This is a guest post from Emmet Gibney from HelmsleyMedia.com, who has participated in both Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind.

A lot of the readers here are likely students in Yaro and Gideon’s Become a Blogger Premium program, and I thought I would share a few words of advice with you as you start your journey towards blogging riches.

Blogging isn’t just about making money, it can also be a wonderful way to experience things you would not have otherwise had the opportunity to do.

I have been blogging for the last 4-5 years. I have started a number of blogs, and allowed a number of them to die. I started a cooking blog where we shot videos of a friend of mine cooking food and teaching you how to do it. It didn’t go anywhere but it was fun. I started a badminton blog, which is still going strong, and has allowed me to become partners with a childhood idol of mine. Finally, the blog that is the focus of this article, is a blog about film school which allowed me to meet Princess Leia herself.

In 2006 I went to NYFA (New York Film Academy), and prior to leaving for school I felt like there was a lack of research materials and testimonials from people who had gone to film school. I decided I would chronicle my experiences at film school on a blog, and hopefully it would make money to support myself in NYC, it’s an expensive place you know!

FilmSchoolStudent.com didn’t turn into what I had planned and I dropped out of the program because it didn’t seem worth the money. Disappointed I moved back to Canada.

Over the next year or so I kept writing on the blog anyway, providing tips to other people who were making the tough decision of whether or not to go to film school. Then the following summer Fox (the TV channel) announced they were doing a reality show where aspiring film directors would have a chance to compete for a Hollywood development contract with Steven Spielberg’s studio Dreamworks. The show was called “On The Lot” and I started watching with great interest as I was an aspiring filmmaker myself.

Then one day I received an email from a PR rep for Ford, the main sponsor of the show:

“Hello,

My name is ***** and I happened to come across this address from www.filmschoolstudent.com. I’d like to be able to contact the publisher of the blog and was hoping you could, since you worked with the publisher, provide them with my contact information. It is in regards to an opportunity with television series “On The Lot”. Feel free to contact me on my direct line below if you would like additional information.

Thank-you,

*****”

I immediately called them, and they asked me if I would be interested in coming down to Hollywood to watch a taping of the show, all expenses paid. I would be put up at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where the first Oscar ceremony ever was held. Of course I accepted their invitation, and not much more than a week later I was landing at LAX airport.

For the next 3 days I was treated like a VIP. I got to see behind the scenes of how the show was put together, I met all of the contestants, and I met Princess Leia herself, Carrie Fisher. Not the highlight of the trip for me necessarily, but certainly the most comical as we proceeded to argue over the quality of Spielberg’s work on “Jurassic Park”.

This trip was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. The blog I was running was getting somewhere around 15 visitors per day, in fact after being contacted I took down my Sitemeter for fear that they would see how few visitors I was getting. It didn’t matter though, they were just trying to figure out this whole blogosphere thing.

The point of it is you don’t need to have some massive readership for interesting things to happen if you run a blog. Just by putting yourself out there on a consistent basis things can start happening.

Now with my badminton blog I am planning to live out my dreams of playing badminton on the professional tour with my childhood idol as my mentor. None of this would be possible were it not for blogging. I might not ever become rich from blogging, or become a world champion, but blogging has made more exciting things happen for me than almost anything else in my life.

Emmet Gibney
HelmsleyMedia.com
BadmintonVM.com
FilmSchoolStudent.com (You can read the long version of the story of my trip to Hollywood)

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