My First Blog Post

byellford

290 followers

6 years ago

As I progress through the training here at WA, I find myselfat the end of Level 2, Lesson 9 where it wants me to create a blog post aboutmy time here on WA and what I’ve done to date. Initially I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about to be exact, butthen everything just fell into place once I started.

The Journey

My journey to get here has taken many turns. We live in the most expensive part of thecountry, where everyone wants to “retire” to because of our great climate –that brings with it, an extremely expensive housing market and ridiculous costof living. Don’t get me wrong, I have agreat job – I’m a senior IM/IT specialist for the government, where I managethe Business Intelligence (BI) portfolio. I make decent money, as I’m at the top of the pay grid (honest), but Istruggle to stay on-top of the bills. We’rea family of 4 with both kids heavily involved in sports. We don’t spend our money on fancy vacations(we can only afford to do tent camping in campgrounds). We don’t eat out all the time (we have 1family dinner out per month) or buy expensive coffees. We buy groceries “on sale” whenever possibleand don’t shop at the “boutique” grocery stores. Yes we have two (2) vehicles, but both are 10years old, so it’s not like we have fancy new cars. The price of gas sits (today) at $1.54/litre($7.563/US gal). Yet despite how frugalwe are, we can barely make enough to cover the bills.

About 5+ years ago I hired a guy at work and we became goodfriends. He talked about AffiliateMarketing back in the day and went so far as to tell me that it’s how he boughthis Jeep. All the money he made fromAffiliate Marketing bought him a brand new Jeep (not “new to him”, but “new”off the dealership lot). I was intrigued,as I could definitely use some extra cash. I went online and tried to research what it was and found a few sitesand forums. I joined these sites andlearned about what a “niche” was. Iimmediately registered a couple domains and thought I could whip up a site inno time and the money would pour in. Boywas I wrong. After writing a bunch ofcontent and not really knowing what I was doing, both sites failed miserably.

Take 2

Fast forward a couple years and I kept hearing aboutaffiliate marketing and people making money selling other people’sproducts. Again, I figured I’d check outonline and see what I could come up with. I found another forum and figured these people “knew their stuff”. Oh they knew their stuff all right – to thepoint that nobody wanted to help one another out and they were all willing tobackstab one another to steal their ideas and niches. Nobody shared anything and made a mockery ofanyone (like me) that chose to ask questions. Again I gave up and went back to looking for other ways to make money onthe side. I even applied to work part timeat the local Rona (now called Lowes), but I was told I’m way overqualified towork there. Huh? Since when is an “education” a badthing? All I wanted to do was stockshelves, or anything to make a buck. I’ma strong guy, so stick me in the yard even! Nope, no luck…

Get Rich Quick

I found myself on someone’s site talking about great ways tomake money online. You know the sites –we’ve all seen them. They talk all abouthow easy it is to make money online doing surveys. Well, I hate to tell you, but that’s such abig scam it’s not even funny. Maybe 5-10years ago you could make money doing surveys, but the reality is, you sure can’tnow. I joined a “bunch” of survey sitesand honestly sunk 3-4 hours PER NIGHT into doing surveys. I did this for a FULL MONTH. What did I get? Nothing… So do the math (and I’ll be conservative): 3 hours per night and assumethat was ONLY weeknights, so that’s 20 days = 60 hours per month. I’m not sure what your minimum wage is, buthere it’s $11.25 per hour. So if I got ajob at McDonalds or Walmart, or any place that pays minimum wage, that’s $675 Icould have earned part time in the time I invested doing surveys. What a crock!

Behind the 8-ball

OK, survey’s where a huge bust. Back to the site and it sells to “sell stuff”. That’s great if you actually have accumulated“stuff”, but we don’t have much extra “stuff” to sell. I was able to get rid of some old cable boxesI had, some furniture we don’t really use, and some kids clothes. But the investment to take pictures and postthe stuff on our local “used” site was a bit much. Nothing worse than people e-mailing you andtelling you they want your stuff and they’ll come by at a particular time, tojust not show. So you end up wasting somuch time just to sell a $2-$5 item. It’shardly worth it. In the end, we justloaded the car up and headed downtown to give away the stuff to the lessfortunate. I’m a big believer in “givingback” to your community, so this felt good, but it still didn’t get me out frombehind the 8-ball.

Frelance!

