REPORT: The Difference A Year Makes [And Why You Must Keep Going!]

Hi folks and fellow WA'rriors and WA'rriorettes.

I guess some of you may be wondering if you should take advantage of the rather unexpected special offer of getting a Black Friday in deal in May (talk about Christmas comes early!) and just for the record this post is not written in a way to try and convince anyone or to sway a decision either way.

Ultimately,

that choice is yours to take.

The purpose of this article is to show you the difference a year makes - even in the toughest of niches - Making Money Online Niche and a documentation of my progress.

Side note: I still prefer niche site marketing having almost 4 years experience of starting and running various niche sites successfully I was in no way prepared for how tough the make money online niche was going to be - despite all the warning from Grace (littlemama) that I was in for one heck of a tough ride!.

Sure having gone through the Online Entrepreneur Certification Training and having the skills that I have learned there helped a lot.

Still I entered the niche with no knowledge and no idea how to write a review for this niche or what works...just like Nike slogan "Just Do It!".

By the time you have finished reading this post you will see how a site grows from blank screen to some serious traffic and how some articles by doing nothing grow to getting thousands of visitors each.

All traffic figures stated are organic search engine traffic only.

Progress Month 1 May 2019

Start Date May1 2019:

Organic Traffic: 63

Total Posts: 60.

Referrals: 3

May 2019 was a tough month - the early months always are. It takes more energy to get started than it does to keep going. Once you get in the flow it is much easier to get into the swing of it.

Productivity Tip: If you have one of those days where you don't feel like doing anything, do something, pick up your laptop and work on the easiest of tasks, if it is keyword research, do some keyword research, if it writing an introduction write it..you will soon find you are doing a lot more.

Form some good habits.

First month was tough - super tough. anxiety of just how hard the niche is was setting in. 60 organic traffic. I was really beginning to doubt myself, question everything! 60 posts (no set length, just at least 2,000 words) and 63 traffic.

Yeah a tiny trickle...I can do waaaaay more than that with 1/4 of the traffic on niche sites. Still, count the wins - 3 starter referrals. I was not expecting any sales - this is rare in the first month of a site.

Month 2 June 2019

If I though May was tough...I was about to face a train wreck face on!...in the form of a very big google update that affected a lot of MMO site...Ouch...yes, despite a still being new and only having 62 traffic, I did notice it..ya know those days when the dial is stuck at zero and there just has to be something wrong...you know creating a barrage of content, throwing more darts at the google dartboard!.

Delighted at those days when I got 4 and estatic at 6 visitor per day finding my site wow!!

Posts Published in June: 60

Total number Of Posts Published: 122

Organic Search Traffic: 133 (up from 62!)

Starter Referrals: 3

Month 3 July 2019 - Getting Some Traction

Haha! I remember thinking July was awesome, starting to see a little light at the end of the tunnel double digit organic traffif..oh wow!! Amazing!. Better still Domain Authority of 20 at this time, some folks been finding my site and linking to me (natural linking, I don't do link building).

Posts Published: 60

Organic Search Traffic: 341 - Up from 130!

Referrals: 10 up from 3 (Trebel yell!! woo-hoo, double digits!!)

Total Referrals First 3 months: 16 (Sweet 16!).

Still finding this niche tough, kept myself focused by celebrating all the little win, more traffic, more referrals and moving in the right direction.

Month 4 August 2019: First Sale Woo-Hoo

The first time is always special, be it your first kiss, or the first time we...well...ummm...ahhh "take off our shoes as boy and girls and put them back on as ladies and gentelmen" (haha!) and yes of course that first sale!.

People vote not only at the ballot box, they vote with their dollars. It's a vote, a sign that what I am doing is right, spot on and that I am going in the right direction. Rather interestingly - My First premium referral went yearly - a knack I'd keep on going with at one poing some 80% of referrals going yearly!

Site Age: 4 months

Total Posts Published: 246

Moz DA: 22 (dropped a point and won 2 back!)

Organic Search Traffic: 812 - Up from 341! (Double Trouble and then some

Referrals: 7 down from 10!

A note on the number of posts published - it was my goal to create a huge amount of content early on to test out as an experiment just how effective creating crazy lot of content can be. The general idea was to spend this first year creating massive amount of content to have a lot more of it maturing in SERP's.

Also,

The more content I create, the better I get at it for the make money online niche. Both Jerry Huang and Chris, (Benjisdad) say something similar about this. Jerry he talks of doing something for the first time, liek writing a review article - at first you will suck at it - that is just how it is and how it is going to be but after your 100th post you will excell at it.

Chris, talks of a 1% improvement with each post (or video, activity) by the time you get to 100th you will see a 100% improvement.

