A small success just at the right time

Hi All,

I just wanted to share a small success with you that came just at the right time. I have been feeling a bit down as I knew I would...working hard without seeing the reward can be very disheartening.

Steep learning curve, mostly about myself

Everyone said that it is going to be overwhelming, that I should stick to the training and progress step by step. Of course I did not listen... the problem is that I am too curious and that I do not believe everything just because someone said so. I am learning from my mistakes: the most important lesson is that I should learn from other people’s mistakes!
I have started experimenting with youtube, clickbank and a few other things. In the meantime I could have spent much more time on writing articles for my website. I need much more disciple, focus and determination if I want to make it work. Don't get me wrong, I have been working my butt off; but instead of going in one direction on the motorway, I am the local coach service on a B road, stopping at every mailpost.

Speaking of traffic

I was trying to go ahead with the training too, placing my affiliate links into my articles. But most of the products within my niche are not on ebay/amazon, and I have not the traffic yet to be accepted by avantlink etc. I thought I picked the wrong niche (again)...and I was so frustrated and disappointed, full of self doubt. Well, I still am. There is no point making all that brilliant content if I won't be able to turn it into an affiliate website, right? So I re-planned (another 2-3 days 'wasted') and while I was thinkng of the 'what'. I worked on the 'how'.

I had no trouble finding long tail keywords, and the products I would like to promote are 'hot', so traffic should not be a proble. I set up with google and bing, but there appeared to be no traffic coming to my way. Then I saw a blogpost here on WA about the google sandbox. I thought...great I am not gonna see any traffic for a few months...so no money obviously for god knows how long.

I checked how my website looks for the crawler and to my surprise every article I wrote looked REALLY different for the webcrawler:

My very best 2000+ word articles had an even longer header full of reference to woocommerce amongst other things. The actual article did not even start until the last third of the page. And I have nothing to do with woocoomerce on my website. THe only thing I could think of was the theme I had installed: so I spent another few days finding a new theme that was 'slimmer' and free of this junk in the header.

The level of my enthusiasm dropped significantly. While the first few articles I published were over 2000 words and I wrote them within a few days, the latest one took over a week to finish and now it is almost a week since I haven’t posted.

When you see the light at the end of the tunnel...

Then this morning I checked on bing webmaster tool to see if there was any change over the weekend. To my biggest surprise several of my articles appeared on the first page, some ranked 3rd and 4th!! Not a massive amount of traffic, but a good start of a 10!! 11% organic CTR is not that bad either!

I quickly checked the google search console too, and YESSS!! A few impressions and clicks on my website, first page ranking for one keywords, 10% CTR.

Considering that I only started this niche website in March and I have only eight articles altogether, it is not that bad. Now I can see a bit more clearly how this whole 'creating content' works, and how I will build my website brick by brick. I need strong foundations if I ever want to rely on this website as my main source of income.

So what seemed like days or even weeks 'wasted', turned out to be a very useful exercise. Knowledge that I can take forward with me to my next website too.

For now, all I need is a bit more traffic, more data, more impressions and more clicks. And of course more content to achieve this...

And then, I may be able to apply for those bl***dy affiliate links!

So there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel, I can see it now. I need no other motivation - but your thoughts are most appreciated!