My 21st Affiliate Anniversary

byIncomeLegion

9.1K followers

2 days ago

Hey everyone, Happy New Year.

This message was supposed to be written yesterday, but an internet tower was on the fritz out here in the sticks, so a day of delay had to happen. Anyhow, January 4th, 2025, marks my 21st year of affiliate marketing.

I wish I could tell you of all my riches. I can tell you I have seen a lot of success and a lot of setbacks, though. In fact, I pushed too hard 11 years back and had a nervous breakdown, which reshaped my trajectory and slowed my progress. I am proud to say that it didn't stop me.

I have seen everything from fly-by-night programs to major success stories falter and flop while I keep plugging away. In my time I have met champions of industry and was mentored by one of the best in the late Corey Rudl who started the Internet Marketing Center and taught me most of what I needed to know in this business before his untimely death.

It all began with an Old Yahoo Group I started to learn and share gardening tips so I could do better in my day job in Wal-Mart's Garden Center. with our 3rd child my oldest son Robert on the way I had bought a computer, and was looking for ways to make money with my group. That night around midnight I was turned onto a community forum called AdLand Pro.

From Adland, I found other people in affiliate marketing and even another gardening group owner who turned me onto the eBay Publisher Network. Later, about 3 months later I sold my first items and that garden trowel and pair of gloves made me all of $1.70 in commissions but the check could have been a million bucks for my reaction.

Yahoo shut down groups not long after that but I moved over to using Blogger and forum marketing, then later created a small social network for affiliates on my first hosting account and the first domain name I ever owned. ZTCUSA.com stands for Zeus Team Concepts USA as my nickname is Zeus from my days as a bouncer.

As luck would have it I met a guy from Australia named Dave Gilbert who owned a budding search engine called Easy Search Live and we got this crazy idea one night to build a hybrid search engine and social media network.

Kooiii.com known as Kooiii Social Media Search was our dream network that at one point reached 7 sites and Kooiii itself was generating over 3 million unique page views off over 600,000 visits a month and boasted over 5,000 social network members. I also stayed blogging and built the domain MyViralBlog.com to over 1 million monthly page views using WordPress as my new engine of choice.

I pushed hard and for 9 years Dave and I went from best of friends to fighting over the direction of the company and I put in too many 100+ hour work weeks.

I had my nervous breakdown one night and just like a light switch thrown I walked away from Kooiii, turned my back on friends and life, and became a very depressed and sometimes verbally abusive and physically scary mess. I wouldn't hit people but I put a few holes in walls to keep from doing so and was diagnosed with Bipolar depression and Social Anxiety Disorders.

I crashed big time and went from being on top and starting to live the dream to couldn't hardly touching anything business for a year. My physical health suffered too and I gained 130 pounds after surgery with a long recovery.

In my time since I have lacked consistency, changing directions too much and starting over too often.

Two years ago we saw the worst of it. We were priced out of the housing market without my income and were forced to spend 10 months living in tents in the Arizona Desert as working homeless. When taxes came we still could not find a home we could afford to move into and in separation bought an older RV that was too old to get into the parks in town.

We finally thought we caught a break and found a place for the RV but it had an overheating issue and we lost both cars we had to expensive breakdowns and one day driving too a cooling spot the RV caught fire. With it, we lost everything we owned except 2 dogs and a few cats. My PC, my audio equipment, everything personal was gone.

Some days are so dark you must be under a rock they say.

Rock Bottom for use was under lava and our faith in God though bent was not broken. Despite my Social Anxiety I got on local TV to tell our story and it resonated. People all over Yuma County came to our aid and got us to the place we are now and righted enough I was even back online on this used laptop.

Since this ordeal, my Social Anxiety is just about history. It is still terrifying being in a business store, and at times I feel eyes on me in a negative tone but now I can even get on video again with few voice cracks.

I have been building a social network, had an idea of rebuilding the past and it is over 2,000 members now but have decided to seek a buyer because the past is not my passion anymore. Instead, I want to focus on 3 of my 4 blogs.

The first is Income Legion which I need to revamp a bit to make work to promote Wealthy Affiliate. The second is Grand Slam City, a blog focused on my passion for sports and people's dreams of building an idea man cave or fan cave in their homes. My new site though is getting a major focus and is called Learn Stuff Daily. It focuses on developing entrepreneur mindsets.

Having just sold my 2 traffic sites and looking for a buyer for my Paid Healthy blog and Kiosk Social I plan to double down on learning AI, and YouTube, while continuing to push hard on Pinterest and Facebook. LinkedIn will also be a challenge as I redevelop my profile to work better with Income Legion.

I have focus and fire like was gone for too long and will be so glad to see this journey through. If I bored you with too many details I am sorry. In closing I will say the message here is no matter how bad things seem to go you decide the ending to your story. If I can fight through all of this in 21 years and come out a champion you can too.

Andy Zeus Anderson