Today I am honored to share an interview with blogging superstar Jon Morrow! If you don't do anything else today but read this interview, you'll have learned and grown as a person as much as others do in a lifetime.
Jon is the associate editor of CopyBlogger, the creator of BoostBlogTraffic.com and also teaches aspiring bloggers around the world how to rock at guest blogging. I am currently attending his guest blogging course and I can highly recommend it. He is doing all this while he lives in paradise, which is something we would all like to say, isn’t it?
I have already given people a bit of an overview of who you are and what you are up to and all about. Is there anything more you can tell us about yourself?
I’m a writer, a blogger and one of the things that surprises people a little bit about me is that I am in a wheelchair and I can’t move anything really but my face. So I’ve managed to build a really big following online just by using voice dictation software to write and I also turn that following into an online business that makes me a healthy six figure income every year. It allows me to live wherever I want.
So I live in sunny Mazatlan Mexico, right on the beach in a condo connected to a Wi-Fi. I can do my business just as if I were in the US or wherever. It’s really been ideal, it’s a dream come true for a guy like me.
When was the moment that you decided to give your life in the US up and move to paradise?
Well, I’ve been wanting to live on the ocean for years. I think that’s where most entrepreneurs start. Most of the entrepreneurs I’ve talked to – it’s not like you want to become a billionaire. You just want to create a business that will help you live the life that you want.
You have a picture in your life of what you want your life to be like and the business is just a vehicle for creating that. And for me, my vision for where I wanted my life to be was a laptop, on the beach, sipping a pina colada with beautiful girls in bikinis dancing on the beach. I didn’t get the beautiful girls in bikinis part, by the way. I’m still working on that.
The rest of it I achieved, and it was something that I dreamed about for years but I finally decided to put it into action about three years before I moved out here. That’s how long it took me to prepare everything, to get all the living stuff straightened out and actually move down here. I worked for a two year period and part of it was because I couldn’t move and the other part of it was healthcare in the US – I have nurses with me all the time – and nurses in the US are extremely expensive.
So just by moving to Mexico, it saved me somewhere around $5000 a month just off the bat. So, not only do I get to live in paradise, but also I get to save $5000 a month. I get to eat fresh guacamole whenever I want to. It was kind of the ideal choice, so even though my family thought I was absolutely crazy, I moved down here and made it happen.
What is your motive behind living your passion? You’re teaching people, you’re helping them. Why does this topic matter to you?
Ideas are really, really important to me. When you can’t move, all you really have left is ideas. I read, I write, I think and I talk and that’s pretty much my life. And because of that ideas have become really, really special to me. What bothers me is that a lot of people with really great ideas who deserve to be heard weren’t getting the attention they deserved online when they started a blog or when they launched a course.
Not because their ideas weren’t amazing, but because no one knew who they were. And after years of seeing that on CopyBlogger, I finally decided that I wanted to do something about it and that I wanted to take those writers and show them how to get the attention they deserved so those ideas could spread the way they should be.
You have this disease; did this make you want to fight harder for your ideas? Do you think you have more willpower than people who don’t have a fatal disease?
