WinterPerkins.com

Winter Perkins In A Nutshell

“Help! I’m in a nutshell. How did I get into this nutshell? Look at the size of this bloody big nutshell.”

Ok… seriously, I’m stubborn, sometimes to a fault. It has served me poorly and well depending on the situation at hand. I love a challenge, and I HAVE to learn something new every day! I just love learning; you can never know enough. I seem to have a facination with learning lessons the hard way. It’s not one of my better qualities, but you better believe that knowledge sticks!

I’ve had a lot of help along my road to success, along with a lot of personal failures. I’m more than grateful to be able to extend what I’ve learned to others, so hopefully they can avoid the same mistakes and pitfalls. I love my job, I love it more every day. I wouldn’t trade where I’ve been, what I’ve learned, or even how I’ve learned it for the world. I’ve worked with and for some of the biggest names in the Traffic Exchange/ Internet Marketing industry, and I couldn’t be prouder!

The longer, more fun-filled version of my Virtal Journey

I am a full-time Work At Home Mom (mother of 2), and I have a beautiful family. They are the reason I work so hard and will never settle for less than success. They have been beyond patient and supportive in my quest to earn an income online. It has been a long,  sometimes very stressful journey, and they have been my inspiration every step of the way. I love you guys, and could never express my gratitude in words!

One of my first experiences in web design, came to me in the way of good old Yahoo Spades! My friend and I created our own Yahoo Spades League, thus were in charge of creating the tournament pages. I Googled the heck out of HTML tags, and my love for webpage design was born.

I spent a lot of time in Yahoo related services, and eventually found Yahoo Tag Groups. Yahoo Tag Groups are simply a group of people, creating and offering free signature tags to the rest of the members. These are the sparkly, shiney, eye catching images used in signature tags found in forums, and at the time, highly used in… Incredimail oh yeah! Again, Google was my best friend; I spent hours in online tutorials learning how to create graphics in Corel Paint Sho Pro (blech!). I fell in love with the process of creating graphics, learning new styles, new effects… I was hooked!

It was about this time (2003) that I decided to get my GED and go to college. I didn’t graduate high school because I had a tiny issue with authority and being made to follow rules. I like to think that maybe I’ve just always been a free spirit, can’t hold me down, I’m following my own path! That makes me feel better at least. My college didn’t offer a Graphic or Website Design degree, so I settled on Computer Information Systems as my major, with minors in Business and Sociology.

In the little spare time that I had while attending classes, I discovered Paid To Click & Read websites. You mean I can earn money for just reading ads?! Oh mama, I was a PTC/PTR junkie. I even wasted some time and fell for the “$100 per email” scam. Hard Lesson #1 learned: If it’s too good to be true… it is.

PTC sites can make you money, but very little amounts of money. I decided to make any real money online, I had to stop clicking, and own PTC/PTR sites of my own. That must be where the real money is, right? Well… sort of. I made significantly more as an owner, but it still wasn’t enough to pay bills or feed my family. Because I already knew a little bit about designing websites and graphics, I decided to design my sites on my own. It was a difficult job, but such a fun experience!

As my PTC/PTR sites became more popular, I got more and more emails asking me who designed my sites. Of course when I said “I designed them myself,” the emails changed from “Who designed your sites,” to “How much would you charge to do mine?” Lightbulb! I was so excited! You mean I can do something that I love, AND make money doing it? Game on!

I bought my own domain name, designsbywinter.info (no longer on the web), and put up examples of graphics I had created. I charged $50 for an entire PTC/PTR design, and $3 for a banner design. You talk about a lot of work for $50, but I loved it!

I was extremely active in the PTC/PTR Admin community, and my design orders skyrocketed.  Understatement of the year alert: I had a very hard time juggling family, school, and design. Up to that point, even though I made small amounts of money for it, design was still just a hobby, a small side income. I continued to Google my tail off, continued to work through tutorials to learn more about graphic and website design. I also used this time to teach myself Adobe Dreamweaver & Photoshop.

I failed miserably at keeping everything in balance. I got more design orders than I could handle and still focus on school. I came to a very important crossroads, and a decision HAD to be made. The choices: A) close Designs By Winter so that I could focus 100% on school and finish out my degrees, or B) quit school and jump into my business head first with both feet, no turning back. I struggled with this decision for months. It’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make, because no matter what I chose, it would affect my life from that point on. I chose my passion, my business, my designs.

I do NOT recommend this to anyone. It worked itself out in my favor eventually, but it was a HARD and often disappointing road. Getting myself to a stable monthly income that could support my family’s needs was more of a struggle than you can imagine. I wouldn’t trade my experiences if I could, but it’s been a rocky road! Hard Lesson #2 learned: Have a plan, and have a backup plan for your plan, and a backup plan for your backup plan!

I found myself managing 4 websites, my business site for designs, 2 PTC sites and 1 PTR site. I had some great web hosts, I had some HORRIBLE web hosts. There’s nothing more frustrating than not being in control of your website uptime. By that time, my business partner and I had HAD IT! I was tired of scammy, scummy, unreliable web hosts, and knew PTC owners needed a more secure, reliable choice for hosting. We made a huge decision and went into the hosting business for ourselves. I vowed that never again would someone else be responsible for keeping my website online and functioning… and from that frustration, Seamless Web Solutions was born! Hard Lesson #3 learned: Do your research before you choose a web host. They hold your website in their virutal palm. You better be sure they can keep your site online, and help when you need it right away!

The birth of SWS introduced me to a whole new crowd of online earners, the Traffic Exchange owners, the Internet and Affiliate Marketers. What an exciting bunch! I quickly developed a new obsession… promoting sites in Traffic Exchanges. I advertised everything: splash pages for other TE’s, DBW, SWS, default Affiliate Landing pages for random programs… mostly junk. I surfed hours on end daily to send traffic to all my junk. Needless to say, it didn’t pay off much. Hard Lesson #4 learned: Just because you work hard does not guarantee you success. You have be working hard doing the RIGHT things!

My newfound friends in the TE world saw me struggling, and offered endless advice. I took them up on their suggestions to attend Affiliate Funnel conferences. I figured “Hey I can go network and be seen!” I did meet some wonderful new people, but something happened that I didn’t expect. I learned!! Oh yeah, I learned that I’ve been going about things the wrong way, advertising the wrong things, great! All that hard work down the drain. BUT, it did light a fire under my butt to start doing things the right way, promoting myself first, building myself as a brand. I can’t thank everyone enough at Affiliate Funnel for their neverending patience and knowledge. Without Affiliate Funnel, I’d probably still be working hard promoting someone else and their programs. Now the ONLY pages I rotate are my own personal squeeze pages…. period, no if’s and’s or but’s!

So here I am virtual world! Today is better than yesterday, yesterday was better than the day before. It’s been a wonderful, crazy, heartbreaking, frustrating, one of a kind experience… an amazing journey! This blog you’re sitting on was bred from my desire to see everyone find the same success I have, with hopefully smoother sailing. If I can help to make that happen, you bet I’m glad to do it!

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