Overwhelmed By The WA Training? Here's A Cheat Sheet!

byEddySalomon

49.2K followers

Updated 5 years ago

Before I dive in, I recommend that you bookmark this article now. I'll wait... This article is going to link to a lot of resources that will help you succeed and you'll want to take your time and read. The information below will help you at different times in your business so you'll want to come back to it often. So bookmark it now. Trust me, you'll thank me later.

Let's face it, WA is the best internet marketing community because of the tools, support and the vast amount of training. But it's almost a gift and curse. Because there is so much training produced here, it can be confusing, overwhelming or missed in some cases.

So the goal of this post is to simplify WA for any newbies or even existing members. This is pretty much a high level overview of what you need to do in this business. It's not a substitute for the training. But I think it will help put the training in better perspective and you'll get more out of it.

That said, I'll be honest. I don't follow everything the training suggests. I tend to follow the spirit of most of it and its main elements. And I think what I listed below does a good job of covering the most important aspect of this business. So I think if you ever find yourself getting overwhelmed or confused this will keep everything in perspective.

1. What is the goal of this business?

Ultimately the goal of your blog is to solve problems. You can write about whatever you want, but if you want to actually make money, then your content should revolve around solving problems. For instance, I write reviews because I know people who are searching for reviews are planning to sign up for something or buy it. But they want confirmation that they should do so. So they'll google "Company X reviews", "Company X complaints" or "Company X Scams". My job is to write an honest review where I tell them the good and bad about said company. In the process I will always give them alternatives which happens to be my affiliate links to a trusted company. People want options. So I might as well give it to them. It helps them and obviously helps me. We both win. Most of you are here because someone did this and you're happy they did.

So your goal is to write content that helps people. Don't waste it by babbling about things people aren't actually searching for. If you're not doing keyword research and writing your content around it. Then you're basically wasting time and no one will find your content. We'll discuss later how to write content and do keyword research properly.

2. What is your website going to be about? aka Niche Selection

Again, if your goal is to actually make money, you need to pick a niche that is conducive to making that happen. I don't hold the same belief that anything can be a good niche site. I know that flies in the face of what is taught here. But when researching a niche idea, I am looking for the following factors before proceeding:

• Can I write content for years to come?
  

People are under this misconception that after you build your site and add a few pages you're done. No sir, your website is a car. And cars need gas weekly and regular maintence. In this case new posts are the gas for your website. So you need to pick a niche where you can write new content every week for years to come and not run out of ideas. This is why I love product reviews. But we'll get into content ideas later in this article. The main point here is you have to pick a niche that makes it easy for you to come up with content regulalry.

You don't want to pick a niche just because it's your hobby and passion. You should also factor in if people are actively looking for this niche in google to solve a problem. Sure, I can start a site on my love for Star Trek. But I probably wouldn't make much money with this site because it's not solving an issue. Whereas if I start a website about growing a beard, that would attract people like myself that are actively looking for advice and products to help grow a beard. And that brings me to my next requirement.

• Are people willing to spend money in your niche?
  

At the end of the day most of you are here to make money with your site. So you need to pick niches where people are actively looking for products and services that they are willing to pay for. Maybe you may want to start a website about helping under served youth. And that intention is great. But it's not going to make you any money because your audience isn't looking to spend money because they probably don't have it.

Going back to my beard site example, people that want to grow a beard are willing to pay money to buy products and accessories to help them with that. They're actively looking on Google for solutions and reviews on products that claim to give them a solution. It's a niche with buyer's intent. This is very important when selecting your niche. Is your audience willing and expecting to spend money for solutions? Are there products you can recommend and review? If you can't say yes with confidence, then this niche is unlikely to make you money even if it meets the other requirements I listed above.

Hopefully this helps you come up with your niche or re-evaluate ideas you may had that aren't conducive to this business. But if things still aren't clicking for you, I have included some other niche articles to help you think it through down below. Just take your time. There is no need to rush picking a niche. It won't speed up the money making aspect of this business. It will still take you time to see that. But it's better you take the time to pick a niche that is set up for long term success.

Here are some resources to help you pick a proper niche designed to make money.

