Everyone says it’s great to fail. They say if you don’t fail enough times, you stand no chance at succeeding. I agree with that. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about one particular failure. A blog that I abandoned. Yet, it netted me $17,239.85. Which by the way is not an arbitrary figure. I exported it from my bank statement to know exactly how sweet was my failure.
Sometime in 2010, I started a technology blog. I was supposed to write about jailbreaking iPhone, rooting Android and all the other crazy things that you can do with your phones. Except that I don’t do crazy things with my phones and I had no interest in writing in this area. I started it because I heard the CPMs (Revenue per 1000 ad impressions) in tech are great (and they were). I also started it because many of my friends and colleagues were doing great with their tech blogs. The blog was inspired by Taimur Asad‘s RedmondPie and Zawad Iftikhar‘s SegmentNext. Since it wasn’t something I was passionate about, despite a good start, I just didn’t have the patience to run it for the long haul.
Personally I gave this blog about two weeks. Later I hired some writers and let them contribute content with no oversight by me but eventually stopped that too since I couldn’t see any growth. Over the past 9 years, I have passively generated $17,239.85 (average $160/mo) after costs from the leftover traffic that Google kept sending in small numbers. Like someone said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. This post is about that. About taking a shot. Almost missing it. And still walking away with a pile of cash. Could it happen, if I didn’t take this shot? Will it happen, if you don’t take a shot?