Trials and Tribulations at Wealthy Affiliates

byImpi

300 followers

Updated 10 years ago

Without a doubt the last few weeks have been quite demanding and at times, stressful. When I joined the Wealthy Affiliate program I was very much aware that I was entering uncharted territory. That in itself didn’t bother me too much. I have always felt comfortable with taking the plunge into the unknown, so to say and being able to keep my head above the water. If others could do it, then so could I.

What I didn,t count on though, was the fine grey areas with regards to the legal ramifications around intellectual property on the internet. How many of us have gone into some site or other that purports to offer free images to the user, only to find out that the critical ‘keyword’ of free, was hijacked and incorporated into the general term ‘free royalties’? How frustrating after a good half an hour searching for that ideal image for that special blog or page on your website, only to find out that you are now expected to pay both money and attribution for the image. Until a few weeks ago, if I had liked an image on the net then I would simply save or copy that image. Now that I am aware of copyright issues, this simple pleasure has turned into a “chore”.

How many of us have read those articles that says you can build a site in a matter of hours and that it costs absolutely nothing. It’s free! I was champing at the bit because I had heard about how easy it was to make money on the internet and that there was a gold mine out there waiting to be plundered. Well, I did a bit of homework and dived into those muddy waters. Amazingly, I didn’t drown. I realized that a website didn’t magically appear after a few hours of keyboard work and that when the initial format was published for the first time, it was far from spectacular. I did however, experience a great sense of achievement when I could key in my site URL and see my content published on the world wide web. Thank goodness for all those excellent, informative classroom exercises hosted by Wealthy Affiliates.

I’ll tell you another thing, nothing is for free! I quickly learnt that you have to pay for your domain name and the hosting of your site, especially as an affiliate associate. I can live with that though. Then came the unexpected expenses. If you have any intention of making headway in this industry, then you need to have access to a few critical but essential programs. An example of such a program is one that provides you with invaluable keyword data. I now use Jaaxy and its data has been invaluable. Not free though but I willingly pay the $19 per month for this invaluable service.

Content, content and more content. The old grey matter was absolutely smoking with this input. I absolutely hated it when I started a new class in the Wealthy Affiliate program only to be instructed to write a new post or page using a new keyword. I have never put together so many posts in such a short time and only now, weeks down the line do I realize how important it was for me to do this. Ranking is what it is all about and good quality content equates to rankings in Google.

Making money is the name of the game and to do this I have to advertise products or services or both on my site. I eagerly applied to a number of affiliate programs that were relevant to my niche and was devastated when I received emails from them stating that my application was declined. My confidence took quite a knock but I took a good critical look at my site and worked a bit harder at injecting relevant, quality content into the new blog posts. I reapplied to certain affiliate programs and was relieved to be accepted by them. Even some of the programs that had initially rejected my application, contacted me stating that they had now accepted my site.

Never in my life have I had to keep track of so many usernames and passwords. I specifically went out and bought one of those small, hardcover alphabetical pocket notebooks into which I could capture all this important information. To get anywhere with a monetized site, one has to join numerous affiliate programs, social networks, etc. I thought about entrusting my laptop to capturing all this data to memory but then I recalled that my last laptop was stolen out of the house late last year. Now I resort to the arduous task of manually keying every username and password into the site I am entering. If I ever lost my magic black pocket book I would be in deep depression and my business put on hold for heaven knows how long.

Every day I access my affiliate tracking programs to see if my site has had any traffic and to see whether or not I have made any money. How depressing to know that you don’t even rank and all that money is going somewhere else. Every now and again, I find myself overjoyed by someone having accessed my google adsense advert and see that there are a few more cents in the bank. Am I rich yet? Not by a long shot. It is still early days and I realize that I still have a long, long way to go. Most importantly, I am beginning to understand the nature of this beast and believe me, I will overcome!