• How To Pick A Niche That Leads To Success!
• You Don't Need To Be An Expert In Your Niche!
• How To Choose A Profitable Niche!
• Very Simple & Clean Way to Choose Your Niche - For Beginners
• How to narrow down broad niches. Examples and tips.
  

3. How Do I Create A Good Website?

So hopefully now you know what your business is going to be about, you need to create a good website. Fortunately WA makes this process easy with their siterubix tool. But I see people making it more complicated than it needs to be. Folks get a new toy and they spend so much time playing with it, they delay working on what will actually drive traffic and income which is content.

Here's what you need to know when it comes to creating a quality site design: K.I.S.S. For those of you who don't know what that means, let me break it down. Keep It Simple Stupid! In other words, you don't need to have every bell and whistle. You don't need to fiddle with all your fonts, colors, headers, sidebar, and whatever else that is distracting you from actually getting into content. Pick a simple clean theme that makes your content the focal point. You don't need things with large images and sliders, etc. People are coming to your site to solve a problem. Why have them jump past large images and a whole bunch of unnecessary text or menus before they can get what they want? Keep it simple and don't get distracted by nonsense as I discuss here:

• Are you distracted by the wrong things?

Themes I like that are clean, simple and easy to use:

• https://wp-themes.com/skin/
• https://wp-themes.com/hitmag/
• http://wp-themes.com/hiero/

How To Pick A Good Domain?

When it comes to picking a domain name, keep this simple too. Here are my criteria for picking a domain name:

1. Must be a .com. Look, no one remembers anything but a.com. All the other ones folks ignore. In most people's mind a .com just seems more professional. If you can't get the .com version of your domain, brainstorm a new one.
   
2. Don't use hyphens. Although most of your traffic will probably come from being ranked in google, I don't like domain names that can be easily forgotten or misspelled. If someone is unlikely to remember my domain name without having to write it down, I don't want it.
   
3. This one is optional, but I like keyword rich domains such as WorkAtHomeNoScams.com which is my blog. I like keyword rich domains because when people link to your site, they'll usually just use your website address. If your website address uses a keyword phrase, that means when people are linking to you, the anchor text is a keyword because your domain includes it. It may not help a lot, but it does help some with rankings. Furthermore, in the search results google bolds words related to what you're searching. So if your site comes up in the results your website address may be bolded because of a keyword in it and that helps increase clicks and thus rankings.

Now with all that said, I see a lot of people looking for keywords that have a lot of traffic from their domains. You don't need to worry about that because most of your traffic is actually going to come from individual posts you write that target many different keywords. So don't spend so much time trying to find the perfect keyword with tons of low competition traffic for your domain name. It's better just to pick a keyword that reflects your overall site niche and makes it clear that you're an authority. I named my blog WorkAtHomeNoScams.com because I wanted people to immediately know what my blog would focus on.

The following tool I use to come up with domain names. Just type in any keyword you want to use as a domain name and it will provide you with all the available .com domain names. But don't buy your domain names there. You should only use it to generate your ideas and then buy your domain names here at Site Domains. Here's the tool to help you come up with a domain name that meets the requirements I listed above.

• Lean Domain Search

4. How Do I Write Content?

I would say writing content is probably the second biggest struggle for people after selecting a niche. In my years of helping people I've seen a lot of different situations. You have some people that are just terrified of writing. They think they need to be perfect, so they're crippled with fear and do everything else but write. They busy themselves by playing with themes and other things that won't really drive traffic or sales. Then you have people that will write content, but it won't follow any of the SEO best practices taught here. They'll write content that is only 200-300 words long. They may just copy and paste things from other sources. They may write a wall of text that is hard to read. They write content without doing keyword research or applying it in their actual content. They write content that has no clear calls to action.

I get it, writing content can be difficult for most people. But let's keep it simple. Remember what I said at the start of this article. Your job is to help people solve their problems. If you're writing content like you're trying to help a friend, it will come easier. All you're doing is applying a little of the technical and marketing best practices to your content. Don't over think those elements. Think of your goal first which is to help people that are actively searching for solutions and information.

Here are some resources that will help you write better and keep these principles in mind.

• Are you terrified of writing?
• 8 Simple Article Styles To Make Money Online
  
• How To Write A KILLER Product Review That Generates Affiliate Sales
• Writing Product Reviews of Stuff You Don't Own
• Do You Have Style?

