There’s No Shortcut to Success

byjetrbby80316

5K followers

Updated 4 years ago

Ladies and Gents, this may sound like a cliché, but it’s worth airing.

There is no shortcut to success. It’s a grind.

You need to constantly learn and apply what you learn by taking action.

Learning is not enough. No way, not even close.

Learning is only your starting point.

Even if you have learned your theoretical lessons well, you need to take what you have learned in theory, and constantly put it to the test in the real world.

And almost always the first time – or the first 10 times.

Or in some cases, maybe even the first 100 times or more you will FAIL.

But failure is a good thing. It is a necessary thing.

However, mark my words: eventually, if you are smart enough, resourceful enough, and above all tenacious enough, you will succeed.

Sure, there are a very few who will get lucky right out of the gate. They will happen to be in the right place, at the right time, and just happen to have the right limited skill set to succeed upon a right rare opportunity presented to them.

Rarely do such successes last.

However; their flame dies down quickly, and then they have no base to draw from to repeat their success. Simply because their success was only luck, and had no basis for lasting – and now their luck ran out.

They are here today and gone tomorrow. Or in most cases even, later the same day.

Building a Solid Foundation Takes Time

The concept of success is fairly simple.

However, achieving real success, whether it be in affiliate marketing, setting up a successful money-making blog, creating a successful podcast or You Tube channel is not.

Building a solid foundation takes time.

After 3 ½ years in a new field, I am only now beginning to reap a relative amount of consistent success. Wealthy Affiliate has been a great training ground with an awesome community; however WA is only one of many different sources that I am constantly learning from.

Is My Path a Typical Road to Progress and Success?

As I’ve said here before, perhaps if I laser focused on only one aspect of marketing I could have achieved greater and faster success.

But this just was never me. Ultimately I am an artist / creator with many diverse interests. Always forever curious what’s “under the hood.”

I have to learn many different things related to what I plan to accomplish (and learn to do them well), and MASTER many different skills in other to be personally satisfied.

So it has taken me longer. We all find our own way.

That’s all that matters.

However, the road to your successes is seldom a linear path: it is a zig-zag path. For most of us, there will be MANY failures along the way, false-starts, and re-starts before you see even a trickle of success.

Here’s an example of my journey in Wealthy Affiliate from the time I began in March 1, 2017:

In 2017, I was completely new to online marketing. Unlike some of the members here who came in with prior online marketing or e-commerce experience as an advantage, I had ZERO prior experience; my background was in music as a pro musician and band leader, and due to a debilitating injury, had to change my career path.

However I was eager to learn online marketing and knew I could do it. I was always a decent writer and fairly articulate, and I knew (at least) I could apply those skills to the new marketing skills I’d be learning. And I was determined to learn and apply.

My First WA Year: 2017

March – April 2017: Right out of the gate, I signed up as a WA Premium member. I didn’t even try the free membership, I DOVE RIGHT IN. Immediately, I asked lots of questions. I would go on other member’s blog posts (often high ranking members), and respond to as many comments as possible.

I will admit, (and some of you may remember!), I would often write comments as long as novellas. Simply by responding and receiving I learned a ton of new stuff from the “veterans.” For whatever reason, a few took a liking to me. This is something I recommend for any “newbie”.

Honestly, I did not immerse myself in the OEC training from the start as well as I should have. It was more like, finish 2 modules, then take a week off, do another, take a week off. But I quickly realized who were the members with the “real knowledge” and reached out to them via PM. In doing just this alone, and conducting backup research on Google I was able to learn so much.

I didn’t write my first WA blog post until almost one month later on March 30, 2017.

But boy, did I make up for that. By the start my 3rdmonth on June 1, I reached WA Ambassador. However, despite all the activity and writing on WA, I was still way behind on the OEC training compared to my activity.

Does any of this sound familiar?

By the end August 2017, I was still an Ambassador going on 125 days. However, I would soon receive my due comeuppance. On September 17, I wrote a “political post” (I honestly didn’t think it was at all “political” when I wrote it) – it was my 70th post on WA - and was hit with a write-ban that lasted exactly one month. A strong lesson learned.

Others shared my fate, some were even Ambassadors at the time. Many I knew who were scorned and felt cheated simply quit Wealthy Affiliate, and walked away. I considered it during my time away, but I didn’t. That tuned out to be the first great decision.

