My Journey from Gamer to Business Owner: How I Built a Successful Business Through Trial and Error

Jamal, The Green Scientist Exposes His Scientific Journal on Medium

Are you ready to take your business to the next level? In this article, I’m going to share with you my journey from starting my business in 2019 to where I am today.

Okay, okay… so we are about halfway through the year and probably halfway through reaching our goals for Phase 1 of Nature’s Uprise.

When I first started, I saw immediate success, but I quickly realized that I wasn't satisfied with the direction my business was heading. I spent the next three years researching, studying, and learning everything I could about business practices, different income streams, revenue types, and the world of the internet online. I even explored how Science and Technology could be applied to enhance or automate business practices.

My goal wasn't just to have high sales; I wanted to create something that could sustain itself and grow beyond me. I didn't have a traditional business plan like most successful people, as I'm a gamer at heart. Instead, I developed my business plan through hands-on experience.

My process is original, and I don't see many other businesses doing what we're doing... at least not yet or entirely. When others do start using my style, I can immediately recognize it, but since I'm still technically a nobody to the masses, they don't even bother to credit me as a source. They just take the idea and run with it.

Despite the challenges, I've made small strides on my own. I don't have a whole team or company to support me, but that doesn't stop me from innovating and pushing boundaries.

What is Phase 1?

I wasn’t that concerned about sales, but I knew if I continued with the high sales that I started with, I was always going to be busy working, and not be able to expand to reach my desired end goal and expectations. No amount of planning or education would have given me the information that I obtained through hands-on experience.

And so back to the question, before I go off on a tangent. There are different projects within Nature’s Uprise that I want to perfect and accomplish, but I’ll never get there by working on everything at once. So I came up with a new strategy, which is to perfect each project in phases, similarly to how software companies release and expand their mobile apps. And once I complete all the phases I would essentially reach my goal, and would be the owner to a self maintained automated company that generates income in my sleep, and essentially all that I would have to do is apply my creativity, implement changes, handle customer service, and monitor for any potential risks or downfalls.

So in Phase 1, it only makes sense, if we are going to be a 100% online company, that we essentially start off with completing the website. And believe it or not, there is quite a bit involved, especially with the method that I use. Of course I could have it completed much faster if I spent money, fundraised, or took out a loan so that I could afford necessary equipment, software, and a team of employees. But I am not much of a risk taker, and I’d like to free from obligations and potential debt. So I will not be spending any money, unless I make money. And everything has to be accessible and manageable remotely from a smartphone. And so that makes things a little bit challenging, at least for the beginning. This reduces the amount of money wasted, forces us to create strategies for eliminating expenses, and explore methods for increasing profits without increasing the workload. And so that means in Phase 1 we will attempt to generate our profit goals primarily through our website. Which websites generally don’t make money on their own. They generate money through blogging, which requires us to sell and requires us to increase traffic coming to our site.

So this is perfect, we can work on our brand, image, online presence, quality, and fan base of loyal followers all at once. By the time we complete the first project, which is primarily creative writing, we will have something that we will be proud to show off to people when we have discussions about our business and what we do for work. So for the rest of 2023 we will be perfecting our craft in blogging and website management. I’m only anticipating this phase to be the hardest and most time consuming. The rest of the phases and projects we have planned will piggyback off the success of the previous and gradually become more fun work activities. And just knowing how human nature is, or at least the behaviors of the average US resident, they really don’t like to read, have a short attention span, and they really don’t explore websites unless it has some sort of usefulness for them. So we will be increasing our quality as much as we can, and exploring many ways to add value to the readers. Because realistically they won’t be making purchases unless we gain their trust and can be extremely convincing. And since there are millions of people with access to ChatGPT or similar ai copywriting software, that makes things even harder. I’m predicting less search engine usage, therefore less likelihood of stumbling on our website, if we even rank high enough to appear on the search results in the first place considering the amount of competition. Sure we could try utilizing ai ourselves, and we definitely will, but we will definitely need a solid brand, credibility, and a unique wow factor.

And unfortunately most of those things wouldn’t be implemented until after completing Phase 1, like obtaining a new domain name (after our original got bought out), adding useful website features through the use of paid plugins and software integrations, and stepping away from reliance on generating profit required for operations through another companies' platform (as a lot of these companies change regularly, therefore negatively impacting or completely stopping your money, and they have rules that you have to follow, as if they were your boss or employer).

What comes after Phase 1 and what are the other Phases?

And so after completing Phase 1, our website and blogging, we would immediately move into Phase 2, which would be perfecting our podcast. Which I can’t wait to get to, because it’s a lot more fun, we are already ranking in the top charts with the rookie efforts thus far, and a lot more people are listening to podcast than they are reading blogs or website content.

And then immediately after that we would go into Phase 3, which would be working on our online video content, whether that be YouTube or another popular video hosting site like TikTok.

Then finally move onward to phase 4, which would be perfecting our online courses.

