What I’ve Learned in Three Months on Wealthy Affiliate

It’s hard to believe in ten days I will have been a member of Wealthy Affiliate for three months. I came here looking for a way to add a little more money to my monthly income and am slowly working my way towards my goal. Contrary to what all the online gurus will tell you it is not easy to make money online. They all have their gimmicks like “make money while you sleep”, “$5,000 a day guaranteed” and on and on. I’m sure you all have seen the ads so ubiquitous these days. Just browse Pinterest or YouTube and everyone has a program that will make you rich with no work at all. Ha

There has been the old saying “nothing is free” since the beginning of time but it seems it is widely ignored today as people clamor for the latest marketing scheme. But these make money in your sleep schemes actually do cost as you have to buy into their plan. Then usually buy into an upgrade to learn another tip that will put you over the edge to success.

So what have I discovered since joining Wealthy Affiliate? Glad you asked, read on and I’ll tell you.

Patience is more that a virtue, it is a requirement!

Building a blog and getting readers takes a lot of patience. Especially if you have never built a website before...well even if you have built a website it still takes patience. You can’t just make a website and expect people to come running to your site to read your words of wisdom. You have to learn to write good quality content and do it consistently. Just throwing up a couple articles is not going to get you noticed by Google.

Google is very important if you want to succeed with your blog. You have to play by their rules or they just thumb their noses at you and ignore you. Google is going to want to see good content that shows value coming from your website for months before they are going to trust you enough to rank you higher up in the search results. There is a lot of competition on the web all trying to get ranked high in the Google search results so you must compete for them.

Keywords are key or else they would be called something different.

When I came to Wealthy Affiliate I had no idea what a keyword was and how it related to blogging. But soon learned just how important they are as that is how google recognizes certain words that are “key” to what readers are searching for. After I learned a little about them I realized it was same principle I used when I listed items for sale on eBay. You try to think of words relating to your item that people would search on when they looked online to buy them.

But then along with keywords, there were terms like “low competition keywords” and “long tail keywords” I needed to learn. I had to learn how to find these keywords and relate them to my niche.

SEO was another term I was unfamiliar with. But a few lessons into the certification classes Kyle explained what search engine optimization was and how very important it was in order to get found and ranked by Google

Writing Good Content and Quality In Everything We Do

When people search on Google they are searching for a couple main reasons. They are looking for information, searching for a product to purchase, or having a problem so they are seeking a solution for their problem. So, we need to keep this in mind and structure our content around the reasons people are stopping by our site.

We need to make our pages easy to read and visually appealing. Today’s readers are skimmers so we need to break up long blocks of text into four to six sentence paragraphs. Use headlines and content relevant graphics to break up the text.

Also, we have to remember the four rules of writing good content

• State the problem.
• Offer a solution.
• Tell them why the solution may be of benefit to them.
• Tell them what they should do. (call to action)

This Is My Job

Whether you have a regular job or not you need to treat your blog just as any other job if you want it to be successful. That means putting in the hours and not treating it as a hobby. If you go at this with a casual approach then your results will be mediocre. But if you seriously want to make money at this then you will have to work hard at it.

Conclusion

I have five more lessons remaining in the certification course. I plan on going to Bootcamp as soon as I finish the certification but I know I have missed or forgotten many important lessons so I will also be starting the certification course over again. Any spare time I have I will go back and pick up points I have missed. There is just too much information there for anyone to glean it all in one time through.

There is really much more that I have learned here in three months but to list out everything would make for a long blog. So, onward and upward I will keep moving forward as I have just scratched the surface.

Please feel free to leave me a comment.