There is a lot to write about in this niche, Rewards sites, Surveys, MLM's, various work from home opportunities, dropshipping, Amazon FBA, Affiliate Marketing Techniques, Blogging Tips, SEO, Money Making Apps, Freelancing, course creation, Cryptocurrencies and trading stocks and shares, WF, JvZoo, Clickbank etc etc...

Month 5 September 2019 Progress

Posts: 60

Organic Traffic: 1376

Starter Referrals: 15 (woo-hoo one very other day!)

Finally a triple figure month, more hacking away at the keyboard in a relentless drive to keep up with 2 articles per day every day.Getting easier and easier as I started using templates and adjusting them as needed.

Starting to become very proud of the high quality of work I am producing. I managed to get my second referral.

Month 6 October 2019

Posts: 60

Organic Traffic: 1628

At this point I have about a years worth of content on my site - should I blog daily. Thankfully due to creating 3 articles daily during September I had a lot in reserve. I felt unusually tired and lethargic after a unexpected trip to Malaysia (large Chinese Community), an unshakable flu that took weeks to get rid of - Corona? who knows!.

Somewhere around the middle of this month Google made a major change to its algorithm BERT.

Image: Traffic progress May to October - note the dip! uggh!

Month 7 November 2019

Posts: 60 (Total 420)

Organic Traffic: 1790 + 162

Soo much effort and very little gains on the previous month and by now..you betch I am out of the famed google sandbox. Woohooh..but very little to show for it - a rather nice record month US$390 in sales.

Nice!

Month 8 December 2019

Posts: 60

Organic Traffic: 2106

December traffic can't be considered to be accurate due to analytics outages in December by google. Around 25th or so I started to impement a few things, a few SEO strategies to help traffic along. results were to be seen later.

Month 9 Jan 2020

Posts: 60

Organic Traffic: 3586!

What is interesting here in January I started to figure out BERT update (so easy! it is in the semantics!, just think about what BERT means and you will get it!). At last..100+ organic visitors per day!

Amount of posts published at this point 540.

No Of Premium Referrals: 2

January I made a slight change to my content strategy to add a new element, a new dynamic to

Month 10, 11 Feb, March 2020

Posts: 60

Organic Traffic: 4321, 6349

Total Posts: 60 in total

Not much to comment on here, an awkward month for us all. For me Covid 19 put a real spanner in the works as per my own situation. Will I get a visa extention..or deported, what are my options for a border run etc? A huge strain and not as productive as I would have liked to have been.

Still nice growth - more traffic and yes, some more premium sales made.

Month 12 April 2020 One year completed

Woo hoo!

Organic Traffic: 13,990

Total Posts published: 660

Referrals: 72

Premium: 4

Earnings: US$55.50

April noted serious changes in traffic "I got a nice biz" kind traffic. Many small streams can lead to one big raging river.

What Happened Over The First Year? An Analaysis

Did you notice something or two?

I've hardly mentioned the moolah or how much I have made - there is a reason for that. Your first year should not particularly be about how much money you make or want to make.

Sure,

Getting sales is nice - all 12 of them what I managed. The goal is to build your business, get the content up there and take it in the direction you want it to go. With a bricks and mortar business you hardly hear the new owner talking about how many cups of coffee or Pizza's or baked bread they wish to sell in their first year.

They are happy to build their business, get things running smoothly, establish a client base (get traffic!) and be recognised locally, to be seen and noticed (rankings!).

The hard work done in the first year will pay off for many years to come.

Make your goal to earn back your yearly fee at Wealthy Affiliate. What better motivation do you have to work hard on your business than to earn back what you spend as quickly as you can?.

I have not mentioned rankings either - I have no idea, not even today and nor do I care where I rank. Rankings are not important to me at all.

Results are!.

It Is All About Keywords

I care not for ranking for a keyword with 50 searches and 32 competing sites. I care more for ranking for a number of keywords per article.

Image: Bargraph representation of the number of Keywords ranked for each of my top 10 articles (on a per keywords basis).

All of my top 30 articles are getting more traffic each than my entire site did during month 1. The top article how many searches does that get pe rmonth? Zero - it's an island keyword! (This article is likely to return zero traffic in a couple of months, maybe even next month.

I don't even rank in the top 5 for that target keyword!.

what Kyle is talking about in this article where he talks about how traffic just grows from a trickle to a full on river rapid,

I wrote an article in September - 20 searches the keyword gets per month. that's all . I just wrote the article -( nothing special by my own admission) no focus on the keyword orther than what is taught here at Wealthy Affiliate.

It started of with just a couple of visitirs here and there - not every day in October. November getting a couple of visitors daily - nothing special at all. I had even forgotten about the article all together.

By December it was getting 300 traffic, by January 500+ Feburary 600, March 800. This month 1357.

See how it gone from random 2 visits some days to just under 50 per day every day?

That is not uncommon some articles that I wrote way back in June have suddenly been getting up to 60 visitors per day! Yet previously not getting any!.

