Start Where You Are

byglodesigns

455 followers

Updated 9 years ago

Sometimes we are led into situations, where we have to ask, "Why am I here?".

I have been there many times in my life. Being "led" into affiliate marketing and finding Wealthy Affiliate, was meant to be.

Years ago, i was in an interior design program working toward my BFA. I did not end up finishing that program for several reasons. Am I disappointed? No.

First of all I have always been very artistic and creative. I liked ice skating, singing, playing piano, painting and creating hand made jewelry. I believe that some of these artistic qualities were born into me, however I know that anyone can learn the "principles and elements of design". It's a real thing . . . Google it. It is a framework based on science for creating artwork; any artwork from a song, to a building . . . to a website.

Of course there is more to creating a website than just making it look good, but this is a part of it.

I have always loved to help people too. This is something that is just inside some of us and some more than others. One of the things affiliate marketers pride themselves on is helping people. Sending them to a site where they can purchase a product, get some much needed advice or subscribe to a membership or forum of some kind, makes us happy. It is one of our missions to collect information from the web, and save our site visitors time or help to solve their problem, with some information or a product we have found, then let them know about it.

While I was in school for interior design, I took a class called AutoCad. This program is designed to create floor plans and other architectural/construction drawings for communicating between architects, designers and contractors. I was 41 at the time and I did not grow up with computers at all, let alone in my formal schooling, so they were not even around when I was in high school. We thought the electric typewriter was such a cool thing. Fast forward to my first day in AutoCad class-the description said "no computer experience needed" so I thought it was fine. Ummmm . . . . it is my first day and I sit down and guess what? I did not even know how to turn on the computer!!!

My classmate next to me helped me. It got turned on and I picked up a mouse for the first time. Weird feeling. After a day or two I got used to it. One of our first assignments was to create 3-D buildings. The default colors were like magenta and lime green. Being the "explorer" that I am, I went looking for ways to change the colors and did that. Then since I was creating a downtown scene, i added different skyscrapers in different dimensions. Well and good. Then, being from Chicago, I thought to add a more traditional Greco-Roman building since I have seen those downtown. I found . . . all on my own how to make the columns and created a building looking something like the White House, but grey. When my instructor came around to check on us, he said "WOW, you got columns goin' on and everything!!!" I felt proud.

I am adding these next two sentences later as an amendment:

~~~ Sounds like I was trying to show off, but really just utilizing all my resources, and trying to impress the one who I should be impressing-the instructor.

~~~Gosh I never knew he'd be so surprised that he would blurt out a statement like that.

During my time at school I had a bad accident on my bike. I recovered after a few months and got back to school. I ride my bike again too. Why? Because I did not give up.

With the economic crash my interior design career got put on hold as over half of the established professionals left the field. There was no work even for many of them as interior design becomes a luxury in tough economic times, not to mention all the DIY stuff available.

I translated my design skills to creating websites. It has been a fine career and I still get to help people, but without knowing about websites and blogs, I may not have ever been exposed to the concept of affiliate marketing.

So the kernel of knowledge here is really that this has been a journey. In my wildest dreams I never would have expected that I would have my own websites and blogs where I provided links to help people find what they want and need. Looking back, every single "event" . . . whether it seemed good or bad or tedious or fun, let up to my wonderful discovery of this new career.

All because I started where I was, worked on the next step and never gave up. These are the core qualities of affiliate marketers, where ever we are in our stage of development.