INSIGHTS•3 MIN READ
My Journey as an Affiliate Marketer
healthywendy
Published on June 30, 2013
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
I started out in 2004 and built my first website with a company called 'Nitro Incubator'; a division of Nitro Marketing. We employed SBI (Site Build It!) to build our websites. SBI (not sure if it's still around or not) was a cut and paste web site builder that came with training on how to set out a website. This was before Wordpress became popular of course.
In those days, I was on a dial-up connection. I used to write my page, copy and paste into SBI and go and do something else for 30 minutes or so. Most of the time the page timed out and I used to get an error message. If the phone rang, the internet cut off automatically, so it could take all day to get 1 page up.
A year later I had a website with 200+ pages in the health niche. To get traffic, I had to request reciprocal links. I used to place a link to someone else's website on a special "links" page and ask them to link back to my site. There were a few programs on the market that did this automatically which made life a bit easier!
In those days it didn't matter where the links came from. Of course we were advised to steer clear of adult or gambling sites, but apart from that it was open season. We had to check regularly to see if our incoming links were still live. At least 25% of webmasters would delete their outgoing links or make them no-follow.
I made most of my money with Adsense. In those days Google used to pay quite well, especially for certain keywords. I was making around $800 - $1200 each month from Adsense alone. You could put your ads on top of the fold in those days and not get penalized for it.
That site used to rank on the first page for multiple keywords and have a PR of 4. It started to drop gradually after the first release of Panda. By the time Penguin came out in 2012, it was only getting a few hundred visitors per month. I sold it 3 months ago for $500.
Things have changed radically in the last couple of years on the SEO scene. I have changed direction and have put my energy into writing books for Amazon. I have 1 kindle book up so far which is also going into print. I will start another one next week. These days my websites are secondary and are only there to promote my books.
People are saying getting a website to rank is very hard these days. I actually think it's easier now as there are not as many backlinks required and, with the right long tail keyword, I think sites can still achieve a good rank. A lot of the spammy sites that were on the web have been de-indexed, leaving the field open to quality sites once again. The good times are still with us!
In those days, I was on a dial-up connection. I used to write my page, copy and paste into SBI and go and do something else for 30 minutes or so. Most of the time the page timed out and I used to get an error message. If the phone rang, the internet cut off automatically, so it could take all day to get 1 page up.
A year later I had a website with 200+ pages in the health niche. To get traffic, I had to request reciprocal links. I used to place a link to someone else's website on a special "links" page and ask them to link back to my site. There were a few programs on the market that did this automatically which made life a bit easier!
In those days it didn't matter where the links came from. Of course we were advised to steer clear of adult or gambling sites, but apart from that it was open season. We had to check regularly to see if our incoming links were still live. At least 25% of webmasters would delete their outgoing links or make them no-follow.
I made most of my money with Adsense. In those days Google used to pay quite well, especially for certain keywords. I was making around $800 - $1200 each month from Adsense alone. You could put your ads on top of the fold in those days and not get penalized for it.
That site used to rank on the first page for multiple keywords and have a PR of 4. It started to drop gradually after the first release of Panda. By the time Penguin came out in 2012, it was only getting a few hundred visitors per month. I sold it 3 months ago for $500.
Things have changed radically in the last couple of years on the SEO scene. I have changed direction and have put my energy into writing books for Amazon. I have 1 kindle book up so far which is also going into print. I will start another one next week. These days my websites are secondary and are only there to promote my books.
People are saying getting a website to rank is very hard these days. I actually think it's easier now as there are not as many backlinks required and, with the right long tail keyword, I think sites can still achieve a good rank. A lot of the spammy sites that were on the web have been de-indexed, leaving the field open to quality sites once again. The good times are still with us!
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