Hi, I’m GM, the blog geek behind this guide.

As a former office drone, well acquainted with paper filing and long drawn coffee breaks, I was originally built for the 8 to 5 grind. That was until I was contracted for my first online gig, writing 500-word articles for a dollar a piece. It was around that time that I also discovered blogging. The goal was to become a popular, income-generating personal blogger in 6 months. I quit my day job, rolled my sleeves and got stuck into it.

Two years into the whole shebang and my imaginary friends were starting to look more real than my vision for blogging fame and fortune. So while worrying over where to get funds for my eldest kid’s private schooling and next month’s rent, I spent my nights pouring over hundreds of ebooks, web pages and tutorials, trying to figure our what went wrong. Becoming a successful blogger wasn’t as easy as I thought.

I had no choice but to take another risk. To keep finances afloat I needed another day job. I took on work for various internet marketers. One high profile Melbourne-based guru eventually became my mentor. Like an expert quilter he picked up all the right pieces from everything I learned and stitched them together into a coherent picture. It was then that I realized it’s not the lack of information about blogging that led me down the wrong path. It was the overload of information that stumped me. I needed an expert to tell me what strategies to use and what to throw out.

Even after gaining a mentor though, the turnaround wasn’t immediate. It was only after I’d learned the best online strategies and after I’d spent hours customizing blogs that I reached my real turning point, realizing that my real passion is building and tweaking blogs. I just get that sense of satisfaction after having built a blog from top to bottom or stripped a badly created one and fixed it.

My story is far from its rags to riches ending. I still work my bones off from dawn til dusk, but I love doing that because I love what I do. The best part is that I am now making a real living out of what I do.

This blogging guide is dedicated to all beginner bloggers who have tried, are trying or are about to try to blog. I can show you how to build a good blog from start to finish so you can improve your chances of doing things right the first time. This can involve a broad spectrum of topics ranging from market research to HTML. I’ve been through the worst online mistakes possible so you don’t have to go through them.

Let me make it clear though that this is not the place for you to discover hardcore codes and scripts. I’m not a coding expert or a tech genius. In fact, I barely survived my computer subject in high school, but that’s just the point. You don’t need to be a technical contortionist to become a blazing good blogger. If a regular gal like me can make it, so can you. I’ll show you how.