10 Months With Wealthy Affiliate: What I've Learned and What's Next

Hello everybody!

I've been with Wealthy Affiliate for nearly 10 months and would like to share what I have learned thus far.

I think it's important to acknowledge our small accomplishments, even if they haven't amounted to earning any money. Money is the #1 goal for most of us here, but we need to complete a bunch of smaller goals first.

My journey started with finding Wealthy Affiliate and searching for a niche. Since I enjoyed website building and reading about marketing, I thought I would join the make money online niche and see what I could do.

This led to me creating Increase Online Productivity.

The name is inspired by all the time we're wasting online, whether it be on social media, YouTube, forums, games, and general "surfing."

What if all of us could take the average 8 hours we waste online and channel them into an online business? We could easily build something great!

That's exactly what my goal has been, and I have learned a lot for my time spent at Wealthy Affiliate.

To summarize, here's what I've learned or at least started to understand.

• The affiliate marketing process
• How-to creating readable and entertaining posts
• SEO optimization and basic keyword targeting
• Analyzing keyword competition
• UX (user-experience) website concepts
• Google Analytic and other types of stats
• Complex CSS customizations

I feel that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what can be learned in the affiliate marketing world. This is why I'll continue reading, trying new things, and watching joining Jay's live video classes (if you haven't been watching them, you really should).

Just a Minor Setback: What I'm Focusing on This Week

I've spent most of this month searching for a good email marketing provider. I started with Aweber, but their autoresponder broke which prompted me to look elsewhere. I went to Mad Mimi and enjoyed their platform but was soon informed that they don't allow affiliates.

This was extremely discouraging, and as I kept searching, I came to realize that many email marketing providers don't allow affiliates!

If you're like me and just getting started with emails, then you should absolutely check with your email provider's spam policy. Getting your list deleted because of a slight misunderstanding would not be fun at all.

After quite a bit of searching, I have now settled with MailPoet. They're a great provider and allow free email sending up to 2000 subscribers. The prices are a fraction of most email providers. Sure, their functions may not be as great, but all I'm worried about is being able to send emails on a consistent schedule.

Needing to Switch Hosts?

I thought my email marketing campaign was ready, but now there's a limit in WA's hosting that has come up. I simply cannot use on this hosting with MailPoet.

This is a shame, but there's not much I can do. I understand that the hosting is meant to be as simple as possible, but having cPanel in the future would be nice for advanced users.

So now I'm probably going end up moving to a new hosting provider. This won't be that big of a deal, but losing SiteComments and having to pay a larger price is definitely a disadvantage.

Who would have thought that setting up something as simple as an email campaign would have been such a hassle?

That's all I've been focusing for the past few weeks. I also moved to a new theme and has to transfer my CSS. I disliked Divi's page builder because it's not a true WYSIWYG. It also doesn't provide shortcodes for normal WordPress posts.

My new theme provides a true WYSIWYG and better shortcodes, so this is going to help tremendously with my content, especially reviews. You really have to work to stand out when promoting WA in the SERPs nowadays.

Other than this, nothing really interesting has been going on. I've noticed that my Google keyword views are slowly on the increase. It's just a matter of finishing these small annoyances and getting on a better blogging squedule.

I have not made made any money as of yet and am struggling to refer my visitors to affiliate sites. However, I have not been posting on a consistent schedule, so my lack of traffic may be the reason I'm attracting "window shoppers."

What's next on the agenda?

• Finish setting up email campaign
• Start blogging consistently (aiming for 2-3 posts a week)
• Begin accountability blog to make sure I stick with the posting

I'm hoping to finish up the email campaign this week. I do not want to spend much more time doing things other than creating content, so wish me luck that everything goes well from here on out!

I hope you guys enjoyed this blog post. My question to you is, what have you learned since beginning your affiliate marketing journey?