About

The Story Behind Start Blogging 101

Jake at Start Blogging 101

Are you looking to create a fast WordPress site or blog that grows your business and makes you money while you sleep?

If so, I was in the same boat back in 2014, and I want to help get you there.

After years of successes and failures (let’s be honest, mostly failures), I have learned invaluable lessons on how to build WordPress sites that are extremely fast, which your users (and Google) will love, along with harnessing the power of affiliate marketing to build a stream of income that pours in while you sleep.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to wake up and see a notification about the first affiliate sale you made overnight. “I just made money… while I was sleeping.”

Hi, my name is Jake, and I am the voice behind Start Blogging 101.

Here’s my story.

I always dreamed about working from anywhere I wanted in the world while making a “passive” income.

In 2014, when I was 25 years old, I purchased a little booklet on Amazon called “How to Make Money Blogging.”

I still remember. It was $3. And it was the first example that proved that learning to invest in yourself can have a massive ROI.

After reading through the booklet, I was ready to start my first blog. But… what to name it?

As any 25 year old would do, I jumped on Google and typed “Blog Name Generator.” 🙄

I clicked on the first link and hit the big “Generate” button.

*Beep boop, beep boop.*

The blog name-generating machines had spoken. Crambler.

I loved it.

I didn’t know what it would mean, but it had a nice ring to it.

It was short and concise. It was memorable. Just like how the booklet said it should be.

Thus, Crambler was born.

I purchased the domain name and installed WordPress. I couldn’t wait to get started.

I needed a WordPress theme… cue Google search for “best WordPress theme.”

The “X Theme” from ThemeForest came up time and time again.

I didn’t know anything about WordPress themes at the time, but it sure looked cool.

It even had this fancy thing called “Cornerstone,” a page builder allowing me to add fancy gadgets and gizmos to my pages with shortcodes galore!

$60? Buy now.

I began writing blog posts about everything that interested me – technology, music, WordPress, and more.

Fast forward only two years later, and Crambler was getting 30,000 page views a month, and two of my main blog posts had been shared a total of over 10,000 times.

Not bad!

Except I had two problems…

  1. I had no idea how to monetize my traffic
  2. My page speed was atrociously slow and getting worse

How bad was my page speed, you ask?

Let’s just say my blog post pages had a median load time of 17 seconds.

Yes, you read that correctly. Not 1.7 seconds. 17 seconds.

Oof. That is ROUGH.

My bounce rate was through the roof (95% and higher), and my traffic was starting to tank.

Have you ever gone to a website and watched the loading bar crawl along, all while showing a white screen?

What do you do after 5-10 seconds of that happening? That’s right, you back out and go find another page.

This was happening thousands of times per month due to my page speed. I was losing out on thousands of visitors and thousands of dollars.

I panicked.

I started switching too many things around without knowing what I was doing, which further hurt my SEO and traffic.

Long story short, I switched my blog over to the Astra Theme in 2019 to help with page speed.

However, I still wasn’t impressed with the number of features it provided, and it was taking too long to make my blog look the way I wanted. So, I added a different third-party page builder called Elementor.

Needless to say, my page speed was still hurting more than I would like, and with Google’s Core Web Vitals looming in the distance, I knew there was still more I needed to do.

I needed to drop my third-party page builder.

Nope. Nuh-uh. No way, José. Not happening.

I was stubborn. “Page builders are so easy to use, and Gutenberg sucks!” I kept telling myself.

Technically, I wasn’t wrong. At the time, Gutenberg was still very much in its infancy.

I had switched my blog posts from the classic editor to the new block editor (Gutenberg) and loved the block editor for blog posts.

But building landing pages with the Gutenberg core blocks? That was completely out of the question for me.

“If only there was a solution out there that could supercharge Gutenberg and give it all of the features that it’s lacking…” I kept telling myself.

In the meantime, I spent a good 6+ months researching and learning about WordPress site speed.

And then I found it.

The theme I always dreamed about having but never thought would become a reality.

It’s called the Kadence Theme.

Is it fast? Extremely. Faster than even the most notoriously “fast” themes on the market.

Is it user-friendly? The most intuitive theme I’ve used.

Does it have a lot of features? Oh yes.

This is the part that blew me away.

The FREE version of the Kadence Theme has more features than the pro version of the Astra Theme, which I paid $50 for.

In fact, I was so passionate about my switch from Astra to Kadence that I wrote an extremely detailed blog post (and made a YouTube video!) comparing both the Astra and Kadence theme so you can see how much better Kadence is.

And then add the pro features that come with Kadence Theme Pro, and you have the best dang WordPress theme I’ve seen since I began blogging in 2014.

As if the pro version of the theme wasn’t enough, Kadence also has a dedicated Gutenberg blocks plugin called Kadence Blocks which extends the functionality of the WordPress block editor and allows you to have a page-builder type of experience directly within WordPress.

I was beyond excited – I could finally replace my third-party page builders and pass all of Google’s Core Web Vitals!

Both the Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks are included in a website builder’s dream package called the Kadence Full Bundle.

The Kadence Full Bundle includes:

  • Kadence Theme Pro
  • Kadence Blocks Pro
  • Pro Starter Templates
  • Kadence Cloud
  • Kadence Conversions
  • Kadence WooCommerce Shop Kit
  • Child Theme Builder
  • All Future Themes and Plugins
  • Even More!

So, I purchased the Lifetime Kadence Full Bundle, which has been the best purchase of the decade so far, HANDS DOWN.

The Kadence Full Bundle is the ultimate package I wish I had purchased back when my page speed was atrociously slow, and I lost thousands of visitors a month.

It gave me access to the fastest, lightweight WordPress theme on the market along with Kadence Blocks Pro, which allowed me to build my landing pages directly within the WordPress editor while having a screaming fast website.

Hence Start Blogging 101 was born.

A WordPress tutorial website teaching others how to build fast, profitable WordPress sites without the use of third-party page builders that harness the power of the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg).

I went from a blog with an average total page load time of 17 seconds to a blog with pages loading in under 2 seconds that pass Google’s Core Web Vitals on both desktop AND mobile.

This leads to a site that both my visitors and Google love. My pages rank high on Google due to SEO and meeting Google’s Core Web Vitals, visitors find my site and love the user experience, and they purchase.

What’s better than that?

The Kadence Full Bundle is worth every penny (and then some!) and is the solution to take your website to a whole new level in speed and customization. Check it out!

Also, I’d love it if you joined my completely free Start Blogging 101 Community Facebook Group, which consists of rockstar individuals who are passionate about building faster, more profitable WordPress websites to grow their businesses.

Come join us and say hi! 👋

To your success,
Jake ✌️