At one point in the night I was in the critical care unit hanging out with the nurses there. And we had a very nice discussion. After a while I decided to get up and walk back to the respiratory therapy department. I said, "Well, I'm going back to the cave!"
That's IT!!! I thought. That's what I am going to call my blog: Respiratory Therapy Cave. I proceeded to create my blog on blogspot.com. And I wrote my first blog post, a silly post about my beeper. As I go back and look at this old blog post I'm reminded of how green my writing was. I have grown so much as a writer since then.
I decided I was going to write and publish a post for my blog every day. And this was quite the challenge, as some days I couldn't think of anything. Although, once I got started writing, I was soon writing not just one but two or three or many blog posts per day. Although, I only wanted to publish one post per day. I decided it would be overwhelming for any potential readers of my blog if I published too much too fast.
Then I learned that I could write as many posts that I wanted on blogger. And I could submit them to be published on any date of my choosing. This was a major revelation that occurred after about a year of publishing one post per day.
A did a lot of Googling back at this time. I Googled how to improve your blog. I learned in this way how to add things to my blog that made it look cool. I even learned how to go to the back side of my blog and make changes to the html. And, I also Googled other respiratory therapy, COPD, and asthma bloggers. I became friends with all these other bloggers.
I would place all my blogger friend's blogs in my contacts link. And they would do the same for me. Sometimes we would write guest blog posts on each other's blogs. And, in this way, we helped each other draw people to our blogs
I did not know this, but I created my blog right as the blogging bubble was taking off. This, along with the help of my new friends, helped me obtain a good following really fast. Within a year or so I had a following of over a million people. This included respiratory therapists, respiratory therapy students, asthmatics, and people with COPD. This also included people of other diseases. It also included high school students were were thinking about becoming respiratory therapists.
I was well aware of who was going to my blog. I was well aware of what people were typing into search engines that caused them to land on my blog. So, I quickly learned to cater my blog posts to these particular groups. I had a plan. On Mondays I would write articles for asthmatics. On Tuesday I would write posts for COPDers. ON Wednesday I would write articles for students. On Thursday I would write articles for respiratory therapists. On Friday I would have fun and write something humorous. On Saturday I was free to write on any topics I wanted. And on Sunday I wrote something religious or philosophical
That was the plan on my blog. That is what I did during the hey day of the RT Cave. And I developed an even larger following. Then I discovered Facebook and Twitter and promoted my blog through pages I created on social media.
Then something amazing happened. And this segues back to where I started:
If you do what you enjoy doing, and you do it well, good things will come of it.
I received an email: "I love your blog." And I ignored it because I thought it was spam. I think we are all familiar with spam today. Back then it was something I had to deal with all the time, both in my emails and on my blog. And so, I thought this email was spam. But, thankfully, the person sending it to me was persistent. And she wrote me a second email: "I love your blog."
And this gave birth to my Freelance business. I had always wanted to be a writer. I kept a journal since I was in my teens (remind me I should probably throw them away). I kept a journal until I started this blog. Since then all my writing goes here. A neat thing about this blog is it gave me an audience. So, rather than just writing to write, I started writing for an audience.
So I continued doing this blog. But I was also writing a weekly blog about asthma for myasthmacentral.com (now it is healthcentral.com). I was dedicated about this job, and wrote one post every week. I would also answer any questions people had about asthma on the site, and I got paid for this too.
In 2015 I was sent a similar email as the "I love your blog" email. This one I also ignored for about six months. I ignored it until one of my asthma blogger friends said, "John, did you get an invite to write for astehma.net?" And, of course, this inspired me to recheck my old emails. And, within a short time, I was hired as a freelance blogger and moderator for COPD.net and soon thereafter Asthma.net.
So, this is a nice side gig. I turned a hobby into a good paying business. And this respiratory therapy cave blog kind of went to the way side. I have spent little time updating it over the past ten years. I still have continued to write a post now and again. And sometimes I get on a roll and write a post for a few weeks. And then I get busy and forget for a couple months.
I do want to keep this blog going. I want to keep it going because this is my baby. This blog is what lead to my business. And so, I have decided to spend some time updating this blog. You will see some changes to this blog. You will also see, coming soon, that my blog will have a new domain. That is something I am working on. You see, like I did in the early days, I'm back on Google trying to find ways to make my blog better, cooler.
And, most important, I plan on updating my content. I plan to write lots of articles on a regular basis. My focus will be on respiratory therapy. My focus will be on asthma. Those are the two things I am passionate about.
But first I have to get this new domain thing going. Thanks for hanging out here in the RT cave. John.
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