Ashley: Thanks for joining me today, John Paul. I appreciate your time.

John: No problem. Happy to be here.

Ashley: You’re in Massachusetts, right? If I remember correctly?

John: Yeah, a little south of Boston.

Ashley: I’m in Switzerland, as many people know. It’s actually sunny here for a change. We have quite mixed weather, I guess, like you guys, and summer’s hit us pretty early.

John: Your summer’s usually around the same time as ours?

Ashley: Yeah, yeah, sure. We have good Julys and Augusts, but the rest is kind of… I mean, when you live close to a massive mountain range, you can’t really predict what kind of weather you get. We’re actually on the wrong side of the Alps. If you’re in Italy, you get good weather. If you’re in Switzerland, you mostly get crap weather. Anyway.

John: You never know what you’re going to get. It could be 40 tomorrow, and then two days later it will be 70 degrees. It’s silly.

Ashley: Yeah, exactly. Like now, it’s awesome. It’s – I don’t know what you guys that, probably 70s or something. It’s quite nice. And then on the weekend, it’s going to just drop by sort of close to zero. So go figure. We’ve had a good winter, hasn’t snowed much, so I can’t really complain.

But anyway, let’s dig in first into your background. That’s quite an interesting one, and you’ve – I wouldn’t say shot up, but you certainly grew your following and your blog very quickly. What’s the story there? How did you start out?

John: I started out online, making money online, years ago. Probably – shoot, probably 12 years ago now. Mainly with using eBay. I was in a couple multilevel marketing companies back then. The blog idea just came from the way I was making money. I wanted a place where I could talk about it and share with people how I was making money.

That’s really where the blog first started; I was just going to talk about the stuff I was doing, like the stuff I was doing on eBay and multilevel marketing and how I was using online marketing – and back in the day, even though it wasn’t social media, but how I was using social media sites like MySpace to grab leads and traffic to the website.

And then as I blogged more over the 6 months, the blog started doing well, and then it turned into more talking about blogging and how to use the blog to do these things. So it wasn’t just how to use the stuff online, but also how to use the blog. So it turned more into a blogging about blogging and making money site.

Ashley: Was there anything specific you did back then to get yourself going? I mean, we all have our tips and tricks these days, but it’s always good to hear from someone who’s done it well.

John: In the beginning, when I first started the blog and started my stuff online, I didn’t have a lot of money, so I just mainly grabbed every free eBook I could get when I first started out online, and read everything. I read pretty much anything that I could get my hands on. And then one of the biggest things I did was the MySpace was really big for me. That drove a lot of traffic and attention to my website. And blog comments. I commented on a lot of blogs, like true, real comments.

Ashley: Not just one line.

John: Yeah, exactly. “Hey, great post.” No, I took time and energy into it, because I wanted that comment to, #1, get seen by the owner of the blog; #2, I wanted people to see it and be like, “Hey, John’s a smart kid. I want to go follow him. I’m going to go check out his blog.” So the comment didn’t have to be 30 lines, but it had to be something decent, to get people’s attention and for them to be like, “Hey, I like that. I’m going to go check John’s website out.”

Commenting was probably the biggest thing I did in the beginning that drove a lot of traffic and attention to my site. Like I said, I took a lot of time in the beginning. But in the beginning, when you’re starting the blog, I had plenty of time, so commenting was probably the biggest tool, that with MySpace, that helped the blog get seen.

And then using Twitter. When I finally actually got into Twitter and started focusing on Twitter – after using it for like 6 months, I never liked it. But then once I started learning it, Twitter, MySpace, and blog commenting were the three things that really got my blog started pretty well.

Ashley: So did you have to replace MySpace with something at a certain point? I mean, when did that die out for you?

John: Basically Twitter. In the beginning, before all this social media stuff, and even when Twitter just started – because I didn’t touch Twitter I think until it was out for over a year – I was using MySpace. On MySpace, I had like 20 accounts. It was crazy. Back then, MySpace – there were some other smaller sites that were similar to MySpace I was using that drove a lot of traffic to me.

And then as MySpace started changing, I put more focus into Twitter, and Twitter is where, pretty much once MySpace, the traffic stopped, the attention stopped, MySpace started changing, I dumped MySpace and I pretty much focused on Twitter. And then Twitter brought more traffic and attention than MySpace ever did. Within the first year.

Ashley: Yeah, from what I’ve seen when I first came across you last year, to me, you were a Twitter guy. Do you still see yourself that way, that’s your #1 place to be?

John: Yeah, man. It’s funny; in the beginning, I started writing stuff. I came out with a Twitter Dummy book 2, 3 years ago; I was writing Twitter posts. The posts did really well. I knew Twitter, and the things I knew were working really well.

When I wrote about it, it did really well, and at some point I stopped and I’m like, every time people mentioned me or talked about me, they never mentioned that John was an entrepreneur or John was a blogger. All they said is “John’s the Twitter guy.” I’m like, “Do I really want to be the Twitter guy?” Do you know what I mean?

It’s stupid; I should’ve just left it alone, because right now I’d be a god, you know what I mean? So I purposely stopped writing Twitter posts because I wanted to be the Twitter guy, but at the same time I wanted them to know, I’m a blogger, too, and I’m an entrepreneur and all these things. Peopl