Beginner Affiliate Thoughts: Things I Have Learned After (roughly) One Month

I had to check my subscription start date when my wife mentioned that I have been working on my affiliate sites for a little over a month. Well, its true - and that means that it is time for some reflection! I thought I would share my thoughts with the community in case they are helpful to anyone.

• It's not a race

When I started I had this sensation that any time that my site was not up and running was time that a sale could be lost. While you could argue that this is actually true, I think it is more important, potentially more honest, (and less stressful) to have a plan for building your buisness up to the level you want to maintain rather than rushing in to a market with a half baked plan.

• It takes time, planning, and effort

This is an actual business and should be treated as such. You need to spend dedicated time working on your business. You should have a plan with some achievable goals, and you will need to spend actual effort on building your business and planning. You also need downtime! Even if something is super fun - you can get burned out on it.

• Quality in quantity, not just quantity

With the tools that WA provides, it is easy to generate a lot of content very quickly. It is probably tempting to blast a site full of content the first day you set it up. Maybe that will work for some business models, but I think it is more worthwhile to slowly build your content and community. Sites that go for quantity are easily identified and that can break trust.

• Start slow

I was so excited about the opportunity that I took a personal day from my career job to research and build my site. Then I had an idea for anotehr site - so I started building that one too. This repeated a couple of times and I ended up working on 5 sites. This is unsustainable for me and I found that as i added on more sites and more work, the fun decreased and the quality across the sites decreased as well.

• Dont get stuck in ideation

Hot on the heels of starting slow, I had (and continue to have) ideas that sound absolutely amazing. Its really easy for me to get stuck on this point in the process and fail to launch anything at all. At some point you need to just get going and do the dang thing. :)

• You may not need all of those tools

I am a firm believer that there are times when you need to spend money. This is dangerous because people will try to sell you anything and everything nowadays. To make things more complicated, advertising and the fear of missing out is so tuned that you can be convinced that the super keyboard 1k is ESSENTIAL to getting more sales.

• You (probably) wont make a thousand dollars in your first week

I get so many suggestions in all of my feeds for proven methods to make thousands and millions of dollars. Im sure we all get these. Sure, there may be some people who have hit the jackpot quickly, somehow, but I honestly feel like a lot of these things are the same information you can find for free (or common sense things you already know) wrapped up in a colorful package. At worse they are literal scams.

Anyhoo - just thought I would share some of the things I picked up over the last 40 odd days. Hope everyone is having a k