First Commission! $16.80! I'm a Believer!
I've been building my website, artcompletes.us, since I joined WA in March. 7 Months later, I checked my Amazon account to see that I made 8 sales yesterday! WHAT?
I have to admit, with each monthly membership payment to WA, I was getting more and more skeptical that I could ever make money on the internet. But even though my $16.80 commission doesn't even begin to cover my membership debt, I now believe that someday soon, I'll be in the green!
Now, I've read many other success posts just like this, and they always made me wonder, "Okay, but how long and hard did they have to work before making that first sale?"
So for all of you wondering the same thing, here's a little info about my journey so far at WA.
- I've been on WA for 7 months
- I am currently on Course 4, Lesson 1 of the training
- I have worked on the same single website for the length of my training
- My site has 7 content pages and a blogroll with about 15 posts
- All of my first 8 sales came from a review for one $34 product - which is one of the cheapest products listed on my site
- I made all of the sales through Amazon, and no sales yet through Zazzle, Fancy, Art.com, or ShareASale
- For my first two months, I spent 10-20 hours per week working on WA
- For the next three months, I spent almost no time on WA
- For the last two months, I have spent maybe 5 hours a week working on WA
- I have also been paying a cheap freelance writer to write some of my content when I'm too busy to work on it (This is sort of embarrassing to admit, but I'm giving you full honesty, here)
- I haven't touched or thought about touching Affiliate Bootcamp
- I've been averaging about 10 visitors to the site per day. On my best day, I had 59 visitors. So far, only 676 visitors, total.
That's about it. Let me know if you have any questions. I was starting to think this day would never come, at least not this soon, but it happened to me! And I'm feeling great.
Many thanks to all of the great WA members who have helped me along the way. I couldn't have gotten this far, this fast, without your help.
Thanks for reading!
Holly
Recent Comments
195
Congratulations on your success! Well done to you.
You have a great site also. As a practicing artist and architect I will be following what you do there and will also be in touch in the future.
As someone in the arts yourself you would be proficient at utilizing the constructive criticism given below. I followed through what iArtisan had to say, referencing it back to your site and I agree. I applaud him for taking the time to give you this feedback on a strong site with a solid foundation.
We wish you all the best and more of this success to you.
Great news and thanks for sharing your experience. It will get easier, but if I were you I'd step it up big time right now. Your site is slightly aged now so it will be easier to get new content ranked.
If you'd had 60 posts up by now -and the posts weren't so thin- you'd likely be getting your WA membership comped at this point, with an occasional surprise month. Your site is tasteful and well-presented, your domain is very clever, but your content is thin. lean into it right now and the holiday season may surprise you.
A couple of tips...
Use fewer affiliate links. You have too many outbound links for the amount of content you have. Concentrate on one single aff link per post. Too many outbound links devalues your content; however, you definitely want to take each and every opportunity to interlink your posts and pages.
Lose the amazon skyscraper ad in your sidebar.
I would embed the art images at a larger size, have them open in a lightbox overlay and make it easy for visitors to pin them. The social sharing on your site is way too low-profile for such a visual medium, not to mention you should be blowing it up on pinterest. Make it easy for visitors to share your pics/content and you will have hundreds of visitors per day by year's end.
Move your recent posts and recent comments widgets to the top, just below the ad block.
Since you're just now jumping for joy after 7 months and $17, I'm guessing you've never converted on that top rectangle ad. I would lose that right away and replace it with a higher converting AdSense block or perhaps one from iStockPhoto. Getty is way too expensive and it will be hard to convert a 'lazy' ad like that. Use a targeted 'save 20% on a credit bundle' ad or something like that, or go with AdSense.
Change your categories menu to a drop-down. It's a mess and is a bit distracting. With only 15 posts you really don't need such a category menu.
I would also configure sidebar menus for the different pages so that visitors see the expanded menu options right in the sidebar, instead of having to scroll up and fly over the nav bars again. For example, when a visitor clicks on any page within 'Inspiration and Advice', have it so that all of those page links appear in the sidebar for all of those pages. Jetpack makes this very easy with the widget display control that it offers.
Make it easy for people to explore your content. :)
Fix the broken image on this page: http://artcompletes.us/advice-inspiration/how-to-choose-art-for-your-bedroom/
Remove the top-level menu items that link to blank pages or flesh out those pages. Having those blank pages in your nav is diluting site authority and it's confusing your visitors.
With a little work, I think you have a nice little business on your hands here. :)
All the best!
Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed critique. I will look into what you mentioned and start editing, for sure. I may need some help with a few of your suggestions, but will be in touch when that comes around. I appreciate it!
Congratulations! Yay, so happy for you for achieving this first sale and now it gets even better. Awesome work and many blessings. :)))
Hi. Always good to see that the training works. Now you need to scale up, write more posts and publish regularly. As you grow so, too, will your business and $16.80 will grow with you.
Holly I am glad to hear this. It can be hard to stay motivated. You are an example of perseverance. Let's hope this is a turn around point. Thanks for posting this as it keeps me focused
Mark
Whoa, nice progress Holly and congrats on your first commission. This is how success looks most of the time, the time you invest now pays off later and you now have the foundation and framework for your business in place and it is in a perfect position to scale.
This is the first sale of many, but the first one always makes it so real! Congrats on your success thus far and I look forward to hearing about upcoming success stories.
That's awesome! I, too, am excited to see I have 9 click throughs from my site to Amazon. Although it's no money, it's good to know my efforts are not in vain!
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This is a great detailed explanation of your success so far here at WA. I started on the Bootcamp but have been slow about it because of work and other things going on. I did not start on my own site yet because I still don't know exactly what I want to do my niche on. Congrats again on your success so far.