Don’t get me wrong, I’m a ridiculously hard worker.  I just prefer to get 100% of the benefit from my efforts!

When I worked for others, if I tried to do anything to make things run more smoothly I usually got in trouble for it.

Try to be helpful, and someone would stab you in the back while smiling at you.

Work harder than ever in the hopes of a raise, and get told it’s not in the budget.

But making money online was nowhere near as easy as it sounded.  And all those ebooks and courses promised an endless stream of riches while seeming to do no ‘work’ at all!

Well I’m here today to tell you – it doesn’t work that way.  Like the inventor who earns millions from passive royalties, there is usually a mountain of previous effort, disappointment and struggle to get there, that you don’t hear about.

It took me about 3 years of working full time at this “online stuff” before I could actually consider myself to be earning an income online.  But those 3 years taught me things I couldn’t have learned any other way.

I was contacted by a pair of “underground” marketers who had made huge amounts of money, but they weren’t really technical and they needed someone who understood that side of things, to help them out.  Needless to say, I was more than happy to do so!

That’s how it all started with me.  First I helped others, and in very short order it came back to me in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.

I learned a tremendous amount from those guys (one of whom I’m still in touch with to to this day) just by taking their wild ideas and figuring out how to turn them into reality.

I went on to unravel some of the mysteries of earning an income as an affiliate marketer, and released my first real software product to the members of another forum (where I was again the top poster and still am) where I could see they desperately needed it.

And over the years I’ve found again and again that the part of my business I get the most satisfaction from, is the one with the least “sex appeal” and the most time and energy required.

What if I created a community for online marketers that was so amazing, people would gladly pay to belong to it and never want to leave?

It sounded like such a cool idea!  But every time I would consider it, I’d get a good look at what I was getting myself into.

There’s no way I could do something like this the way I would want to do it, because I would never get my own campaigns done.  If I was going to do this, I would have to choose it as the absolute primary focus of my entire business.

And so I didn’t move forward on it.  But I couldn’t stop thinking about this community idea.  It just wouldn’t leave me alone.

I’ve learned over the years (and am still learning) to listen to the “little voices” that won’t stop nagging me at times.  When an idea just will NOT leave me alone, there’s a reason.

And so early in 2011, I decided to put this community back on the table and REALLY look at it.  What would it take to do it right?

It again was immediately apparent that I would have to drop the affiliate side of my business if I was going to do this.  I don’t have the time or energy to do both of these things well, and I won’t accept doing this community half-assed.