5. How Do I Get Visitors To My Site?

It all boils down to your content. Again, I tend to pick niches where I know people are actively searching google for various topics within my niche especially product and company reviews. I love reviews because there are always new companies or products coming out in certain niches. That means I don't have to think of new content ideas. A new company or product comes out in my niche, I just write a review on it because I know people will be going to google and searching about it. That just means easy traffic for me.

But it doesn't have to be reviews. There are best practices to help you write content that will drive traffic:

• Jays 10 Step Process on Getting Content to Rank

If you're not writing your content following most of what Jay laid out above, people won't find your content. And you won't make money. You have to write with purpose and keeping certain principles that Jay covers in mind. Otherwise you're wasting your time. If you have already written articles that fail to follow Jay's step then go back and edit them. Or just make sure you apply what Jay teaches going forward with new articles.

6. How Do I Make Money?

So I wasn't sure if I should include this section, but I feel there are some jewels I can drop that people may learn from. So the focus of WA is to make money with affiliate marketing. By now you should know what that is. But you're basically getting paid to refer people to other sites. The benefit of this is you don't have collect payments or deal with customer service. It's an easier way to make money online.

Amazon is probably the easiest program to get into and start making money with. So you should try to start with that since the barrier to entry isn't as hard. With other affiliate companies like Google and affiliate networks it may be harder to get in. So you want to make sure you have been posting new content for a few months before applying to some of the bigger boys. When you apply to be an affiliate, they'll usually go look at your site to see if it's actually live and has content that will engage people to click on their affiliate links. If they visit your site and see you don't really have any quality posts that can drive traffic, you'll be rejected. No traffic means no money for them so why bother dealing with you.

When you do get accepted into an affiliate program, please don't just slap a whole bunch of banners on your site and call it a day. Remember, people will be coming to your site because you've written content that solves their problem. So they'll be in a mindset to read it. People tend to have banner blindness, but they will read text for the most part. So you want to make sure you have many text based calls to action in your articles. Calls to action basically mean telling people what to do. Don't assume they will because they won't. You want to have various text links that are bolded and easy to spot multiple times in your given article. You do this because people scan so you want to be sure that you more likely to catch their eye as they scan.

• Treat Your Readers Like Dumb Herd Animals

If you're only using banners or only including one link in your articles at the end, then you're leaving tons of money on the table. Just adding several more text based affiliate links throughout your article can increase your income dramatically. If you already have content that is ranking and getting traffic you should apply this immediately and watch your income grow.

Bonus Tip: Keep your affiliate programs relevant to your niche topic. Too often I see people trying to slap WA banners on their niche sites that have nothing to do with WA. If I go to a car dealership, I'm not buying groceries there just because you have a grocery store section in your car dealership. I've come there to buy a car. That's my mindset. So don't try to shove WA or unrelated affiliate programs on your site because it makes you a lot of money or you like it. It won't covert well, unless you approach it the way I've discussed in this article:

• How I Earned $740 Thinking Outside The Box!

INSPIRATION:

When you apply what I've mentioned above, these are the type of results you may experience in time:

• Back At 5 Figures: I Earned $10,640,56 in August...
  

What's Next?

Hopefully this gives you a nice overview of what you should be doing to succeed in this business. Again, this shouldn't replace the training. It's really more of a compliment or cheat sheet of it.

Most of these principles is what I and other WA super affiliates follow. It's one the main reasons I'm usually one of the few people that win WA Super Affiliate Contest that results in a free all expense paid trip to Vegas every year.

• Vegas Trip 1
• Vegas Trip 2

So if you're wondering what the secret sauce is, that's pretty much what I use. That said, none of this stuff is a magic bullet. It will still take hard work, consistency and patience to see the fruits of all this. But it does work.

So if you're ever stuck or confused about what you should be doing to succeed then read this article again. If you find that you need help with any of these elements, then be sure to follow my tips: How To Get The Help Here At WA... Guaranteed!.

Well, this post has been long enough. Let me know if you found this helpful. If so be sure to share it with everyone else in the community. Shout out to some of the authors of the content I've referenced in this article.

Until next time,

Eddy "with a y"

(Yes, it's that serious! lol)