My Journey Towards Online Wealth and Success

Last Updated: August 23, 2022

No “make-money and success site” would be complete without the person behind it telling you their personal “This is how I did it!” story, right? (please note a touch of sarcasm in that sentence you just read!)  And what better time to publish such a story than on The Ides of March, ha, ha - oh the irony of it all!  So, here it goes........
 
Many dreams begin in childhood or early adulthood, and, like many dreams, it all began in college for me.  You see, by that point in time (2002-2005) the Internet was really wrapping up its own “Childhood 1.0 Phase” and starting to enter Internet Adolescence.  The online environment was becoming more and more “real” with each passing month and each passing year.  “Real life” happened online – the early novelty of the Internet was very, very quickly dying.  The “I light up when I detect a WiFi Hotspot” hoodie was a flash-in-the-pan real thing that I remember well at this point in history (I almost bought one for myself, but never did, as I actually didn’t even start using WiFi myself until many years later when it finally became too mainstream and widespread to avoid)!

Companies were starting to (very, very quickly) transition from just having websites that looked like traditional hardcopy catalogues online that required you to print out an order form and send in a check or money order (or cash, but that was never advised!) to order to platforms that accepted orders...drum roll, please...directly online through the website itself with credit/debit cards and PayPal (which came out right around this era)!  Within just a few short years after this era you could hardly find any place at all that would accept a check or money order via "old-school hardcopy snail mail" for an Internet order anymore!

If I recall correctly, Bitcoin came out sometime around this era as well – give or take a few years.  Everyone laughed at it except for the most die-hard hardcore geeks of geeks.

Bezos had “happened” several years prior, but now it was no longer just the “heavy hitters” raking in the profits online!  Us “mere mortals” living in the shadow of Mount Olympus were doing so as well!  More and more Internet millionaires were being made with each passing year!

Opportunity was overflowing on the “Wild West of the Web” as she was quickly being tamed.   The whole point is, this was the epoch the Internet was in at the time when my dream to get rich online started.
 
The problem was, I just wasn’t ready as a person yet to take on the Web.  First and foremost, I could never focus on any one thing long enough.  I had a serious case of Look!  A Unicorn! Syndrome for years – suffering from this disease for well over a decade (let's be honest, close to three and a half decades, actually [facepalm]!)!  As literally everything moved from the brick-and-mortar world onto the online world, the overflowing opportunity was just too overwhelming; too much for me to take in.  I read and researched voraciously, jumping from here to there.  Always on the look-out for the next greatest thing.  The thing is, “the next greatest thing” was always coming out so fast – week after week the Internet changed.  I would read, research, and just when I felt almost ready to jump in with something, there would be 10 other things waiting for me, promising me riches and wealth like no tomorrow; so, I would drop everything and move on to those 10 new things – just to have 20 newer, “cooler” things hit me like a ton of bricks in another few days to a week.  Of course, with a “shooting buckshot from the hip” mentality as such and absolutely no solid foundation in any of it at all, I was never really able to implement any system or program with any kind of sustained focus to make it worthwhile.
 
As a quick aside, I don’t consider the above to have been all bad.  After 30+ years of closely and avidly following where and how money moves on the Internet, I now feel all that much more prepared to do what I do now with confidence – run money-making websites and live to tell about it :)!  It just took a really long time to get there!
 
My Unicorn Syndrome affliction was definitely the most detrimental factor that kept me from succeeding online for so many years, coupled with the fact that I never had a solid physical foundation for any of my dreams to grow in (we'll get to that); however, like I say, closely and eagerly following the trends of the Net with no real major financial stake in them wasn’t such a bad thing in the long run, when viewed in the light of it being 30 years of careful research, and, furthermore, just because that held the place of “Number 1”, it wasn’t the only factor holding me back.

