Gratitude for the Journey!

Hello friends and fellow WA members!

Thought I'd share the header picture of an awesome cloud I came across while hiking, which to me looks like a multi-coloured flying bird.

It's a reminder that you can't control EVERYTHING in life, and that there's beauty in allowing things to just roll.

So the time has come for me to share some of my journey with this awesome community and hopefully help others along the way.

I joined WA 6 years ago as an excited newbie who felt SURE that everything would just click into place. I worked hard and learned a huge amount of stuff.

Never ending, right? Exciting!

I gave it my all - or so I thought.

In reality I was giving my all to 1 piece of a 100-piece jigsaw! Because I could only see one tiny little piece of the puzzle.

Well, the good (or maybe the bad) news is, unless you uncover all the pieces of the jigsaw and get most of them covered, you're not going to get the progress you need.

I guess I was wearing blinkers and chose not to see the other 99 pieces lol. I should add that I am, erhm, quite a STUBBORN learner. Which can make the process MUCH longer lol!
But hang on, that doesn't actually matter because this is just MY timeline, nobody else's. Other people move through the process at wa WAY faster than I have.

But my speed was what I NEEDED in order to get to the true BEGINNING, which is NOW.
At the START (6 years ago) I built 2 websites and worked through the training, excited, dedicated, motivated. But my MMO / WA promotion site seemed FAKE to me, because I was writing about things at the same time as learning them. How could I stand up as an expert when everything, and I mean EVERYTHING was new to me?
So I scrapped that one pretty quick. (Thank goodness!)
The other one I scrapped soon after, and I started my 'real' site 4 years ago. I started out with affiliate links but I wasn't getting enough traffic and it felt spammy so I got rid of them too.

I decided that I wanted to build up a stream of traffic before worrying about monetising the site, so I just installed Google Adsense - so that I could have some fun checking in and seeing 0.01 cent being added to the sum total, hahahaha - oh I do still enjoy it lol!

At this point, I didn't know where to find help. Yes, I hear you as you gasp, shocked that someone on WA couldn't find help. But tbh I just had too much ignorance and I didn't know how to integrate here.

I already asked too many questions (I thought) and always had kind & helpful answers. Thank you to all of you who have hopped on to answer my questions and help me out.

But I felt I couldn't ask EVERY question that I had. And another thing, I was only ever asking questions, never giving back. I didn't feel I had anything TO give back. (Obviously not true as we can all share our journey.)

I felt I needed another course, to take me to the next level. But I didn't find one.So what did I do?I procrastinated!

Yes! I can finally add this glowing gemstone to my crown!

I used to think, me? procrastinate? No way! But it's TRUE, I became a PRO at procrastination. I wasn't going to give up and didn't know how to proceed, so what else could I do? hahahaha.If anyone wants any tips on how to procrastinate like a pro, I'm sure I could share a few!

FAST FORWARD TO TODAY

They say when the student is ready the teacher will appear and that's the case!
I posted yet another question and Prince Partha ( @ParthaB ) came to the rescue in his absolutely generous and giving way. He went the extra mile and took a look at my site. It had the worst speed test he'd ever seen lol.

Need I say more? If you haven't come across Prince Partha, you should get yourself over there right now and start reading his blogs.

I still have a ton of his blogs to read and apply to my site and I feel as though I've just been handed the other 99 pieces of the puzzle. Now it's just left to put them together and we'll have lift-off!

I hope this helps some of our newer members get an insight into one variation on the possible path (just my variation lol). And to know that you should never give up. You can stop doing something because you've found a better, more efficient or inspiring way to do it. You can change what you do for something else, but NEVER just give up.
If you haven't given up, you haven't failed.

I'm confident now that I will progress with this. I've come out of hibernation and am going to give it all I've got (for real this time).

I will share more here too. The time has come to open up!
Wishing you all an awesome day and much success!

Soraya :-)