Then I haven’t decided exactly how phase 5 is going to go, but lastly I’d like to work on releasing an app or video game related to our content, and somehow creating a social media experience of our own so that our fan base of nature lovers or nature enthusiast have a permanent home and we could eliminate the need of socializing and maintaining them through other platforms.

And once these 5 phases are complete, we would essentially have completed the goal for Nature’s Uprise and could pretty much do whatever we wanted at that point, which I’d like to move my attention towards establishing and creating a non-profit. So that gives us a lot of time to think and brainstorm how exactly we would operate and what the need would be.

Our blog or Journal on Medium

So I’m expecting it to start off a little messy, maybe a bit disorganized, but I have included it in the plans for Phase 1.

I really like the Medium platform, and upon discovering it in my exploration of income streams, I was so fascinated with the idea of being able to get paid for people to read your content. Or at least that how it was presented, I have since learned throughout the years, that essentially I’m getting paid to promote the Medium platform and increase traffic to their website. And so they have been making changes and implementing not so transparent rules about all the requirements that must be met before a sale can be generated. So essentially I have to be appropriate, avoid talking about Medium, entice readers to fully read my article and Engage with it, and just recently they adjusted their program (which you have to join in order to start getting paid) to have a follower prerequisite and they now have a verification process for authorship. So essentially it’s just become another social media platform, except they don’t really market your content, you still have to do that on your own, or get lucky and get boosted by a publisher. Or you can pay to become a publisher.

Our plan for utilizing the Medium platform

I think for right now I’ll just focus on the basic essentials for monetization. So if you’d like to help me out with that, because I’m literally not getting paid for any of this content, then you could follow my medium blog profile and occasionally engage with our content.

Until we meet those requirements, we would essentially be posting complimentary articles that lead traffic back to our website, which is the most important. Always generate traffic to your own website first, then from there you can lead them to somewhere else. Your basically ripping yourself off by generating traffic to someone else’s platform, and even though they have promises to compensate you, they have about 100 stipulations in the way of you actually getting paid for your contributions, and because your not the owner of the site, it does nothing for your Alexa rank or future partnership deals. And let’s not forget, they have the right to censor or eliminate your content or profile at any time for any reason without backlash or reprecussions.

So one plan or behavior I’ve been getting into with Medium is that I wanted a place to post my stories or articles that do not quite fit the theme or structure of our blog. So essentially this is bonus content for our blog. I was thinking of posting our blog post on Medium, but I already received a warning that duplicate post from multiple websites can be confusing to search engine indexing bot crawlers and would have the opposite effect on our ranking in the results.

In the past, our paid newsletter was integrated with Medium, LinkedIn, and a few other sites. But as we mentioned before, companies make changes to their platform, so this is no longer going to be something experienced on this platform. We essentially made our newsletters free, but considering that it is a newsletter and not a blog post, I may consider reposting issues on Medium as well, but we still need to rebuild our email list after the two step verification issue we encountered before. So don’t expect to see the newsletter actually issues until we meet our subscriber goals for the email list. The way I see it, there’s no point in sending emails if no one is interested or on the list to recieve them, and with the open rates of emails being so low in the first place it basically boils down to, we don’t want to waste our time.

So WordPress did implement a daily writing prompt recently, which could potentially increase traffic and generate more content, I just would rather not clutter my beautiful blog with all of that nonsense, but because I like the idea, I’m willing to write responses to the daily prompts on Medium instead.

Lastly I was considering having a weekly reflection post written on Medium just so that you guys can actually get to know me as a writer, and as The Green Scientist. I was thinking I could establish myself as a professional well known author, and you can learn more about me as an individual, whereas the WordPress blog would be more business oriented and focused on Nature’s Uprise the company.

And with that being said… I’d still like to continue with the theme of the Medium platform hosting The Green Scientist scientific journal and stories related to Nature’s Uprise. I know I write a lot, and it may not always add value or be interesting, but this gives me a chance to practice my creative writing outside of formal copywriting, and hopefully reach a more diverse audience that will look forward to our content and actually provide feedback. If you guys aren’t going to provide feedback then you are not going to get what you want. And I truly love to write, and so no ai program is going to be able to really write the way that I want my writing to be written. That’s one thing that the editing for grammar, spelling, readibility, formatting, optimizing for SEO, increasing value to readers essentially scrubs and takes away from my original work. I really don’t have to do much of those things if this is essentially going to serve as my journal.

So, if you’re looking to start or grow your own business, join me on this journey. I’ll share with you everything I’ve learned, and who knows, maybe you’ll develop your own original process too.

So if you read this article completely, and I had to cut it short so I don’t end up overwhelming you guys, and you like my ideas or personality, please leave a helpful comment on what I could do to increase my following and engagement on this platform. I want something real, authentic, and practical. I’m tired of reading copy and pasted clickbaity medium articles which feel like a manipulation to obtain high traffic views and sales rather than provide realistic examples or feedback. I refuse to pay to build followers and traffic!