My Last 12 Months & 9 Months of No Articles

I've been working on several websites for the last 3 years. I have had some ups and downs but I want to tell you about a few things I have learned.

First off, I made a mistake and built several websites, at the same time, which made life much more busy and distracted me from a singular focus.

Second, I chose some niches that were interesting to me but not to enough other people. Since my first year I have learned to research better after watching Kyle and Jay, so lessened learned. We all need to really listen to others with more experience.

Last year I finally convinced my buddy to start an outdoor hunting and fishing website with me as he is fanatical hunter and always has to get that trophy buck or trophy fish. This is a niche that has a lot of interest and other fanatical people who will do most anything to get that big trophy.

We started off great in September 2020 and published around 65 articles, plus the same amount of videos, and the interest seemed to be exactly what we thought it would be, but then life hit, in a horrible way. Besides my wife and I buying a new home in Colorado and becoming busy day after day with home projects, Mike lost his wife to cancer and then in the spring of 2021 he lost his son in a head on collision by a drunk driver. To say the least, we stopped work on our website and YouTube channel for 9 months.

As you can expect, Mike had incredible depression spells, among other things, but one of the things that helped him pull through (even though he is still dealing with their loss) was getting out in the mountains to enjoy nature.

We finally got back out to the Taylor River near Crested Butte, Colorado in September 2021 and were reminded of some good things in life and how we still want to share our outdoor experiences with others, so we took a lot of video, enjoyed our time with the aspens turning yellow, against the pine trees and Rocky Mountains and were rejuvenated to get back to building our website.

Interestingly enough, the time we took off didn't have any negative impact on our traffic, and we were shocked to see our subscribers grow by over 130, our views on several article go over 20,000, with a lot of great comments, plus the graph has an exponential growth to it that seems to indicate some really positive things for the future of this website.

There's no way to tell yet if this trend is going to continue it's climb or drop off, however, at this point, the data is extremely encouraging. I have showed our analytics to several people with websites and they have been very impressed and think we have a lot of potential.

The point I really want to make here is that this journey of building an online business is one for the long haul, with many ups and downs. This is not a get rich scheme. We all need a lot of focus and determination, with a goal and vision for the future that will help us look past some tough things that life throws at us.

I hope this helps some of you to stay focused, be disciplined, keep training but to also not give up when you get sucker punched.

Your Friend,

Rick