About Bob

My name is Robert Hutchinson. I’m a 50-year-old professional writer based in Orange County, California. I basically write for money — advertising copywriting, books (when I can get a book deal), articles, even radio scripts. I’ve been doing this for about 30 years. I once had a regular job for a whole two years, as the managing editor of Hawaii Magazine, but I quit one month before I got married in 1990 and haven’t worked since. My wife Glenn and I have five children whom we’ve raised in a rambling old house about a mile from the beach.

Aside from that one editing job, I’ve been a full-time freelance writer my entire life. My bread and butter clients are investment companies, Internet marketing companies, health and fitness companies — anyone who will pay for words. Despite being an Internet and writing professional of sorts (as I said, many clients are Internet marketers), in the past I avoided trying to join the “blogging revolution” largely because I found the technical details too time-consuming to master. The learning curve on software like Deamweaver seemed relatively high to me. It was just easier to hire professional web designers for projects.

But over the years, I’ve had many ideas for websites or informal blogs that I would have liked to start but I could never get past that first step of setting up a blog. I tried many times but always ended up frustrated.

Whenever I’ve created websites professionally, it was a big deal and meant hiring a professional web developer, hours and hours of back and forth emails. It wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to do for an informal family website… or get the hobby sites to look the way I wanted. And, as I’ve said in other places on this website, whenever I tried to do an informal blog, I always hated the result. It just looked too amateurish. Making the simplest, tiniest change seemed incredibly complicated.

But here is what I’ve learned in the past six months: Once you get over those first initial hurdles, creating a blog is actually quite easy. It now literally takes me $10 and just 10 minutes to create a new website. But it took me about three full months of trial and error to learn how to get my blogs to look the way I wanted them to look. Because I am NOT a web designer and HTML and PHP (the programming codes developers use) are still largely Greek to me, I had to learn simple shortcuts to get my blogs to look right. The good news is that these shortcuts are also extremely easy.

Bottom line: Anyone who knows how to surf the Web on a browser can create a professional-looking blog in under one hour and can use it for their business, their personal hobbies, their kids’ swim team, whatever they would like to use a website for. It’s easy, simple and doesn’t take much time. Once you set it up, you can post text, upload photos, even post video.

Giving Away Everything for Free

The way you make money on the Internet or through blogging is to GIVE AWAY lots of free stuff and then hope that eventually people will pay actual money for not-free stuff. It’s just common sense. You want to know what you’re buying — and a free sample is the best way for you to know what you’re getting.

My ultimate goal is to teach introductory blogging classes as a way to get more comfortable doing copywriting seminars. But to get people to sign up for my live, in-person classes, I’m going to literally give away everything I know free.

I’m doing this because, if you’re like me, you still probably would like to have someone show you how to do things even if you have all the instructions down in black and white — especially since my live blogging classes are so cheap and I even provide pizza.

I always have questions and a live class is really the only way to get those sorts of questions answered. So, even though my live classes pretty much cover everything I am giving away on this website and in follow-up emails, I’m still going to give it all away.

So, if you’re interested in starting a blog but don’t know how, I’m your guy. I can teach you the BASICS — the “I don’t have a clue how to get started” basics. I’ll walk you through the initial steps of getting up a DOMAIN NAME, setting a HOSTING ACCOUNT, installing WORDPRESS, changing the basic WordPress theme to something moderately professional-looking and creating a professional-looking BANNER.

I’ll also explain the basics of how you log in… make posts… change posts… upload photos… and make simple modifications to your WordPress theme (for example, the width of the page and the fonts and colors).

Eventually, I hope to do this with videos but, for now, I’ll do it in a series of SHORT emails. If you’d like to sign on for this, fill in the form below.

If you’d like more hand-holding and live in or are visiting the Orange County, California area, and would be interested in attending my live, in-person BLOGGING CLASS, then fill in the longer form below. (Again, I won’t share any of this information with anyone… and you can make up fake names if you’d prefer.)