Wow, 1 month already ???

It has been a month since I stumbled upon WA and decided to take a look and see if it was for real. Luckily it didn't have all the same hallmarks of the usual get rich quick suspects, namely wanting you to sign up quickly for a limited time or ground floor opportunity, so thought it was worth a crack.

I have had a bit of experience over the years with website building and blogging having started with a Geocities site way back in the mid - late '90's, now that was a challenge I had to teach myself HTML to set that website up. It was also my first introduction with Affiliate Marketing with Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the likes, although I never made a cent, as my site had a very limited audience (my local cricket club) and wasn't set up for SEO (heck I didn't even know what that was back then). More recently I have been writing on Blogger about my families travel's as we left our cosy life in New Zealand and headed for the snow covered streets of Moscow and our adventures thereafter, so coming to grips with setting up a website hasn't been too bad. The added bonus is the community of fellow users who are always willing to freely pass on advice, which saves a lot of bumbling around trying to sort something out and the risk of getting disheartened and giving up.

Progress To Date

So far I have set up a few sites for myself, the primary one is www.handsupforclubs.com I have also set up www.thebestaffiliatenetworks.siterubix.com and www.webhq.siterubix.com and are in the process of rebuilding my own business website on WA so I can cancel my hosted account and save myself another $50 per month. While 3 different websites might sound like spreading myself a bit thin, I have set them up in such a way as to complement each other, they could have been included in my primary site, but I felt that they would have cluttered it up and deserved their own sites to work on those niches as well. I have just sold a business that took up a lot of my evening hours and after 12 years of working my butt off to nearly go broke on that one, (although the business itself was successful, just never had the money to do it properly....) I now have time to spare and would rather do this than become a TV zombie.

While I haven't developed a lot of income yet, and didn't really expect to yet I have had some positive moments so far, firstly there are the newsletter signups from my site, where I have been driving traffic from a Facebook page I set up as well. Secondly is the Page 5 ranking on Google for one of my keywords, now just got to work on nudging it up a bit.

Targets

Initially I'd be happy with my first sale or commission check, at least then I would know I have done something right. After that I would like to be making regular money after month 3 (even $100 / month, as long as it was consistent). Once I have achieved a consistent income then I can look to ways of increasing it firstly to $1000 per month then my ultimate goal would be $5,000 month, which would cover our mortgage payments and allow us to keep hold of our small farm which we currently can no longer afford to keep.

I have really enjoyed the last month here, it has demystified the mysterious art of building web-sites and getting traffic to them and I look forward to building a few more.

Thanks to all the other WA Members who have given feedback and answered my questions along the way it has been most appreciated.