400 domains linking to me have done so at their own free will. 3.6k, keywords all in the top 50 Most that make the Vegas trip have around the 1.4-1.8k mark, at the moment to join that exclusive club I need to be more towards the top end.

See Below for rankings distribution

I need to be more towards that #1-3 (53, most "Vegans" (my name for Vegas atendees! haha! are in the triple figure range).

Currently I have, for what it is worth 7,200 keywords total in the top 100 (according to SEMRush)

Image: Keywords growth and number of keywords ranking for in top 100.

The BERT Update said to one of the biggest date at the time is really helping google to classify your content correctly. The graph represents keyword growth over the previous year.

I Got Featured! Woo-Hoo

Creating great content not only leads to featured snippets - these are like rankings cool to get and only really count if they are high traffic keywords. Then you can expect a flood of traffic. I have out of SEO Geeking out intentionally targeting featured snippets.

This does come with a warning - google has been hitting out at this and no longer places your site on page 1 if you get a featured snippit. Officially speaking you are placed on page 2 at the top, even of the past 48 hours I have noticed not being ranked at all in the serps if you get a snippet.

My own thought here and why I target them - they are great for branding! your site stands out, becomes better percieved and who knows...maybe better CTR in serps for other terms due to Brand recognition and loyalty.

(That comes through a number of things such a s great content, in this "game" your content is your brand!).

Creating great content not only leads to featured snippets - these are like rankings cool to get and only really count if they are high traffic keywords. Then you can expect a flood of traffic. I have out of SEO Geeking out intentionally targeting featured snippets.

This does come with a warning - google has been hitting out at this and no longer places your site on page 1 if you get a featured snippit. Officially speaking you are placed on page 2 at the top, even of the past 48 hours I have noticed not being ranked at all in the serps if you get a snippet.

My own thought here and why I target them - they are great for branding! your site stands out, becomes better percieved and who knows...maybe better CTR in serps for other terms due to Brand recognition and loyalty.

(That comes through a number of things such a s great content, in this "game" your content is your brand!).

See How Your Business Can Grow In A Year.

Image: Traffic growth from day 1 to day end of one year.

And from Google Analytics if you wish.

Image Organic Traffic growth May 1 2019 to April 30 2020.

See how at the beginning there is literally nothing and at the end - well that is where you get the fruit of your labour, the benefit of the hard work done. Close on 15,000 traffic per month - that is a good base to move forward into year 2.

14 mins 10 seconds average on page time for an entire year - something I am very proud of! One of my strongest points - TBH - no idea how or why!...but what ever it is I'll keep doing it!.

Is my site perfect...hell no!. There is a lot to improve on - like a 6% conversion rate that brought in US$800 (approx - not counted and I am not bothering to. It is that unimportant to me. I made back my yearly fee which was my goal - job done!).

I have a horribly low CTR - 2% but thankfully a very high impressions rate that has been saving my bacon!.

Note: I measure over a rolling 3 month period. It allows me to see what are blips (in both directions) and what is a cause for concern and what is a cause for celebration (i.e going in the positive direction).

When I started had a a terrible CTR and it has been a concern for a while - most of this year it was sub 1% - starting out in May as 0.2% CTR.

Image: Note the blip, seeing it on a 3 month scale and it is clearly just that - a nice good positive blip.

The same blip in a 28day scale would have me took at my traffic and questioning what happened. Covid 19, Easter Holiday..who knows..a blip is a blip!.

Just to compare that to a year ago, first 3 month period May 1 to July 31.

Shocking huh!

That is why you gotta keep on going, keep on slogging a away, keep believing and keep building your business. I know it is tough, I have just completed that jouney of setting a solid foundation.

Yes,

I suffered a lot of anxiety during the past year while seeing results slowly. I just keep on focusing on the all the positive indicators. be it more traffic, more impressions, an increase in that horrible CTR 0.2% (It took 8 months to reach 1%! and a further 3 months to reach 2%.

Give yourself a year, believe in what you are doing and you will get there.

(I'm not "there" yet..but I have 13,940 visitors more that I had during this point last year!, 12 more premium sales and definately I will make Vegas. - It is No longer a question),

I have achieved what I have managed through sweat equity and what I have learned from the great training here

A year is a long time - but it is also a drop in the ocean. A year ago nobodu had heard of Corona Virus and soon enough conversations will be starting "remeber when had to isolate because of that virus thing...what was it called again?".

I hope this article has served it's purposes or demonstrating what you can achieve in just one year with your site and keep you inspired and motivated to keep working on it.

If I have motivated just one person to keep on going it has been worth my while in creating this article - hell - I woke up and wanted to quit every day - sometimes twice!.

Finally..if you are curious: WA Earnings for the year: US$894 - Year total US$917