Part 2 - Chapter 6: Why Did I fail With My Blogging Business

The Search

A few weeks had passed, and I was still trying to recover from what had happened to my AdSense account. I felt disheartened and lost hope. I knew that AdSense was not the be-all and end-all of earning money through advertising and affiliate programmes, but it still felt like a fatal blow.

I did not know exactly why my AdSense account had been disabled, but deep down, I knew that my blogging journey as a whole had gone wrong, partly because of how I had approached it. 

It felt like I was chasing money, and ironically, it ran away from me.

To me, it felt as though I had been trying to reap without sowing. I wanted the reward without the labour that should have come before it. Something about that felt dishonest to me. I had refused to be dedicated and constantly looked for shortcuts.

"Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow." (Proverbs 13:11)

I was still fascinated by blogging and the possibility of earning a living from my laptop, eventually leaving my day job. But I did not want to return to blogging with the same motives. Something had to change first. 

I needed a cure.

Looking back, I can compare myself to someone treating one obvious illness only to discover that several other problems are connected to it. Chasing money was the problem I could see most clearly, but it was not the only one. There was perfectionism, overthinking, looking for shortcuts, announcing my dreams before I had achieved them, and something even more basic: I did not really know why I wanted to blog.

My cure was not structured; it came from all directions...

For a long time I paused and reflected. From 2011 onwards, I fought battles within myself - wrong beliefs, laziness, my constant search for shortcuts, and one question that kept returning:

What was I actually trying to achieve through my blogs?

The answers did not come neatly or in any particular order. Neither did the cure. It came from different directions and different sources, sometimes in small pieces and sometimes through sudden realisations.

I read books. I watched YouTube videos. I listened to podcasts and personal stories. Sometimes something one person said stayed with me. At other times, I learned through examining myself.

Little by little, pieces began to come together.

For me, money had become associated with blogging the way sweetness is associated with sugar. How was I supposed to separate one from the other?

Yet somehow, I had to.

How?

Years passed; I began identifying more of my mistakes one after another in a neat sequence. It was a long process of learning, decluttering and challenging some of the beliefs I had carried with me.