One Year Recap - The Dissapointment and Encouragement

I joined WA during the 2018 Black Friday Event. I was really into stock investing and building wealth and decided to make a site dedicated to helping those that had no experience investing and wanted to get started without being sold the moon and being promised returns that aren't realistic.
I wanted to start a site that really just helped people understand how to start investing and how to choose their own journey in building wealth responsibly.
I've created about 20 websites in the past back when micro-niche sites could be successful. This was about 7 or 8 years ago when you would find an exact match domain focused around 1 keyword, and then build about 6 pages with at least 500 words of content. With the right balance of on page SEO, you could be #1 in Google in about 3-5 days sometimes (worst case 2 weeks).
My full time career (active duty Navy) took me away and I didn't have time to maintain them so I sold the ones of value and left the IM industry for about 5 years. When i decided to come back (having slightly more free time), I knew the IM landscape had changed quite a bit so I joined WA to get back in gear.
Boy, how things have changed. I have a site with 37 posts (over 50,000 words in total) and these are my results after a year...

About 100 visits a month on average which has converted to one $5 commission, and one $60 commission (that I can't access until I reach their $300 minimum payout...). Needless to say it was discouraging. It turns out the Personal Finance and Investing Niche is some heavy competition...

The early on spikes are from WA Comments so the most reliable portion of the graph really starts around June 2019 when I decided to stop requesting comments. It has been a really slow grind and now that I'm in my second year of WA, I need to seem some movement or my wife's gonna pull the cord!

Although the results are more than a little disappointing, there is some encouragement here. Most site owners give up within the first couple months when they realize it takes time to rank in the almighty Google. Here's what I've accomplished in the last year:

1. 37 blog posts (averaging 2000 words each)
2. 9 videos on my Youtube Channel (approx 800 views and 6.4 hours of watch time)
3. 20 Custom Pins on Pinterest
4. 1 year of site age
5. An amiguous valuation for the site between $271 (siteworth.org) and $510 (webuka.com)
6. Motivation to keep pumping out quality content
7. Refusal to fail.

Of all of these 6 and 7 are most important to me. I believe in my site and think 2020 is going to be the year for me. Good luck to all those out there that aren't where they want to be YET! Keep believing in yourself and striving to improve your sites and success is around the corner!