My 2017 - Achievements And Failures (New Contest by @anomadsoul)

What's up guys, @anomadsoul just started a new contest called My 2017 for the last 4 Sundays of 2017. Each week will have a different topic and this week's title is "Achievements and Failures". The prize is pretty good and you may get a vote by the man himself.

Here's the link: https://steemit.com/my2017/@anomadsoul/my-2017-contest-inviting-everyone-to-do-a-2017-recap-every-week-until-the-year-ends-100-sbd-weekly-reward

2017 is a totally different life path for me. My course of life has been pretty direct since I was born. Study hard, get good grades and become a lawyer/doctor/engineer/accountant like what Asians do. So i went to law school, was called to the Bar only to not practise as a lawyer.

I changed my direction and decided to become a full-time blogger after reading all of the success stories. What drew me the most was the flexibility. I hated working long hours, getting calls at 3 am just to complete my work and more importantly dislike the fact that I was not in control of anything. In other words, I'm jobless. :)

So what have I achieved in 2017?

• I started a blog called Ordinary Reviews in January and it was intended to be a review blog of some sort but then I realized I ran out of stuff to review. So I changed my direction and it's now mainly on how to look for online jobs, make money online, crypto (thanks to Steemit), blogging tips (since I used to blog a lot) and some personal reviews of places and food. It started out pretty slow with almost no income but I'm glad to see more money coming in. My blog has finally hit more than 100k monthly page views in less than a year and I look forward to improving it further. Hopefully one day it will generate enough income to travel more and eat good food every single day. You'll notice it's always about the food...

• I discovered Steemit! I was looking for ways to make money online since late 2016, but for some reason Steemit didn't pop up anywhere! It was only when I looked hard enough in an online forum (Black Hat World) and I happen to click a post advertising Steemit. I'm not sure what the guy's id was on Steemit. I didn't join then and I finally joined Steemit when I saw a comment on a random FB blogging group. That guy happened to be @timsaid and he mentioned that he was making $1,000 a day. Well, he's not wrong but definitely a bad example of how much YOU would be making on Steemit! Steem was close to $3 back then and HF19 hasn't happened yet until a week later, so post rewards were pretty good. That said, Steemit has contributed a lot to my daily expenses and I'm happy to discover it, even a year later than I intended to.

• I joined @ocd not long after joining Steemit and have made so many new Steemit friends! It's nice to belong to a community of awesome curators and I would love to thank @acidyo for bringing me in. The project was almost cancelled back then but fortunately it wasn't and is now on full swing! We've even expanded to the international community.

• I met fellow Malaysians on this platform, people I wouldn't have known if not for this platform. We're a close community in our @teammalaysia discord channel and before the discord channel came along, we were all scattered around Steemit. These days we have @curie helping out Team Malaysia and I try to nominate some of these posts for @ocd as well.

• Daily Food Photography has finally gained lots of traction on this platform. I only received less than 10 entries in the beginning, and now it's getting hard to choose at least 13 winners (including consolation winners). Thanks everyone for participating and supporting the initiative.

• I joined @sndbox last month and I'm grateful for the upvotes given. It has helped me to sponsor the Daily Food Photography contest and my own expenses of course. Sure it comes with a fee, but if you post daily, you will cover it in no time. We should negotiate the fees this month since SBD is so high right now! XD @hansikhouse @voronoi

• I received a 5,000 SP delegation from @fulltimegeek a few weeks ago and it has helped me to give out more upvotes to you guys. Thanks for the delegation!

• I finally went to Japan and saw for myself how awesome the place is! Their mentality is probably what we need here in Malaysia. They don't jump queues, they are really helpful, they respect each other and are super efficient. Punctuality is crazy there. They had to apologize because the train left 20 seconds earlier, 20 SECONDS! I would definitely love to visit Japan again for the scenic places and the awesome food.

Failures

• I would consider joining Steemit in July this year a failure. I should have found the platform last year, considering that I was looking to get paid for writing. It would have made a huge, huge difference. I would think not researching on crypto in general was a big failure, since I stumbled upon Bitcoin ages ago and I'm really sure most of us feel the same way. We can only look forward from here on.

• I started a few other websites as well. One was to monetize via affiliate income (e.g. Amazon) but it still hasn't kicked off. I'm not sure how others do it TBH. I'm shutting down one site and keeping another. It takes failures to see what works and what doesn't in this dotcom world. I just started another new website a few weeks ago so I won't know for now if it will succeed, but fingers crossed. If I can generate enough money, I'll probably pay for a few writers..

• Looking back, I could have gotten a side job while working on my site because it's a huge financial burden to work with very little income.

In a nutshell

I see 2017 as a start of good things to come. 2018 will be a year of scalability. To improve on what I have already achieved and scale it up many times.

I may have missed a lot of things on this post, so apologies if it was not mentioned. If you're wondering why I have a long list of links at the bottom of my posts, it's because I'm trying out a link building strategy.

Thanks for reading.

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I appreciate all upvotes, resteems and follows.

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Support the OCD initiative!

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