Five Months After Bootcamp, Here's What Surprised Me Most

When I first started the Affiliate Bootcamp, I remember Kyle talking about brands, websites, assets, and the long-term opportunity that comes from building something online.

In fact, I recently found myself revisiting the very first Bootcamp lesson:

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/classes/series/affiliate-bootcamp-your-path-to-becoming-a-super-affiliate/foundations-brand-website-opportunity-math

At the time, I was probably like most people. I was thinking about income!

Some questions that came through my mind when we first started were:

• How long would it take?
• Would affiliate marketing actually work?
• Would I ever earn anything?
• Would anyone ever find my website?

Recently, I went back and looked at some of the work I've done since completing Bootcamp, heck, even from the beginning of when i first started here at Wealthy Affiliate, it made me realize something.

The biggest proof that this works wasn't actually the money.

Don't get me wrong, the commissions matter, same with the contest wins and the affiliate payouts. But looking back, those weren't the first signs that I was making progress. They were actually much smaller than that if I zoom out!

I look at the first article that ranked. Or my first visitor from Google. The first affiliate link click for that matter.

Then there's the first time someone commented on an article and found it helpful (even though that was through site comments, it still mattered).

But here's a bigger one: The first time an affiliate manager reached out to me from a brand i joined.

There's also the first time I realized a piece of content was still generating traffic months after I had written it.

And so on and so forth!

Over the past few years, I've built several websites in different niches. Some have performed better than others. Some are still very much works in progress. But along the way I've had some interesting wins.

One of the more unexpected ones came through LegalShield. They held an affiliate content contest and I entered with an article called "Legal Protection For RVers." I ended up placing second and received a $600 prize.

What stood out wasn't the money.

It was the realization that useful content can create opportunities I never planned for.

Another example came from one of my travel websites.

An article I wrote months earlier eventually led to a Viator booking worth roughly $420 in travel sales and around $34 in commission. I wrote about that in this blog: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/jdenesovych/blog/what-happened-in-december

Again, not life-changing money, but it proved something important.

The content continued working long after I stopped thinking about it.

Now of course, not everything was a win....

I can look at that same travel website, and take the dashboards there that recently showed more than 300 clicks and zero bookings.

Kind of sounds disappointing, doesn't it?

But the more I looked at it, the more I realized it was still valuable information. I know people are finding the content, and they're interested enough to click. That makes the issue not being attention, but conversion, which is a very different problem to solve.

I've also joined affiliate programs that produced almost nothing. I've written articles that never ranked. I've created content that simply missed the mark.

But each and every one of these experiences teaches me something new, and sometimes every day.

Looking back now, I think Bootcamp accomplished something much bigger than helping me earn commissions.

It helped me build assets, not websites. It helped me build:

• Skills.
• Content.
• Experience.
• Relationships.
• Confidence.

A portfolio of work that didn't exist before.

Even publishing my book, Freedom Is The New Rich, probably never would have happened if I hadn't started building online in the first place. Thanks for that insparation Mel Waller!

Anyway, to the point -- IF someone asked me today whether making money online actually works, my answer would be a resulting YES.

For anyone who is curious, I recently documented a much deeper breakdown of this entire journey, including the contest win, affiliate results, failures, and lessons learned along the way:

https://from0to100k.com/what-proof-is-there-that-making-money-online-actually-works/
The exact website I started during BOOTCAMP!