3 Years At Wealthy Affiliate

bydylanrieger

16.9K followers

Updated 6 years ago

Hey, what's going on everybody? I haven't been posting as much lately because I felt like I was basically repeating myself with every post. I'll work on posting more (I'm thinking more on the lines of reviewing succesful niche sites).

I'm working as hard as ever, though, and just realized I've been here for 3 year now. I was almost shocked when I noticed this and got me thinking about my time here so far.

If this is your first time reading a post by me, here's the journey up to this point:

3 years ago I came across Wealthy Affiliate and didn't sign up right away. I kind of put it on the back burner and never really researched affiliate marketing.

Then in August in 2015, I was working an insurance job (I was 25 then) and didn't like it. I actually ended up leaving at lunch and never returned.

I jumped right into Wealthy Affiliate without even knowing what I was getting into but I was determined to make it work.

I didn't tell anyone in my family for the first week (I literally just got up like I was going to work and just went to Vassar College's library and went through the training and started building my site there).

Eventually I told everyone and they all tried to talk me out of it. You know what happened next? I didn't make a single dollar in my first year. I didn't quite understand which keywords to target and SEO as much as I do now.

My family was losing patience but I pushed on. I scraped my first site and started over. This time I had a year of experience and research. In 6 months I got this site to over 2k a month.

But...

It all disappeared in a day after a Google update. I went from 2k a month to $200. I ended up selling the site for 2k and started over.

This time I did it right (before I had too many affiliate links per page and not enough words per post) and got this site to nearly 5k in 7 months.

I made an additional $500 from Canada and Europe sales.

It was pretty seasonal and I had a choice to make this previous spring - sell it or make under $1000 for the next few months and build a new site with basically no money.

I decided to sell it and got $40,000. It was the right decision and finally being ahead after 2 and half years felt GREAT. For this year I'll have made between $50,000 to $60,000. Not bad.

Since May I've been working on a seasonal website that's probably going to average $2000 to $3000 a month between November to April. I'll be finishing this site up by November and then I'll start a new project.

I already have a niche picked my next niche and this site I'll be working on for a while (I'm guessing for the next 18 months as my sole focus). I'll also put around 10k in it for content creation to speed things up. I may dabble in Youtube as well.

My goal is to have a 10k month in 2019 and to be over 150k in the year 2020 and 300k in 2021. It's going to be tough but I think I can get it.

Here's my advice to anyone just starting out or not getting results:

Measure things in terms of 3 months to 6 months. Affiliate marketing can be slow but it's a great way to make money. If you're not seeing improvements in rankings in 3 month to 6 month chunks, you need to switch things up.

Also, if you're monetizing through Amazon you HAVE to pick a niche where the majority of products are OVER $100.

Here's how the numbers worked out for my last site:

Of all the traffic I got to my site I was able to send 32% to Amazon. Of the 32% sent to Amazon between 7.5% to 8% bought something. The average of all sales was $3.

So If you get 60,000 people to a site and you optimize it correctly, 19,200 will go to Amazon. Of those people you'll get around 1440 sales. At $3 a sale you get around $4,320. That's very attainable and if you know what you're doing, you can do that in a 12 to 18 months.

I marketed items that were in the $150 to $500 range. So if you market products that are $20 to $50 you'll only make around $1 a sale or less. With 60,000 people a month you might make less then $1000 because of this. To make $5,000 you'd have get traffic in the 300,000 a month range. Not impossible but not easy and will take probably 2 years at the very least.

If you pick a niche that has products in the $200 range 300,000 people a month might get you $20,000 a month! These niches exist and can be completely monetized through Amazon. I'm hoping the one I just picked can reach that.

If you're interested in learning how I make sites, read my training here.

This is the best time of the year to use this strategy too. Research a niche now, start writing in November (targeting 2019 keywords) and you'll see good results pretty quickly.

So that's my story and advice. I'm so grateful to have found this place and grateful to have talked with the people inside this community. This is a hell of a lot better then an insurance job. I don't have to ask when to eat, I wake up whenever I want and I'm making more money now then I did working twice as many hours!

Thanks for reading and I hope you success!