(Long story short: I’m a WooCommerce developer, an author, a speaker and an internet marketing expert. I own approximately 10 online businesses)
If you want to know more about myself, I’m an Italian civil engineer who completely switched career after recession hit in 2011.
I thought going solo, building websites for little money with no previous experience was going to be fun.
Then, I stumbled upon WooCommerce while choosing ecommerce software for one of my first clients, and my business life changed drastically.
I started sharing WooCommerce customization tips in public so that I could reuse them on other clients’ websites…
100k unique users/month later, Business Bloomer became my only source of income. With that level of traffic, I haven’t needed to do marketing, networking, social media or advertising. My income is entirely dependent upon client work and scalable products, such as WooCommerce online courses.
Over the years, I’ve come up with several free resources for WooCommerce developers, such as the popular visual hook guides or the cart / order / product getters. Together with that, I published several free video lessons as lead magnets, so that I could collect email contacts and keep sending value every week with WooCommerce Weekly.
When I noticed there was a lot of interest for video tutorials, I created WooCommerce online courses for designers/developers, and my business added another big chunk of scalable revenue.
I also launched the Bloomer Armada, a non-subscription membership for sharing discounts, WooCommerce perks and valuable Q&A with direct access to me.
In the meanwhile, I also managed to write a book for ecommerce entrepreneurs, with easy and straight-forward sales conversion optimization tips. Sales have been good but for sure I could have and could do better with dedicated marketing.
Over the years, I created other websites from scratch for personal or business purposes: apieceofsicily.com (the marketplace of Made in Sicily), xperience.ie (Ireland’s first internship job board website), tennissicilia.it (the only Italian website dedicated to Sicilian tennis), 177days.com (my 6 months of digital nomading throughout South America), and many more that I started but never really launched and decided to let expire 🙂
I enjoy speaking around the world, and my speaking gigs range from WooCommerce development to internet marketing strategies. Not only I was lucky to be selected as a WordCamp speaker (I remember especially my short gig at WordCamp Vienna and a great one in Rome), but also I managed to run my own ecommerce / WordPress / WooCommerce meetups for years when I used to live in Ireland, which was terrifying at the beginning as I never spoke in public before.
Current objectives for my business life are selling my first website at a reasonable price, as well as growing my personal brand and turning some of my side-projects into profitable ventures (or at least one at a time).
In regard to my personal side of things, I think in 2021 I achieved most of what I’ve always wanted: building a family. Lorenzo, my son, was born the second last day of 2020, and in July 2021 I married Benedetta here in Sicily. We also managed to buy our first house in Palermo and we’ll start renovating it soon. Not sure I can ask for more this year!
I recently got back into sports (Lorenzo kept me busy for a while) so I’m delighted with that. I’d be nothing without tennis, soccer and whatever activity I can come up with (stand up paddle boarding last year, for example). I feel much better now and I believe I shouldn’t feel sorry if one night I go play while my wife looks after our son – she’s thinking of going back to swimming, so I’ll get the favor back when that happens.
Other than that, I’ve been working from home and on my own for the last 10 years, so I have a good life balance and hopefully I’ll never need to work in an office. I enjoy collaborating with people but I don’t think I’m able to cope with office work. At least, I never enjoyed that – who knows.
If you want to follow my path towards Business Bloomer acquisition and personal brand development, feel free to follow me on Twitter or subscribe here:
For now, good luck and stay safe!
