Akshay Hallur is the founder of BloggingX, InfoSparkle, and many other online ventures. He is a professional blogger, digital marketer, and trainer.

He has educated thousands of budding entrepreneurs and businesses to help grow/start their online businesses through his trainings, blogs, YouTube channel, FB community – Digital Marketing Hackers, and also his podcast.

His blog BloggingX (previously GoBloggingTips) helps aspiring bloggers and businesses leverage the power of the internet and content marketing to spread their brand message. As a trainer, he has trained many brands, and he also has multiple online courses related to blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing, etc.

As a digital marketer, his views were sought after by some top websites worldwide like Databox, TemplateMonster, DigitalReady, RenderForest, Malcare, SuccessfulBlogging, and much more.

He is also the founder of InfoSparkle, a B2B Digital Marketing company that helps other businesses through content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and digital marketing consultancy.

AKSHAY’S STORY

Back in 2013, I wondered – who creates content on the internet?

That’s when blogging fever kicked in. I started plenty of blogs on the Blogger platform and wrote sporadic thoughts in my head. I never treated it as an opportunity.

On the other hand, I was losing focus on academics. Chemistry was the subject I hated the most. I asked, “Why do I have to memorize so much? Why do I have to remember so much about the things that I’ll never use in my life?”.

It was a gloomy period of my life. Because I had no clue what to do in life, I hated the subjects.

I started my first self-hosted blog. There I wrote about tech stuff, PC tutorials, YT videos, etc. I started multiple blogs, and all were quite a failure without any direction or a niche.

Later, I started GBT realizing that I need to dive into a domain and is limiting my potential by blogging about general tech blog stuff.

In the final year, people said that you need to study well and get a good college, so the final year percentage was 84% – highest for the branch, stood like a champ – although I knew this is worthless… you know that feeling. Wrote the CET.

Got selected at PES University CSE, that’s where the real story starts.

At that time, I was earning quite a good money from my blog, but the university syllabus was slowly killing my blog in-front of my eyes.

Why do I have to do something that’s ruining my business?

I realized that my curriculum will definitely ruin my blog by running me out of time.

Moreover, I was not interested in getting placed in an MNC company, fixed to a certain salary, place, and schedule. I hate being employed. I forecasted that employment model turns out to be a real modern slavery model at least in India. (I would rather master at a particular programming language and work at sites like Upwork.)

I was depressed for like 2 months, not properly going to college, unable to sleep at night, unable to wake up in the morning, worries about the syllabus, useless things to memorize.

I was like a bird in the cage, I knew if I am let out of this cage, I would fly high.

In the hostel there was no proper internet connection as it was in the ground floor. MTS (cell phone carrier back at that time) was giving me like 150kbps. College wifi has all those download and site restrictions.

If I wished to go out and work with good internet, you are not allowed to go out of hostel after 8pm.

It was a hard time, I had not updated my blog for four months. In front of me, day-to-day traffic was plummeting.

I dropped out of the university. Because, I knew earning a degree is more or less earning a dignity; at least in India.

My parents resisted initially, but understood me later and supported me to drop out.

After dropping out, people were like, “Akshay doesn’t have commitment. He doesn’t know the value of getting placed in a good university.“

My old friends asked me, “What are you doing with your life?”. I would tell them, “Blogging.” Most of them looked at me like I was a crazy-weird-kid. I thought – let it be.

An even big challenge for me is growing and boosting my income. I was a low-earning blogger; I used to earn 15k/month. I was in a comfort zone.

Later I realized that I needed work from the inside. I attended an event called MMI that raised my income thermostat (ideal income belief).

The knowledge about the inner world was an ‘aha’ moment in my life. I started to value only quality information. Earlier, I used to browse through the blog posts and forums and dug into many resources. I was struggling to isolate the signal from the noise.

After this, I learned that I need to model successful people in a domain. Having a mentor is essential to being successful, and it pushes you out of your comfort zone.

The things that I learned in the past three years are insane in Digital Marketing, blogging, psychology, and personal development.

I used to try and test different stuff with unpredictable results. But now I’ve learned how to play the game that I will win for sure.

Fast forward to this day, I do what I love, blogging, recording videos, teaching others how to blog, building productivity systems, and reading top 1% books.