Hello everyone! Here it is, all about me, Josh Dusick, and how I started the Firepit and Grilling Guru. I know most of you are probably just on my site to find out about fire pits, grilling, roasting and the like, but I thought some of you would like to know a bit about Josh Dusick (that's me!) and how I came to build this site. Others of you are wondering how you can do the same with your personal interests and hobbies. Well read on if you are interested. If you are just looking for great fire pit and cooking ideas, then skip on to the other sections listed on the navigation bar to your left! Enjoy the site and please feel free to contact me if you have any comments or questions!
The internet and websites are not my life. In fact, other than using the internet for email and surfing the web I never did anything remotely related to computers in the past. I have many different interests and food and cooking just happens to be one of my favorites. I'm not a professional chef… oh, wait, I guess now I could say I am a professional chef since I do make some money off this website which is related to my cooking. But I digress, I'm not a professional chef in the traditional sense. But I am passionate about cooking and food and am quite good at it (if I do say so myself!).
My parents used to call me a Renaissance man because I was so interested, even passionate, about so many things. Besides the sciences that I studied in school, I am also an avid reader, a guitar player and music lover. But one of the most important things in my life has always been food! I don't mean food being important like it is for everyone, sure we all need to eat to survive! What I mean is that I have a passion for good food and that has led to several other hobbies. For one, I've always like to cook. I fancy myself something of a gourmet chef (although not professionally, as I mentioned above) and love to host dinner parties or even just cook up new fun things for my family and I. In fact, I cook just about every dinner we eat! Along with this interest in food came wine. After all, what is a great meal without great wines to accompany it? So for the last 16 years or so I have been a wine lover, collecting and tasting wine as much as I can. In fact, my love of wine and wine tastings has led me to start yet another web site with my wife on that very subject, called Josh Dusick's Wine Tastings Guide. It has lots of info on various aspects of wine, from the basics of how to taste and assess wine on up through detailed information about individual wine regions and grape varieties. However, of all my interests related to food and drink, one of my favorite pastimes is cooking with fire, outdoors, grilling, cooking on a fire pit, in the fireplace, wherever. I love cooking on an open fire, over coals, etc. There is something so primal about it and, besides being fun, it creates great, uniquely flavored food.
So how did all this lead to Josh Dusick's Fire Pit and Grilling Guru website? Well, several years ago my beautiful wife decided to consider starting her own website devoted to a couple topics she was into at the time…crafting and weddings. She did some research and found a great website hosting and design company called Site Build It (SBI) which makes the whole process easy and fool-proof if you follow their great, in depth guides. She began writing and writing and writing and pretty soon had a great website going. She was interested in this because she both loves those topics and has fun doing it, AND we were planning to start a family and she wanted to be able to make some money without being at work all day long. She really wanted to be a stay-at-home mom but couldn't afford to do so at that time. Well her site took off! With all her great content and ideas, people flocked to it and she started making money. In case you don't know how a site such as this or hers makes money, while we don't sell anything directly, once we have good traffic, we can place a small number of relevant advertisements on the pages. Her site was a success pretty quickly, although it does take a lot of time and hard work to build up good content that is useful to visitors.
Well my wife's website success story was so inspiring that I though I, Josh Dusick, should jump on board the website/internet train! She was eventually able to quit her job completely and is now a stay-at-home mom, able to spend all the time she wants with our beautiful young boys! So all this inspiration lead me to consider options for my own site. Well, with my passion for food and cooking and my love of everything to do with fire I thought the Fire Pit and Grilling Guru would be a great concept. While there are a lot of websites out there devoted to cooking and even a fair amount on grilling, there are few non-commercial websites with good information about fire pits and cooking on a fire pit or in your fireplace. So the idea fell together and I started writing. Pretty soon I too had a pretty nice site going (if I do say so myself!) and was getting more and more traffic each day. And that's it! I just kept at it whenever I had time and with the help of Site Build It (SBI), which makes it really easy, my site grew and grew! Pretty soon I was able to place some ads on my site as well and it started to bring in some extra income. While for me it wasn't critical to make a lot of money (it is fun to share my knowledge anyway!) like it was for my wife who wanted to work from home, the extra money really doesn't hurt! Who of us wouldn't like a hobby which brings in a little extra income each month? You can't say no to that!
So how did I do this? Is Josh Dusick a computer wiz or something? Heck no! I don't know much more about computers than most of you. I mean I knew my way around a Mac and PC, I knew the basics. It doesn't hurt to know basic word processing and even a bit about digital photos but I knew nothing about html code or other programming, I still really don't! How I did it was the same way my wife did before me (and then I stole the idea and pretend it's mine!). I signed up with Site Build It (SBI) and followed their guide and then just started devoting some time to writing good content that people seem to be looking for. It's that easy. I really recommend it to anyone who has a passion for something and knows a lot about it. All that info and exciting passion isn't doing anyone any good cooped up in your head! Get it out there and you'll likely find that there are a lot of other people out there who would benefit from that knowledge, and will thank you for it! You can see examples of other peoples' website success story which came right out of their own passions. Most of them are not computer wiz kids either, just regular people like you and me.
Well, I guess thats it! Enjoy my site, Josh Dusick's Firepit and Grilling Guru (in case you weren't paying attention)! If you have interest in creating your own website then I wish you all the luck and success I have had (and hope to continue to have!).
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