My Best Investment Till Date

I have done a lot of investments in my life, but if I have to look back at the best investment to date, that would be a blogging course that I bought for $300 back in 2008.

Less than 10% of the Indian population was on the internet and I started a motorcycle blog called BikeAdvice in 2008.

Before the course, I did not have any idea how to set up a WordPress blog, get it indexed on the Google search engine, and update articles on the blog.

I could've learned how to set up a blog by browsing through a lot of videos but I wanted some step-by-step guidance. Yaro Starak used to run a blog called Entrepreneur's Journey and he was giving away a lot of free content in the form of blog posts and podcasts.

I was inspired by how he built a business for himself through blogging, so at that time investing $300 into his course was a no-brainer.

I consumed around 5-6 hours of his paid content. That was good enough for me to learn the technical stuff and get started. But soon enough I started losing motivation to continue but Yaro was constantly publishing interviews with his students and that's what helped me keep the momentum going on.

The name of the blog BikeAdvice was inspired by CarAdvice started by Alborz Fallah who was also a student of Yaro Starak. He quickly grew his blog to $50,000 a month in income and he also raised funding for his "publishing business".

The value of the program wasn't just the content that taught me but also the inspiration that came from the community. Though at that time we did not have video conferencing like Zoom or Google Meet, the text-based interviews were alone enough to motivate me to continue building my blog.

After 6 months of starting the blog, I had around 5,000 visitors a day and I was making $300 a month in Google AdSense revenue. From there, I kept on reinvesting the money back into the growth of the blog.

I hired some freelance writers for the blog and they started publishing more content. I purchased a video camera and started taking HD videos of the different motorcycles I was reviewing. I even got a chance to go to China for a motorcycle exhibition.

I learned digital marketing not because I thought I will get digital marketing jobs or get around to launching my digital marketing courses, but because I wanted to grow my blog. The term Digital Marketing wasn't even popular at that time. People used to call it "Internet Marketing".

Whatever I am doing today, the foundation goes back to that course and the blog I started as a result of it.

So yes, that $300 was the best investment of my life.

What's your best investment?