My path to internet success

Here's my story, I hope it's not too boring, and not worthy of any tl;dr.

I'm a 26 year old college graduate with a degree in Communication Studies. I graduated early, at the age of 21, and immediately landed a job at a prominent commercial insurance brokerage. The money was decent- but I hated doing it. I was however grateful to even have a job while many of my peers struggled to find work. I never was quite comfortable working a 9-5 job (which actually ended up being more like a 9-7) but unlike the majority of people in this world I became willing to do something about it.

Growing up I had always loved the internet, messing around with basic html websites on my parents Windows 3.1 computer. I remember my favorite piece of code was <blink>Hello!</blink>. Since my ultimate goal was to try to find a way to work for myself, but I didn't have a large start up capital to start my own official business, 6 months into my insurance job I started looking into legitimate methods to make money online.

Around the same time a close friend was starting a small local business and was looking into hiring a web design and SEO firm (I didn't even know what SEO was at the time). I told him forget it, I would design him a site and do whatever this so called "SEO" was. I had no idea what I was getting myself into!

I spent that entire weekend reading everything I could about current web design trends and learning as much about SEO as I possibly could from simply "reading", which I would find out in the future only goes so far compared to true experience. I found out Wordpress seemed to be the most user friendly platform so I delved into it, learned some lines of code to manipulate a theme to my liking and created his website within 24 hours. Granted, it wasn't amazing, but it was a website nonetheless and it was decent.

I was lucky that he had owned his domain for a couple years and from what I had read "aged domains" were much easier to link build for. I spent about $300 in various SEO software tools for keyword research and other bare essentials.

Within a matter of 2 months I got my first call my friend telling me he had just landed a new client from his website. I was shocked, surprised, and exhilarated. Soon he started landing multiple clients a week from his site and my hard work had paid off.

What did I do for his site? A. I wrote a ton of great unique content- granted this was almost 4 years ago but that holds true today even more than ever.

Time WARP wooooosh Flash forward to today.

I now run a small SEO and web design firm, with one employee. I work less than 25 hours a week, and I am my own boss.

I build about two websites a month for clients, and average about 8 or 9 monthly SEO clients paying between $400-$2500 a month.

I own about 40 domains of my own, with about 30 of them ranking 3rd or higher for their keyword. These sites are 80 percent amazon affiliate and 20 percent Adsense. They don't rake in tons of cash but each site makes between $3-$40 a day. It's nice supplemental income with minimal effort.

NOTE: I am not sharing any of this to brag. I do not think I am better than anyone else. I know there are TONS and TONS of members on this forum who have had much greater success and know much more about internet marketing, SEO, and web design than I do. And for those wondering, I quit my insurance gig 3 years ago this September

I just wanted to share this to communicate with anyone frustrated or unhappy with their current job situation that if you continue to constantly learn, better yourself, and work hard, you can achieve whatever goals you have in mind. Just always keep an open mind, stay teachable, and stay focused. Don't take shortcuts and the results will come, in time. It's a quick road for some and a long journey for others. Just don't give up hope.

To your success,
Ashera