How a Blogger Found the Right Plan and Business Idea

Today our series of stories from new bloggers continues with Stefano Caioni, a web developer and photographer.

How Stefano changed blogging platforms and started blogging with a plan

Stefano’s blog offers guidance on various aspects of photography including focus modes, settings and equipment reviews.

Using his tech experience, Stefano wrote all the code for his blog himself. But he soon discovered how fun it was to build and write content for it, even though it had no traffic.

Then Stefano decided to migrate his existing content to WordPress to benefit from its SEO and security functionalities.

But he was inconsistent with posting content, didn’t have a specific strategy or business idea in mind, and ran out of topics.

He almost gave up on it.

Then he came across ProBlogger.com. He started writing more consistently, this time with a plan and business idea in place.

His blog lets him share his passion for photography by writing useful posts that inspire others and offer them value. He’s met many photographers who’ve inspired him as well.

He never dreamed of making money from his blog or building a business around it. But traffic continues to grow, and he monetizes his blog through Amazon affiliate links.

Blogging isn’t dead. The number of internet users increases every day. Fresh and updated content is needed to fulfill the growing demand for information. So start a blog.

Links and Resources for How Stefano Changed Blogging Platforms and Started Blogging with a Plan:

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Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 274 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the founder of problogger.com, a site for bloggers and prebloggers, designed to help you to start a great blog, and to monetize that blog.

Today, we are continuing our series of podcast with stories from new bloggers, people in their first year of blogging. All these are short stories from participants from our Start A Blog course and we’re sharing them in the hope that they will inspire you or someone you know to start a blog, as part of our International Start A Blog Day on the seventh of February, which is fast approaching. There’s still time to participate if you would like to start a blog, either for that date or afterwards. We have a course that will walk you through exactly how to start a blog using a WordPress platform. That course is completely free to participate in and you can find it at problogger.com/startablog.

Today’s story comes from Stefano Caioni from stefanocaioni.com and I’ve got a link to that in the show notes today. He is a photographer. He is a web developer, actually, who is a photographer as well and his blog is about photography, which grabbed my attention. But I also wanted to share this story today because it is a little bit different than some of the others.

Stefano actually came to blogging with a bit of a tech background, which is different to many people. We’ve had others in this series who came with no technology kind of background whatsoever. Stefano has created a beautiful-looking blog with that background but he has some interesting reflections upon that journey which I will come back to at the end of his story, too, just pulled apart just a little bit. Here’s Stefano. Enjoy his story.

Stefano: Hi. This is Stefano Caioni, a landscape and outdoor photographer, living in Sydney, Australia. My website is called Stefano Caioni Photography and you can find it at www.stefanocaioni.com. I’m Italian as you can hear from my strong accent. Sorry for that.

I write gear reviews on Micro Four Thirds cameras, drones, lenses, and camera equipment such as bags, filters, and tripods. I write tips on how to get better landscape photos. I also share my outdoor adventures and tips on how to organize photography travels.

I’m a web developer by profession and I started my blog as a personal coding exercise a little over a year ago in May 2017. In fact, the first version of my blog wasn’t built on WordPress but I wrote the code of the entire blog from scratch. The HTML, the CSS, the backend, everything. It had basic functionalities such as writing posts, with text and images, a rudimental search, and comments. I started writing articles and my website started to take form. What I’d soon realized while I was writing my first posts is that it was so much fun and I enjoyed creating content even though it had no traffic at all.

I then decided to migrate my existing content over to WordPress for two reasons. One is because I could benefit from its SEO, from all the plugins available, and security functionalities. Second, because I didn’t have time to maintain the codebase of the entire website and I wanted to focus on writing content and share my adventures.

My initial idea was to only write about photography adventures and my travels. I was creating one very short article each month just for fun again. But article after article, I soon ran out of topics since I have a full-time job and I don’t travel that much. I got bored and wrote a first review of my own camera. From there, from fact, that would be the only gear review for an entire year. I wrote some short tutorials on how to get better landscape photography and I was being very inconsistent again. I didn’t have a strategy or a real business idea in mind. After a year of starting my blog, I was about to give up. I stopped uploading new content for a few months.

I then came across the ProBlogger podcast, started consuming content online, and eventually subscribed to problogger.com,...