OK the next thing these sites were saying was tofreelance. Find something you’re good atand offer your services to others. OK, Ican do that – I’m an “IT guy”. So off Igo to Fiverr. If you haven’t heard ofit, it’s a place you can post what you do and sell your services. OR – if you’re looking for work (e.g. tobuild a website for someone), you can post it on Fiverr. So I head there and can’t believe what peopleare willing to do for $1-$5. There’s noway I can compete, as I know how much time it takes to do something so thesepeople must be just giving it away. Turns out, I think most people that are successful on Fiverr are fromsouth-east Asia or Eastern European, where their local currency isn’t worthmuch on the world market. In someplaces, you can feed or house a family for $5 USD per week. In the end, I actually ended up hiring somepeople off of Fiverr as I couldn’t do what they could for the prices they wereoffering. So freelancing was out of thequestion for me, at least if I wanted to compete online.

To Make $$ You Need $$

I joined a stock trading group at work, where we would spenda couple lunch hours a week talking about stocks. One guy had a professional software packagehe paid for annually, where if you entered the stock ticker, it could tell youa bunch of information about it. Not bad– I picked a mining company that did pretty good and then hit it out of thepark with a national RV company that was starting out when the economy tanked(when the economy tanks, people have no excess cash to spend, so they don’ttake vacations away, they take stay-cations and renting RV’s is a great way tosee the country). I bought this stockaround .27/share and sold it when it hit $1.84. I made a lot of cash doing this, but then I bought an oil & gascompany that I previously made money with as I ‘believed’ in the company. One day I should write an e-book on how “NOT”to buy stocks. Anyways, I bought in atthe height of the fracking business and literally overnight fracking was badand there was a glut of oil on the global market. Prices per barrel of oil plummeted to anall-time low and I lost my shirt. Allthe money I had earned previously was gone. Thank goodness it was just my ‘play money’ as I call it.

There’s Got To Be A Better Way

Late one night about 4 weeks ago, while again searching forways to make some extra cash on the side, I stumbled across someone’s blog, butthis was one different. It didn’t talkabout writing surveys or selling all your possessions and living in your VW bugon the side of the road. It again talkedabout affiliate marketing. I scrolled tothe top of the page to see when it was written (last thing you want to do isget into something based on reading a 10-12 year old post). This was 2018 – so it was current. I read further and talk about a bunch ofaffiliate marketing “platforms” and then compared the various platforms – not bad. This one went so far as to say it had freetraining. OK, so one of these platformsoffers “free” training to try it out? OK, what have I got to lose here. So I clicked the link and ended up here at WA.

If You Want To Make $1 Million – Ask a Millionaire

I started with WA about a month ago and I’m the type ofperson that will give anything I do 110%. I hit the first lesson and learned about WA and how it works. I got engaged on the forums and postedquestions and got answers from others on the site. This was vastly different from what I wasused to where on other forums they mocked you and stole your ideas – this waspeople helping people. KARMA.

I’m a firm believer that if you want to learn to dosomething, you ask an expert and have them show you. If I was to hire you at my day-job, I wouldn’texpect you to come in and know immediately how to program in SQL or SAS and Rand run some data extracts. Either Iwould sit down with you and go over how it’s all done, or one of my seniorstaff would sit with you. It’s a recipefor success. Funny thing, WA is based onthe exact same methodology. You learnfrom people who have “made it” in this business and are more than willing toshare with you how you too can be successful.

I’ve dove into every training course in order here atWA. Some I really got – others I had tore-listen to the video over and over to get it to ‘click’. I won’t “jump ahead” for every lesson isbased on things from previous lessons and I learned long ago, there’s noshortcut to the finish line. If you jumpahead 8 lessons, you’ll fail miserably, as that’s not how the successful peoplehere did it. There are little steps thatthey teach you in order. Do it in orderand you’ll be just as successful as the rest.

I need to mention, that I completely became addicted to someof the stuff on WA. I love the site andpost feedback/comments. I can spendHOURS a day just providing feedback to others on their site and on theirposts. I’ve come up with some GREATideas for others for their specific niches (I’m like that – I can see the bigpicture pretty early on).

When I joined WA, one of the first things Kyle asks you ishow much time can you devote to this. Well, I said 2-4 hours a night and I’ve never faltered on that sofar. I try to fully complete one lessona day and the activities associated with that lesson. I also try to write a post on my site for myniche at least once a week (so far I’ve been able to do a post every few days,so that’s great).

I started following people, but not just anyone. Those of you that I’m following – I believein YOU. You’re the people that are going tobe successful – you have a great niche, you’re friendly and caring, and yougive and get. You’re the next shootingstars on here.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog of mine. It’s my first one here and it might be a bitlong and rambling, but it’s my journey… I’d love to hear about yours…