Down The Yellow Brick Road

I began affiliate marketing 15 years ago.  I graduated college with two degrees and spent 5 years in the social work and mental health industry.  I always knew I wanted a large family. I grew up an only child and was lonely most of the time.  I knew I wanted four children, I ended up with six. When I got married, we lived the American Dream.  Two careers, big house, two cars, a dog and a cat.  However, behind that facade, I hid a terrible secret. My husband was battling a drug addiction.  It began with him smoking marijuana to deal with anxiety, then pills.  After the loss of our third child to a rare liver disease his addiction grew and grew quickly. He battled it for a year, but then he began to get it under control, things were stable for a little while.

I left my job as a social worker and became a stay at home mom.  We got our foster care licence and began to foster abused children.  We adopted three girls.  The last little girl we adopted suffered from a massive and critical congenital heart defect.  She required round the clock care.  The first 6 months of her life she was in the hospital over 150 days.  100 of those days were consecutive.  We closed our foster licence and our family was complete.

The stress of her care brought out the best in me, however, it caused my husband to relapse.  His addiction came back in full force.  We were making $124,000 a year and we couldn't pay the mortgage or keep the electric on.  All of our money went to fuel his addiction.  .... and so my affiliate marketing career was born!!

I knew with five children to care for, under the age of 10, I couldn't work outside of the home.  I hate selling to family and friends,a brick and mortar business was too much of a start up and too time consuming, so affiliate marketing sounded like the right spot for me. 

When I began, I had no clue what I was doing, it brought in very little money and I had ZERO support from my (so called) support systems.  I continued part time, but with very little heart or motivation or dedication.  I began working for the government to bring in additional income.  Due to financial issues, we lost our home.  My daughter went into heart failure and underwent two more open heart surgeries, my husbands drug addiction became 10 fold and it began to take a physical toll on him.  One day when I was at work, my son called me and stated that my daughter's ventilator... (Yes, a machine that breathed for her..) was going off and he could't wake his dad up to put the tube back in her airway to make the alarms stop.  I said alarms,.. they were going off and he was so high that it did't wake him up.  I made the decision that day, that my children's safety was at risk and that he had to be given the ultimatum to go to rehab or leave.. when given the choice, he packed his bags and was gone in 3o minutes.. and he didn't go to rehab.  He walked out of our lives.

He stayed sporadically in my life and the kids lives for about 15 months after that.  He became addicted to heroin, became homeless and now it has been almost 7 years since we have seen him.  The care of my children was now 100% on me and myself alone.  I began working full time from home for the government, while still working part time online. Then came the big Paypal crash... so I made the decision... (poor decision) to leave affiliate marketing because I felt it was too time consuming to adjust and rebuild with a different payment processor.  

In those years, I've continued to work full time for the government. It was a work from home position, but it was just a job, there was no real passion or fulfillment involved.  Three years ago, I got re-married and we began to foster and rescue animals with our local humane society.  I decided to leave my job and we recently became an official non-profit rescue organization.  It can be a full time job, but it doesn't pay well, some months, not at all!  So I decided to come back to affiliate marketing in November 2018. Wow, has the whole scene changed!  It's like working an entirely new business than it was five years ago.  

While working on an intense rescue one day it hit me that the main problem with rescue work is finances.  People in rescue often forget that they have to reach an audience, captivate an audience to bring in funds and find homes for these animals that need a safe haven to call their own.  Finding an audience is the main bullet point of affiliate marketing as well.  So I am taking the tools I am learning at CTP and spreading the knowledge to the other parts of my life!