Even when my write-ban was lifted on October 17, I wrote 8 additional posts on WA, but I had little motivation. Without a premeditated intent, I stopped writing on WA, and became less active. I didn’t write another post until January 31, 2018.

Looking back, this inactive period during my one month write-ban and my later self-imposed time off the platform (even after the write-ban was lifted) was a GREAT time of learning and initial experimentation in the online business world. . I was able to re-focus (without distractions) and complete all 50 lessons (5 modules @ 10 lessons each) of the OEC.

The best thing was in September 2017 as a total e-commerce newbie, we started our own Shopify store. There were some great days where we’d make as many as 15 sales.

In addition, I was able to conduct my own daily experiments and develop what later became my own website evergreen speed training Turbo Charge Your Site Speed, which is still being commented on today.

The Years: 2018 - 2019

These were 2 years of the MOST activity on WA; once I got my engines started I couldn’t stop myself.

It was not only a time of my most prolific writing on (and off) the platform, it was a time of great experimentation, application, risk-taking, and emerging opportunities.

During 2018, I learned to build robust WordPress websites, I was hired to build the website for a 9/11 film (which later got shelved), I worked on and learned crowdfunding for an independent award-winning film “The Lost Village” which was shown in a famous theater in NYC for 11 consecutive days, and assisted my partner who is a social media strategist during her live seminars, both for her independent workshops and for SCORE in NYC.

In 2019, I spent the first 2 months building my responsive and conversion-optimized affiliate marketing website. This was a big improvement to the other past websites I’d built, because I knew it would be my workhorse. That website is still currently active.

From late March through November, I wrote and published 145 posts on that website comprised of reviews and online marketing topics, containing a total of 230,000+ words. I learned to create an opt-in form and a sales funnel. And yes, I made some sales too. While doing this, I was still writing an average of 3-4 posts per week on WA.

I remained the #4 ranked ambassador here for 7 straight months plus during 2018, and kept both writing on WA and my website. To to this day I've writen my 507th post, and by simply staying active and engaged in the community, I've been an ambassador for 738 days.

Then one day at the end of November, I became bored of writing on my website and stopped cold.

I decided to switch my focus to You Tube.

This Year 2020

Learning how to create informative and engaging You Tube videos was a natural place for me to end up, as I have always been a content creator. My musical and entertainment background was a natural fit for You Tube.

Although I’d previously “dabbled” in You Tube and had a few other channels, this time I was hell-bent to create a successful channel where my content could be leveraged. That is happening right now, as I am building up a strong fan-base by consistently creating one new video every week that I upload on You Tube.

However in 2020, quite unexpectedly I finally found my TRUE place, an exciting space that fuses my innate love of creating, with a successful money-making marketing business model: podcasting.

Podcasting is the new blogging. It is trending and now with only 1 million podcasts (compared to 500,000+ blogs), podcasting is simply the most exciting place to be in all of media.

Evidence of this is that long-time music streaming leader Spotify, only a few months ago signed The Joe Rogan Show to a record-breaking $100,000,000 exclusivity deal. Clearly, Spotify is aimimg to take down Apple Podcasts (who currently own 62% of the podcast market) as the Leader in all podcast media.

Now I am the joint owner, and executive producer for a growing podcast that has a flow of amazing upside opportunities coming our way. We are also producing a 2nd podcast for entrepreneurs who do “Ted Talks”.

Perhaps the most AMAZING and exciting thing is, we have been recently sponsored.

And there are now plans (and an even greater opportunity) of taking our podcast to many other different countries, and translating it into different languages.

This Monday, we will be publishing our 90th episode, but we are only just getting started!

What Does Every Period I Share Have in Common?

For me, my happiness all comes down to one word:

Progress.

And do what you LOVE.

This is the #1 recent proven fact based on well-vetted studies by the top behavioral psychologists who studied business leaders, and average people.

Progress is the only thing that makes us happy.

Personally I can tell you, of all the things I’ve done, it is NOT any amount of money I make (although that is nice too, I won’t lie) that makes me the most happy, it is progress.

Even the smallest amount of progress, as long as its forward.

This is the story of my life, and growing career as a marketer and an artist.

And I hope (and expect) that my progress and happiness will continue for many years to come.

So far, knock on wood!

Cheers,

Kaju