Many months of work later, things are starting to come together in interesting ways

bysangemaru

717 followers

Updated 9 years ago

I first started getting a taste of the world of an Internet Marketer somewhere around last year (Pretty close to this time of the year, too).

At the time it was all a fascinating world of discovery and learning, and hope that if I just put some time and energy into the fascinating world of the Internet, I'd get a magic pill solution to my financial and personal-life issues, and everything would be fine and dandy.

That's not quite how things work out, I think to myself now, but they also come together in unexpected ways one could not have foreseen. To exemplify, I started www.thespiritualawakening.net around this time last year, and have poured weeks of study and effort into it, but the hardest thing for me to realize was that there was a hard limit I could not push through, not because I lacked creativity or drive, per-se, but because my own personal affinities and values simply don't match up in that space.

The hardest thing for me was to realize and accept that, while that website may one day represent me in a personal way, and it helped me learn a lot about myself, not only was it not going to become a magical solution to my issues, but a lot of the things I wanted to express are maybe still ahead of me. That while I am learning, and I do have a lot of valuable things to share with others, it would be highly hypocritical of me to share parts of myself as supreme wisdom while I myself am still coming to terms with lots of things.

Somewhere along those months of work I realized a close friend which had been working in the niche of entertainment, computers, and gaming, was a perfect fit for some parts which were lacking in myself, and here I refer to a certain kind of passion and relentless drive, the kind of drive you see behind niche authorities, some YouTubers, and so on.

The kind of drive that actually CAN deliver mountains upon mountains of quality content while I would struggle to put out one piece per week.

And I realized that we have strengths and weaknesses. Where he had this amazing drive for creation, he had and still has, a piss-poor understanding of the scope and scale of things, which had kept him stuck in a position where he could not express his drive freely, could not even put his own name on his own work, being dependent on others for the resources he needed to continue feeding his drive.

Out of this interaction, a new project was born.

In virtually no time at all (and so far on an entirely voluntary basis, since we've yet to hit the money) a team of 5 people was born, with myself as webmaster and 4 content creators, men with years of experience in their niche and the selfless desire for self-expression.

It's beautiful, inspiring and humbling to be a part of something that spins around yourself, part of yourself, putting together pieces where you didn't even realize they were missing, and showing you the responsibility you bear to those people and their own dreams, once decided on this path.

It's this kind of thing that gets me working for days on end without even feeling the drain.

And while maybe it's not growing as fast as I'd have liked or dreamed, I'm not surprised, since I'm entirely unsatisfied with the aesthetics and functionality of it and want to keep improving it relentlessly. But apparently Google thinks it's good enough for AdSense, so as of today www.ruggedgamers.com is ready to start building on the parts of itself it needs to grow.

The affiliate contracts with players in the niche come next, along with the redesigned layout, the subscription services, the YouTube community (which is also on its way - some of my unexpected and impromptu teammates are long-standing YouTube personalities - http://youtube.com/c/ruggedgamershome).

I can barely keep track of this fast-growing beautiful creature of code and structured markup languages, and I find myself growing naturally more organized in response to it. Lazy habits vanish due to incompatibility, the hundreds of open browser tabs and unfocused attention get compressed to one to three windows, filled with essentials.

A long unorganized toolbar of stuff gives way to neatly structured folders. What else? The Twitter community is starting to grow (twitter.com/ruggedgamers), the LinkedIn showcase page is garnering reshares (https://www.linkedin.com/company/rugged-gamers?trk...), the facebook page is slow and steady (https://www.facebook.com/rugged.game.reviews). Maybe 30-50 views/day, at this point, but we're growing.

Did I forget anything? Oh yea, Google+... I'm going to make a joke and say nobody's using G+, but I'd be lying. It has around 3000 views (https://plus.google.com/+RuggedgamersHome/posts).

A large part of this road so far has been made possible by Kyle, Carson, and the whole of the WA community. I hope we can keep at it quick and strong - ourselves and yourselves.

Success breeds success, exponentially, and I see the road ahead for WA being defined by the successes of it's members. I might be a bit premature, since success is also measured by cold, hard dollars, but the more time passes the closer I feel to that, and I realize I didn't start this for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in income (though it would be nice to cover all the bare necessities through it, at least).

Maybe one day Kyle and Carson will have built the platform that overtakes Facebook and Google, not through search, not through social, but through entrepreneurship, self discovery, self-empowerment in the digital age. I hope to see something like that.

So yeah, give my work a look-over if you feel like it, and if you do like it, we'd appreciate your comments, suggestions and re-shares. That's one thing we all know we all need.

If you don't like it, that's ok too.

Bless you.