Have I gotten lazy with Wealthy Affiliate?

So recently I've been struggling with dedicating time to Wealthy Affiliate. For some reason I have trouble sticking to one thing and building a solid foundation surrounding that. I'm not discounting the success that I've seen thus far...and exploring other opportunities is giving me more and more topics to write about every single time I fail.

My Biggest Recent Lesson

I've realized recently that things take time. I guess I always knew that things weren't supposed to happen overnight but I definitely get caught up in the "Get Rich Quick" schemes. I know they aren't legit... matter of fact I review so many of them and thrash them for false promises.

I don't think I was necessarily looking for some way to get rich as I was some way to drive consistent income. What I found was... there is nothing like Wealthy Affiliate out there.

Let's talk briefly about the types of schemes I tried... Please note: I'm not saying that these ideas aren't great ideas for some people, but they don't work for me.

Retail Arbitrage

So the first idea that I tried was Retail Arbitrage. This consists of running to the store and buying all the garbage on the clearance racks and reselling it on Amazon... I am a dedicated side hustler so obviously this sounded of interest to me. I quickly realized the leg work required was not worth it.

If I would have spent that time writing as part of the Super Affiliate Challenge I would have had no problem meeting my 12,000 words.

I did sell the items that I bought for a significant mark up... the catch is... after fees and everything else I made a couple hundred bucks over the course of a month and would have to hit the store and put all that leg work in once again.

If I would have just worked a part time bar tending job instead I would have made more. In addition, if I would have written that many articles about Wealthy Affiliate or created a couple YouTube videos or just watched the coursework at WA I would have learned and generated a lot more in the future as a result.

The next idea was a far bigger disaster... and far more time consuming...

Shopify - Drop Shipping

I heard somewhere around the interweb that it is so easy to fire up a Shopify store and get to selling products. I'm not denying that is true. I started a shop in nothing flat, took advantage of a free trial, watched a couple videos on Oberlo and how to drop ship.. and BOOM I was off to the races.

I then attacked all social media platforms and setup my Facebook pages for these sites and then immediately seeded an Instagram account (something I'll do a training on soon). After I had all this setup I read about Facebook Ads, ideal ad spend and Adsense. All great tools but also all very expensive tools if you really want to convert leads into sales.

My first site was doing great with traffic but my conversion rate was garbage... Maybe 0.2%. Everyone reporting huge winnings/sales were reporting around 1-2% on average. I quickly realized I was not doing a very good job with targeting.

Drop shipping is not for me. After about a month and countless hours spent learning the system and understand ecommerce in general I realized that I prefer affiliate marketing any day of the week.

Conclusion

Wealthy Affiliate is the best platform out there. It teaches you everything you need to know about affilaite marketing and how to build out your WordPress site. Everywhere else you pay for your memberships and then still have to seek out independent knowledge. Much of the knowledge you will seek out is extremely vague and noone gives you true information. In fact, you'll likely just stumble upon 500 gurus trying to force you to subscribe to their emailing list.

It sucks.

So... overall I'm telling all of you folks from first hand experience... you are in the right place. Take advantage of all WA has to offer. Dedicate yourself to it and don't run astray. Take it from someone who dropped a few hundred bucks on Facebook Ads and Clearance Items at Walmart...

If you are not yet a premium member, I suggest you dive in and really get into the Affiliate Bootcamp. You can't beat it.

Lastly, special thanks to Kyle and Carson for being so transparent and helpful and helping me find some inkling of success online.

Hope that helps someone out there.

If any of you have experience with Ecommerce, drop shipping, or retail arbitrage drop a comment below... I am always open to learn...

Next distraction: Real Estate Wholesaling.