I had another unexpected stumble with the website.

When your message resonates, growth just happens!

As I remember, I was trying to add a widget to the side bar. Well, I added the wrong widget, yet encountered some startling news. The widget I added was the most popular posts widget.

For all the content produced up to this point, I would have said that my most popular posts would have all been SEO centric. Guess again, that wasn’t the case.

My top five posts were based on domain names. How could this be? Well, numbers don’t lie, people do.

Apparently, I was so focused on making my presence known in the world of SEO that I neglected what readers (that’s you!) we’re telling me all along.  You all wanted to learn more about the various aspects of domain names.

How could I have missed this vital piece of information? Once this information was made known, I made a huge pivot midway through December. Bye bye SEO, and hello domain names. I left preseason training equipped and trained for the real season ahead of me.

And in less than 30 days from the first post to the newly aligned domain vision, traffic doubled on the website, twitter engagement jumped 80+ percent, and I’ve become a domain name marketing influencer.

Now, I don’t know where this path leads, but it’s proving to be worth it in terms of traffic and affiliate income because of readers like you rewarding my efforts.

And we press forward, engaging and growing together…

I can’t believe that I neglected readers (that’s you) trying to jump up and down to get the attention of companies. That’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate the companies that came, but more importantly, I should have been solely focused on this reader community’s needs.

But I’m glad to say it only took me three years to truly cater to your needs, and you’ve rewarded me and this blog handsomely. I can’t thank each of you enough for the consistent visits, emails and comments along the way.

I’m grateful to have pivoted when I did, and to be allowed the opportunity to keep growing and expanding this experience and journey to wherever it takes us.

I hope this content helps you in realize and reassess areas of your life that you may be unconsciously or consciously neglecting because you have your eyes set upon that elusive something that was never meant for you to obtain.

It only took 3 years to get this far, but the journey is not over… and so, I sign off posing the following question…

What have you been called to do that you’re neglecting?

Thank you for your continued support of Kickstart Commerce!

~Alvin