Since there is a blog here and I already stuffed my "Interests" box full of banners, I think an introductory post is warranted!

Where to start..... ok let's start way back, many years ago in a time before Shopify, a time when Amazon was just starting to blossom into the behemoth that it is today, a time when eBay was king. (Not sure if eBay was really the king, but it sounds good, right?) There was Store's Online.

It was 2007, possibly 2008, my wife and I went to a seminar at a not-cheap hotel in Denver, Colorado. You know what I'm talking about... silky white tablecloths with lacy edges, polished to a mirror finish silverware, and a 5-course meal. Yeah, it was one of the best meals my 24-year-old self had ever had.

The food came out on rolling carts by the kitchen staff wearing those fancy white chef outfits with all the buttons on them. The first speaker got up and introduced himself and got things started.

My intention in going to this event was to get a free meal and not to buy anything. I imagine that many people who attend similar events have exactly the same intent.

As I sat there eating an amazing meal, I started to hear words and phrases like "online income", "earn while you sleep", "sales", "global audience", "passive income", the list could be very long. Perhaps one of the most important words was "dropshipping". I think that was the one that really resonated and intrigued me more than any others at that time.

The more I listened, the more interested I became and at some point during the presentation the speaker showed us how to do a basic form of keyword research using just the Google search bar in order to find suppliers which we could then drop ship from. I don't think I really need to go into more detail, you know the story... you've attended at least one seminar or webinar.

By the end of this presentation, the audience, including me, was red hot excited! I and many others immediately signed up as soon as the presentation was over.

What we ended up purchasing was a 5 website package with hosting, support, and various other tools and resources to start an online dropshipping business. My wife was really the one who grabbed this thing by the horns and steered it in the right direction. She worked tirelessly to build our first website, found the drop shippers, and just made it work.

After a few months of work we finally had our first site up and running, gopoddytraining.com, (hey, we had 2 young toddlers that we were trying to poddy train and it was something we rapidly gained experience in!)

We actually made a handful of sales! I was totally blown away. But things in our lives changed, my wife struggled with some health issues, I was in the middle of a massive house remodel, (I bought the house for $35K, I'm sure you can imagine the condition it was in). It was becoming very difficult to manage everything because the income from our site was not consistent or large enough yet to cover the expenses to run the site, the remodel was consuming everything, and my job was a low-paying deadend. So we pulled the plug on the site to save ourselves from having to pay the expenses on it. I decided it was time for me to go back to Alaska where I could have a high-paying job and get the money I needed to finish the remodel.

I'm sharing this story because my drop shipping experience has never left me, I think about it often, and I think that was the seed that started all of my online income dreams.

Fast forward to 2016ish, I learned about affiliate marketing and shortly after about traffic exchanges, safelist mailers, solo ads, and everything else. That was enough to re-kindle my online income fire and I dove in without taking a breath first! I jumped onto Clickbank and started promoting everything, everywhere. I started a blog for one of the products I was promoting and actually made a handful of sales.

I did other things too, spammy, blackhat things like scrapping facebook, craigslist, and any other site with emails. I scrapped 10s of thousands of emails from sites and stuffed them into a free Mailchimp account, as many as my account would hold, and I blasted email after email. For anyone who didn't open the emails, I'd just delete them and load up replacements. Yeah, it was really bad. I actually feel terrible about it right now, writing this. But believe it or not, I actually made a few small sales from this! Craziness...

Once again, things in life changed, and I was putting in a lot of time and effort to keep my spammy email marketing campaign going, but I eventually pulled the plug on it and deleted all the emails and accounts.

Now fast forward to today. I am a business owner outside of the internet, a 1 man trucking company, and I do pretty well. However, the online income dream lingers and as I get older, the more I want to find another income stream that is more passive, and less physically demanding. The internet can provide those things and I am exploring different ways of earning.

My mindset about all of this is very different now. I'm interested in building relationships and trust. That's really where I should have started back in 2016.

That's my online marketing story! If you've read this far, thank you. I appreciate your attention and look forward to connecting with you here or elsewhere.

Josh Zyelinske