Wealthy Affiliate is My Counselor and My Addiction

byIncomeLegion

9.5K followers

6 months ago

On June 17th 2014 I Relaunched My Journey in Affiliate Marketing.

We are just 2 weeks right now from my 11th year with Wealthy Affiliate and the journey has been exciting though eye opening. See I came here about 10 and a half months after a major nervous breakdown, after having a long battle to healing from a major surgery. The worst part was the nervous breakdown left me with Bipolar and Social Anxiety disorders.

Imagine 1 disorder telling you it's all over and the other telling you everyone knows it and thinks you are pathetic and that was me. I was trapped inside my own head and have spent the last 11 years getting back out of it.

No excuse, no blame.

I make no excuses, everything that has kept me from being as well to do as many of you who joined years and even a decade after me is 100% my own doing. See I learn daily and teach daily but as much as I have told everyone to apply what you know I was not ready until recently. Now I am fighting for myself and my family and it feels great.

I just put out a ton of content across a range of our 12 site network that my business partner and I own that let's me know I can do this again and the timing has never been better.

Recently my wife had her Gallbladder Removed.

This was very sudden, very scary for more reasons than one. See not only is she the love of my life and mother of my 7 children, and grandmother to the smilingness baby on the planet I swear. She is also currently our main breadwinner as my failure to push the action button has left us in a sad shape since a bout of homelessness 3 years ago claimed the first rebirth of my business.

I still earn enough I pay my annual dues plus a server and a few dozen other bills mostly out of profits and personal this and that but her part-time earnings cover most of our daily needs.

Thing is the past month we haven't had this money while she was in recovery and it meant really scrimping to get by. Our Social Security income looks laughable if the system is not insolvent by then. We don't own our own home, because of housing markets we live with family, and our best hope is that I right the ship and return us to a position of powerful returns.

Mission Retire Well

This year I turn 51, which means with my physical and mental disabilities I have to really dig deep to retire well in the next 20 years.

I wrote a blog 6 years back showing what 10 years at 240,000 per year or just 20,000 per month could do for us and this post is a bit of an update. I still haven't started on that climb. I still lack a Ford Mustang, an RV, a Ranch Home, and some Horses. We don't travel, my office is a TV Tray, and easy chair, and a erasable calendar in the living-room.

I have as my partner says, a lack of controls in place or structure which I am working on.

This includes a schedule I am starting to fill with task, more trust in sharing some of the workload, and a new content calendar I have been using on and off since January 2025. I work hard, too hard for the end results and my health has been crap because of it. My diet sucks, my diabetes is out of control, and I am actually here to see accountability partners I can relate too.

What is an Accountability Partner?

An accountability partner is someone who you share common goals, task, interest with that you can work with to keep each other on track. It can be as simple as another diabetic to share things we learn about issues like the Neuropathy in my left leg that is making concentration today spotty.

It can also be someone in each of the following niche segments to collaborate with.

My main niche is Side Hustle Concepts and Affiliate Marketing and fits well with any MMO or Make Money Online niche. The 2md most robust is actually a new blog that delivers AI-Powered Marketing tools each week with training posts on how to use tools like them to be a better online marketer. Both of those fields I have over 21 years in and have built sites with up to 3.4 million monthly page views.

I also have a site on my journey back to health and getting paid for it that has been on hold while taking care of the needs of others. Then there is Grand Slam City which combines my love of sports with my mission to some day build my own man/fan cave.

By finding collaborators we can use a tool that my social network grows and thrives on which is leveraging other people's content, and leveraging multiple audiences. Working together we can co-brand each other as experts, can expose our readers to diversified content, share traffic within the network, boost online authority, and attract new users without having a million customer avatars in play at any given minute.

The END GAME Is

While the first focus is on the MMO blog called Income Legion, and the AI-powered tools blog so we can grow our Wealthy Affiliate referrals and build rapid residual income, the mission also involves helping a small group build out their own powerful leveraging system and maybe co-authoring a book on organic traffic within 5 years.

I don't ever think in terms of me, I think we and right now I need a inner circle that forwards good thought, and healthy relationships. I have too many toxic people in my close proximity who think I can't and we can't and basically need new best friends. As Jim Rohn said, "You are the sum of the 5 people closest to you". My goal is to get closer to 4 people to complete my 5 which includes my loving wife who has been here for every triumph and struggle for nearly 25 years.

WARNING LABEL

While I am killing off the social anxiety I still have many bad habits from the Bi-polar and other bad health like the before mentioned Neuropathy that can take me away sometimes a day, sometimes a few days. I am some days less focused and less productive and I occasionally miss deadlines for it.

I also warn you that on my increasing number of good days I will out work you 10 to 1 as I will never accept less than my best. I also bring a wealth of knowledge and even if I am rusty on applying what I learn I still learn massive amounts of new stuff daily.

My main distraction for the next year will be a focus on being a top contributor here at Wealthy Affiliate, because of this need to take so many along on the journey. I know the real power in the new points driven system coming with the new UX is not the cash at stake but the reputations you can build, good or bad. Mine will be exemplary.

Thanks if you made it through all this,

Andy Anderson

11 year WA Member and 21 year affiliate marketer.