Mistakes-The Key to Mastery

byVarga

316 followers

9 years ago

Greetings fellow Wealthy Affiliates. I trust you are learning something every day. When I started WA a few months ago, I read the four points of how WA works and they sounded very easy to do. In fact I thought that in about a month I would be up and running. Choose an interest, build a web site, attract visitors and earn revenue. Easy peasy! Gong. A loud dissonant gong that indicates you have not answered correctly on the WA game show. Anything worthwhile is going to take some hard work and dedication, right?

Why did I call this post Mistakes-The Key to Mastery? Well, since I started with the training, everything I have learnt and still retain was because I made a boo boo, a blunder of some magnitude. There have been so many mistakes I cannot remember them all. When I first started niche research and purchasing domains, I over enthusiastically got a domain name. In fact several, based on a low competition key words. I bought standingdeskworkstation.com as one of many that I was convinced had a lot of merit. Now in hind sight, which is always 20/20 vision, I realize that it was too long and cumbersome. I did not thoroughly research my niche. It is still a good one, (standing desks) but I am not sure I would have committed to it if I had stayed in the research phase a little longer. I should have let it marinate as Jay would say.

Getting my parked domain out of Godaddy was a roller coaster ride, mainly downwards. The customer service left a lot to be desired but it prompted me to find out more. Now, I can release parked domains, transfer domains etc. I will be buying my next domain through Wealthy Affiliate.

One time I even lost my entire site. Gasp! Yes, I tried to change the php code in my title and not knowing enough about coding (basic html only) the whole site went down. I sat back in my chair and thought – all that work gone with the touch of a keystroke. Fortunately, WA support had me up and running the very next day.

Great Support All Round

This is another wonderful feature with WA. You can get prompt help when you need it. Support is awesome and at times I have needed to get through to the owners, Kyle or Carson and they have written back usually within 24 hours. I think that is pretty amazing for a company this size. I once tried for about two weeks to contact someone in Ebay about a dispute. Enough said. The community are so helpful and supportive. If I have a question I first type it into the search bar and then my question is usually answered within a few posts. The combined experience of the community is really shortening a steep learning curve for me.

Problems or Growth Opportunities?

Each stage is a major learning cycle. Just finding a plugin for reviews took quite a while and a lot of research. In the end I settled for the first one that I had read about in the WA forums. En route, I learnt an amazing amount about review plugins and plugins in general. I think that what I am trying to say is that WA is a journey. The sequence for me has been, I read the well laid out tutorial. A false security settles in. Aaah, I can do this, no sweat. I try something and bam! I hit a wall of some kind. Often the wall involves a tangent, and what looked so easy evolves into a hydra, complete with tentacles. It really is the small details that make the difference though and problems turn out to be the opportunity to grow. Research, try again, research, implement, learn some more. Then the sun comes out. A feeling of accomplishment and an understanding of what I just went through. Now it’s easy! Basking in the glow of accomplishment, I read the next module and the sequence plays out again.

When Stuck-Do Not Pass Go

Getting to grips with WordPress really put me through the mill. I come from a click and drop background so the many layers of WordPress had me initially totally baffled. I am by no means an expert, but now, I can do in half a minute something that used to take a couple of hours of guess work and experimentation. This spells progress.

When I am stuck, I read and absorb the next training module. The sequence is totally laid out so if I am wondering what to do next, I pour a cup of jasmine tea and start the next section of training. I marvel at how easy a lot of these tasks are once you really understand what you are doing. The caveat being, don’t break out the champagne just yet, there is always more to learn. Just when I feel I can congratulate myself is usually when the next lesson is waiting in the wings for me. The panic that can attend these episodes of confusion is practically gone. I realize there is something more to learn about the topic at hand and that there will be a resolution.

Anyway, my first three websites, standingdeskworkstation.com, structuredwaterhealthbenefits.com (is that url really that long?) and vargaworld.com are developing nicely. It can be daunting keeping up with the ceaseless flow of information but it is slowly crystalizing into something I can recognize as success. I have yet to make any money from the first two sites mentioned, but I am pretty certain that if it is possible, WA is the way to do it.

If I Only knew Back Then What I Know Now

I once had a yoga site through a company that charged a lot of money for the course and hosting etc. It was ok. I made some money from this site but if I had known just a fraction of what I have already learnt from WA it would have been a whole lot better.

Keep going, and of course making mistakes along the way, they really are the key to mastery.