How a Mechanical Engineer Ended Up as $0 Profit Blogger

I graduated high school with the passion to become an engineer. I was always in love with mechanical systems from pumps to air ducts etc. Whenever I went to college and started my journey to become a mechanical engineer, I didn’t like it for a second. It was a rough unpleasant journey for almost 5 years where I lost my mind but where I also made it.

After graduation I was hit by reality, nobody is hiring mechanical engineers anywhere I can reach. It was devastating and I felt like all my efforts at college and the pain that I went through was for nothing. I started taking extra courses and training where I got certificates in the field. Still, nothing! I knocked every door that I could trying to find a job as a mechanical engineer or any related field and I failed.

2 years after graduation and still no job found, I decided that I need to make money as fast as possible because it’s really getting ugly for me and I am out of options. So, I started thinking what am I good at and what can I give to people so they could pay me. The first thing that crossed my mind was social media and marketing. I really have decent experience in basically anything on the internet (NERD!) other than writing code and programming. So, I started looking around for any opportunity that I could find that will allow me to gain some actual experience in this field so I can tell people that I actually did something and get more customers. Luckily for me, a friend of mine started a business and opened up a restaurant and it was doing fairly good and he needed someone to manage social media pages for the restaurant and do some customer service answering questions and responding to messages on the social media platforms. And he asked me to do it, I didn’t even tell him that I was looking for something like that but he did ask me. And of course, I said YES!

The restaurant had a Facebook page and it was ugly, unprofessional, and low quality to be honest. So, I took full responsibility and started things from scratch. I also started an Instagram page and put it together and linked it with the Facebook page for the restaurant. I learned many techniques on how to manage posts and stories and I also learned techniques for using the right keywords to get more organic traffic to these pages leading to more traffic to my friend’s restaurant. And the most amazing part, that the restaurant was getting a really decent amount of traffic because of what I learned and implemented.

I was getting paid for basically pennies by my buddy, so I needed more. I was mentally stuck at the online world and I was thinking what should I do to make more money now and on the long run. As for making money now, I thought that I should market myself once again as the dude who manages social media for anything. So, I called my friends and people that I knew and told them that if you know anyone that needs anything related to social media just let them know about me. The next month I got a call from a friend when he told me that one of his brothers owns many shops that sell stock items and he needs someone to manage the social media for these mini shops. I obviously agreed and started right away and used every little info that I knew from my previous experience.

With 2 customers, I felt good and thought to myself that there is actually hope for me to master this field and make good money out of it. So, I started making a little research about how much social media managers make. I’ve seen better numbers, but it’s actually not bad. So, I started a search for another career while I managed my 2 customers’ businesses.

As I mentioned, I was mentally stuck online, I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything that does not include a keyboard, an internet connection and freedom. So, I took these points in consideration when I was looking for something to do as an alternative to social media management and originally mechanical engineering. The first thing that I tried was a freelancing platform, where I mentioned that I can translate any document/text from Arabic to English and vice versa, I can manage social media, and I can work as an online research assistant for PhD students (I helped some people in the past with this so I said why not mention it).

And it was nothing, nobody cared about me nobody accepted any of my bids, nobody made any offer to me, nothing. So, I thought that if I make my profile more professional people will take me seriously and actually ask me to do tasks for them and pay me for it. I made my profile so professional and with a portfolio and all the sweet things you wish to see on a freelancer’s account. Yet for 2 months, nobody cared as well. I was really unhappy with the results, but with the number of bad results that I had to deal with, I managed to create a strong mentality where I could never be defeated (Hopefully).

I looked for something else. Suddenly one day the YouTube algorithm decided that I was interested in blogging. I didn’t even know what blogging actually is. So, I opened the video and watched till the end (30 minutes) where a lady was explaining what blogging is and how to make money out of it. I was in shock and said to myself ‘How the hell are you not a blogger?’.

Same night, I paid for a host and chose my domain name, and started shaping my blog using WordPress.

I’ve been blogging for almost 2 months now, and made about 10 cents with Google AdSense. But I see the potential in this field, it’s so big and this field is amazing.

Being a 2-month-old blogger made me realize how search engines work and how I can work with them to get better results for my blog. I’m currently averaging about 100 page views a month, but from what I understand that this number is going to grow for sure if I followed everything that I learned correctly.

On of the things that I learned, is that bloggers should be on Medium sharing their posts with other people. But I noticed that these posts where not interesting for anyone, and Medium’s audience are looking for people sharing their thoughts more than giving them a guide on how to create a website, or the best freelancing platforms for 2021.

So, here I am sharing my story as a new born writer on Medium. Hopefully it shows some of the pain that I went through and give some people the hope that I still have and will never lose.