Back in the day I spent time networking and learning on Flying Solo – Australia’s biggest health & fitness forum.

I would have been about 21 at the time and had been working on Engage Marketing full-time for near on a year. I’d heard of WordPress on the search to create my own marketing blog and armed with their famous 5-minute installation instructions, made my first blog.

So when I saw a post from Janna (who I didn’t then know but would later become a marketing client of mine) for a recommendation of someone who could create a blog for her tax compliance business, I replied back saying ‘sure, I can do that’.

I knew that blogging was on the rise, both in a personal and commercial capacity, and did a quick google search.

Google: Blog Designer Australia, Blog Design, Blog developer, WordPress blog design

There was next to no-one out there in the Google search results. I thought to myself ‘If theres no-one ranking for it on Google, there’s a business opportunity right there’.

Within 24 hours I had registered, designed and built www.theblogdesigners.com.

My early blog designs were rough, rarely venturing far from the themes that I set them up on. Over time I started doing a few a week at $500 per site and developed strong systems around scoping projects, handing feedback and developing templates.

Eventually, everything would be completely customised and not based off themes as I got better at both design and WordPress development.

It would take me a while to realise that what I was doing was worth way more than $500, but I had fun – hiring a friend to help me run the business while I continued with my marketing consultancy.

After 2-3 years I’d built the business to the position as the go-to designer in what was still a niche market ($500 is still a lot to the average blogger).

I moved to Canada, using the business model which required zero face time to pay the bills as I snowboarded, eventually listing the business for sale on Flippa when I returned back to Melbourne.

$25k isn’t much but I was (and still am) pumped. I had just sold my first business.