About Shabbir

I started this blog to share my experiences with SEO, affiliate and digital marketing, and growing websites.

How did I get here?

I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. Since I was a kid, I loved to hustle.

Living in New York City in the 1990s, I was fortunate enough to grow up just as eBay and Amazon were becoming a thing, and I quickly became good at selling things that were lying around the house. I’d also finance most of my video game purchases through selling old video games and stuff!

I started my first e-commerce store drop-shipping reusable sandwich bags and plastic-replacement items back in 2010. In a fit of creativity, I called the store Reusable Bag Store!

That was my first entry into digital marketing, and safe to say, the site flopped.

In hindsight, there were a lot of issues:

• I had no idea what I was doing
• I chose a very inexpensive product to sell, requiring lots of volume to make any money

My next store drop-shipped fish finders and was called Fish Finder Source. At the same time, I also started an e-commerce blog called Bootstrapping Ecommerce. I leveraged my blog to get guest posts on industry-leading sites like Shopify, GoDaddy, and PrestaShop.

I implemented a content strategy on Fish Finder Source and managed to grow it to around 15,000 visits per month, but I was converting very few sales. It was then that I decided to switch the site over to an affiliate model and I converted the store into an affiliate website, and I made over $500 in my first month!

Fish Finder Source was later sold on Empire Flippers and I decided to plunge full-time into building and growing sites.

Since then, I’ve built:

• A drone website which I grew to 30,000 visits per month and later sold
• A photography website which I grew to 45,000 visits per month
• A coffee website which I grew to 75,000 visits per month and later sold for 6 figures

Networking with the best

During my journey, I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from some of the best people in the industry. During the initial stages of Bootstrapping Ecommerce, I was in touch with Brian Dean, who inspired me to write what was then the most comprehensive post on e-commerce link building(this post was tweeted by industry leaders and shared thousands of times).

You can still see it here.

Obsessing with systems

Until recently, I’ve always wanted to do everything hands-on.

So I built and designed the site, I wrote the content, and I built the links.

This is great, except it can lead to burnout. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been learning how to convert these tasks into systems and processes that can be easily replicated.

This was an incredibly important realization. Systematizing your business is the only way to scale.

Since then, I’ve become a bit of a productivity and systems nerd. I love working with apps like Zapier, Asana, and Notion to organize and streamline my business processes.

I can help you do the same. Even if you’re still a small team, it’s critical to build your processes and SOPs from early on so you’re ready to scale when you have to.

Growing this blog (and yours)

Ever since I sold Bootstrapping Ecommerce in 2017, I’ve wanted to start another personal brand, and here I am.

At heart, I love to teach, and through this blog, I hope to teach you how to build and grow your own online blogging business, systematize it, and work towards freedom both in terms of time and money.

My life

• I was born in Mumbai, India
• I moved to New York City when I was one year old when my dad pursued his PhD at NYU
• I lived in New York City and then in Chicago until I was 17
• I studied Arabic Literature at a university in Surat, India
• I’m currently based between India and Chicago.