Time For A Break

Yikes – a tame-sounding headline which evokes a sense of foreboding eh? Well, yes and no. Speaking as Mark, the co-founder and content creator of Granite Fitness, it is time to take a bit of time off to reflect and to plan the future of our little community.

Granite Fitness was founded in 2014 and grew to prominence in 2015. With the launch of the four e-books, namely the Winning Psychology Manual, Strategic Nutrition Guide, Lifelong Fitness Blueprint and Traveller’s Fitness Bible, the transition to a blog was a smooth one, with a nice small community forming.

We started writing the blog in 2015, but barely two years later, it started to attract the attention of others in the fitness industry, and so came the guest posts and the sponsorships. Some of them are still thriving today, while others had fizzed out. All of them are greatly appreciated.

It was at this time that we started a few affiliate marketing projects with a bunch of websites which we created a banner for – with the banner name being the Granite Network. It thrived for a while, but it never reached the heights we wanted it to reach. Back to the blog, It was then that we decided to venture into articles relating to other areas of health rather than only fitness. Our community loved it!

Things started to slow down a little in 2018-2019 when I, Mark, started to focus more on my career in a university. Co-founder Atanas also started to venture into his main occupation, which is working for high-end international clients.

Nevertheless, both of us continued with this project, with Mark getting content up and Atanas securing sponsorship deals and dealing with the search engine optimisation. At this point, the community was almost self-sufficient, with minimal effort required. Though small, members of our community were supporting one another psychologically and mentally.

Sales of our main product has slowed, which was expected since low input equals low output. Sponsorships and affiliate sales slowed down, which was alright with us because by this time, it was a side hobby. The frequency of our posting was reduced, but we were still sticking to it. This was our baby and we are proud of it.

Fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic struck, leaving people helplessly at home. We had a spike of our physical product sales i.e. resistance bands, for a while. Surprisingly, it was during this period that we made it to number two in our relevant category on internationally renowned blog ranking site Feedspot! That really warmed our hearts.

Here we are in 2022, both co-founders have found ourselves in situations where we are progressing with our respective careers very well, and they are taking up a lot of out time – Atanas with coding, and Mark with Human Resources. With limited time for hobbies and external interests, it is now that we are announcing a break from posting for a while.

Thank you for all the support throughout this time. To say that Granite Fitness has grown beyond expectation and made much of a positive difference to the lives of hundreds is certainly an understatement. We will still be posting, albeit sporadically, and maybe in the near future we can ramp up our operations again. But for now, it is time for a well deserved rest! Take care, and know that we are always up for a chat. Hit us up on LinkedIn or Facebook!