Another huge factor that held me back in my young adult days was not having the necessary stability and foundation in my life in general to really, truly be able to unfurl a program and take the time to really let it start firing on all cylinders even if I had really wanted to and had a true opportunity to.  I remember the first paycheck I ever received from “the Internet” was when I was working in construction and living with my cousin in San Rafael, California, in the Spring of 2008.  It was about two or three weeks after I had signed up with peoplesearch.com to have a cookie-cutter money-making people search website “made” for me to start “really raking in the profits from the hottest trend of searching for people online”.  Yes, laugh all you want.  I was even skeptical (but eager to dive in nonetheless) at the time.......but it worked!  Two or three weeks after signing up (and doing nothing) I received a check for US$24.00 in the mail.......or, at least, I supposedly did.  My account dashboard said the check had been sent, but literally right at that moment (within a day of seeing that the funds had been sent on my client portal online in my account) some very serious family matters cropped up in my cousin’s life, and we had to move out of that house.  I very quickly got a new job out of the country teaching 6th Grade Science, and that first school year at the new job consumed absolutely every minute of my free time like it would for most anyone.  I was more or less forced to abandon my relationship with peoplesearch.com and that check for US$24.00 probably just sat in the mailbox in San Rafael until another tenant moved into that apartment and tore it up along with a pile of junk mail, no doubt.  WARNING！ DISCLAIMER FOR IDIOTS ALERT!  Just for the record so everyone is clear, I have no idea if this aforementioned program with peoplesearch.com still exists, these events I am writing about happened in the Spring of 2008.
 
Over the course of my 20s and early 30s, various other drastic personal and professional changes in my life akin to the peoplesearch.com example mentioned above tore me this way and that way so quickly that I never really had the chance to hunker down and really, truly devote the consistent and persistent energy needed to build and grow an online business or money-making gig or venture of any kind.  Changing jobs and needing to re-establish myself in a new professional environment, moving to other countries and needing to re-establish myself in a new locale within a new culture, quitting my job for two full years to go to Graduate School and complete a Master’s Degree, rocky and damaging romantic relationships (these – particularly one – sucked huge amounts of energy away from my Internet pursuits), having kids – oh yeah, this one was a BIGGIE – all contributed to choppy and inconsistent work on my blogs and websites, with many breaks – sometimes very large of years at a time – in between.  Inconsistency does NOT build lasting effective systems!
 
Oh yeah, and the final point I should mention is the haters and the “supporters” who were more inconsistent and/or clueless than I was.  We all know about them.  Some people are blessed to know – or be able to seek out and find in a natural way – other like-minded people who share their own passion for Internet wealth and are actually into doing it.  I, unfortunately, have never been one of those people.  The very few people I have meet who were also into the idea of Internet wealth creation, were never able to even get their own ideas off the ground, much less support someone else’s ideas, even in spirit.  All talk and no real "A-Game;" all smoke and mirrors, if you will.  And the vast, overwhelming majority of people in my life, including those closest to me, have mostly been, well, let’s just say, they always said that making money on the Internet was a bunch of hooie, and never really supported my “head in the clouds” ideas to get rich from the Net.  “Get your head out of the clouds,” was what many of them said.  "Oh, that would be nice if you could actually get it to work, now what kind of job do you really want?" were some of the nicer comments I would get.
 
Suffice it to say, it has taken me a really, really long time to 1) know what I should be doing, 2) be at a stable enough place in life to follow through with it, and 3) start doing it and gain enough momentum to actually bring my efforts of running money-making websites to a “tipping point” of fruition in my favor despite less than desirable external supports.  These less than desirable external supports and my early on naïveté and general level of cluelessness at the beginning of my journey towards making money online were the reasons it has taken me so long to arrive at the level of success I am experiencing today - but it's all part of the journey; and, in general, a beautiful journey it has been!  And the journey continues!

Better life, better business, better you,

-Andreas

Andreas Philip Gross Enterprises
Ideas, Inspiration, Opportunity
 
Washington State Certified K-8 Educator, K-12 International Education Consultant, Professional Coach, Proofreader/Editor, Affiliate Marketer, Popsicle Stick Crafter, Print-on-Demand Products Designer, and Webmaster

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