Here at Art Infliction, we run into the rare instances of having so many blog entries to the point that we run out of pages that can house any blog entry, with the week of May 18, 2020 through May 24, 2020 being such a week.
However, we always think of ways to showcase content that needs to be showcased. Especially in specific situations, such as when Artist Vs. (Con) Artists: Part 2 needed to be showcased on May 23, 2020 or when Heard Might Not Be The Word needed to be showcased on October 7, 2020.
And now you can add November 17, 2025 to that category, as Steve Kaycee blogs about the conclusion of his WordPress origin story.
You can read about it via the entry below.
**Note: The mention of Wealth Affiliate sets up for “WordPress Story To Tell, Part 3”, which will have Steve Kaycee mentioning his past experience of attempting to work with that company, and will not be promoting e-begging/phishing/any pyramid schemes at all
“WordPress Story To Tell, Part 3”
Last week, I blogged about not lasting too long in the Wealthy Affiliate program, due to not feeling confident enough in trying to amass a large customer base on my own, along with feeling that affiliate marketing was not that much different from all those multi-level self-employment programs, which are all bottomless pits of unhappiness, and I didn’t want to feel unhappy. Plus, affiliate marketing and the thought of all those multi-level self-employment programs didn’t align with my core belief of truly earning success in the self-employment world, so I went back to revamp Art Infliction, but not before picking up some nuggets during my brief stint with Wealthy Affiliate.
Let’s continue.
Alright, so those of you that are reading this are probably wondering what nuggets did I pick up during that brief stint, right?
Well, in one of the Wealthy Affiliate tutorial videos, one of the program instructors suggested buying a domain name from a website, entitled “Namecheap” and lacing it with the WordPress website-builder, so that my unique Amazon affiliate marketing product links (color pencils and acrylic paint) could lead to sales via search engine optimization a.k.a. the commonly-used acronym of SEO. Of course, I wasn’t aware of website-building via WordPress a decade ago, but back in early-2015, someone on Fiverr suggested that I switch from WebStarts to WordPress, only for me to not respond, due to the WebStarts version of Art Infliction being a little over three months old at that time. So no, it wasn’t ego nor pride that rebuffed that suggestion. Instead, it was still being very new in the content-creating game during that time, and a website provider switch that early in my career seemed like a move of impatience, so I chose to ride it out with WebStarts for as long as I did. Now back to color pencils and acrylic paint via the next paragraph.
Alright, so after hearing that suggestion in that tutorial video, I thought to myself, “What the hell?”, and took a chance with the Namecheap-WordPress combination to see if that would lead to that SEO success. Newsflash, it didn’t, but using WordPress to both build and continuously build (albeit for a brief time) my second ever website, Color Pencil State, presented me with a much smoother page-building process to the point that I decided to swing for the fences in getting a subsidiary website in late-April 2015, so that I could both archive blog entries and give a page to each member of the Artists Community, because the WebStarts version of Art Infliction wasn’t doing justice for any picture of their work. That subsidiary website ended up being the now-defunct “Creating Camaraderie”. Oh, and before we move onto the next paragraph, I want to say that I chose color pencils and acrylic paint as my unique Amazon affiliate marketing product links, due to both my knowledge in working with each of those materials and support of my fellow artists, so I can at least say that the freedom in choosing those products as my uniques is honorable, compared to all of those scammy and completely clandestine make money online systems. Now let’s continue.
Alright, so my time with Color Pencil State (also defunct) was brief, but that particular branch of the Wealthy Affiliate experience gave me the blueprint for building with WordPress. Plus, that instructor, whom I alluded to two paragraphs ago, also suggested to have CPM banner ads on our (myself and other program students) affiliate marketing websites, because being paid for website views means that it’s not realistic at all to rely solely on money via online sales, thus I (and possibly many others) heeded his suggestion of embedding AdSense code into an html section of the WordPress dashboard. And of course, I was able (and fortunate) to get immediate approval for an AdSense publisher’s account in mid/late-April 2015, which has since led to a stable publisher-advertiser partnership for nearly a decade, following a year-plus of trying to find the best CPM banner ad company to partner with.
In summary, my brief stint with Wealthy Affiliate didn’t seem like that it amounted to anything (or much) at that time. But time away from the WebStarts version of Art Infliction gave me a whole bunch of things, such as 1] The confidence to never run out of content, as I want to keep this content-creating thing going for as long as I can, 2] Building with WordPress and thriving as someone utilizing their services, to the point that building with them came way easier to me than building with WebStarts did and almost immediately at that, 3] Maintaining that initial knowledge of WordPress and expanding upon it as a 10-year veteran now, 4] Coming to the realization that the WordPress drop-down arrow feature is much more aesthetically-pleasing than that same feature for WebStarts, 5] Finding what is now the perfect CPM banner ad company in AdSense, from the standpoint of being a publisher, and 6] The ability to be consistent for almost 89 months in the current Art Infliction era. So yes, that brief stint did amount to something or should I say a whole lot of something, as I returned to Art Infliction fully rejuvenated in late-April 2015 and with everlasting study habits across the board. And while taking a detour away from a dream will take a bit of a toll on your emotions like it did for me, I also acknowledge that every exact sign of progress since that second weekend of April 2015 would have not been made, so I wouldn’t change a thing nor should anyone else that’s been in an exact (or similar) situation. Yes, the goal that might seem daunting can be achieved with undeterred motivation and an open mind to self-reinvention, and this entry is just one (of possibly many) that is written proof of that.
Keep progressing, pay it forward and don’t hold it back!