Made a sale and wrote a second novel

byJukkah

2K followers

5 years ago

Phewww it's been a busy first quarter of the year. I've made some decent progress, so I decided I would share my experience so far with the WA community.

Three big things happened since the last post:

1. I started a completely new site.

The new site is actually my fifth, or seventh site if you count discontinued ones. Third if you count only the ones I've put some real effort into. Someone a bit brighter than me might have taken the hint from the universe and given up long time ago. Fortunately I'm stubborn.

I know it's recommended to work on one site until you get results, but to be honest I've ended up stuck with all my previous sites and this new niche felt like something I could write day in day out. And I did.

2. I wrote over 100k words in less than three months

In my last post around Christmas I celebrated hitting 100k words on the content I've created through Site Content. I also decided I need to write more. A lot more.

The new site was something I felt passionate about and knowledgeable enough to write a post daily and so I did for the whole of January and some of February. Some days I wrote two posts.

I was at around 70k words at the end of January when my writing started to really drag. I realized I can't keep up the pace with a busy day job if I want to have any life outside of work and online business. Then the big thing happened.

3. I made my first sale!

There it was. I had just re-registered for Amazon Associates (made no sales in 6 months on previous site) a week before and put some links on couple of the posts on my new site.

I was consistently getting one or two visits of organic traffic and some from social media and WA so I wasn't expecting to make any sales just yet.

There was a spike of traffic on one day that I couldn't really make out from Search Console data where it came from. Likely someone shared my post on social media.

When I logged on to my Amazon account I found out someone had bought and exercise bike costing $159 earning me a whopping $7.16! Nothing to write home about really, but it made my day and I managed to keep on banging out daily posts for couple weeks more. This was my first online affiliate sale!

I even ran some Facebook ads to get some traffic to my new posts but unfortunately they have not produced any sales since. Some clicks though.

It took me the whole month of March to write around 20k words, the same I wrote in almost a week in February. I found myself running out of things to write, but also losing motivation to write.

My brain feels like a dried raisin some days. I struggle to produce readable text constantly and end up procrastinating way too often. The complete opposite of what I was just few weeks ago.

Come to think of it, writing this kind of personal post feels really refreshing and effortless actually.

What next?

When I got started with my new site in February, I decided I would keep it super simple and just focus on content until I'd hit 100k words and then I would redesign the site and maybe do some brand building and outreaching. I guess that time has come.

And not a moment too soon I have to add. The daily writing was really getting arduous and stressful and I think I'll have to take a short break from writing until I find my motivation again.

My biggest fear is that letting myself breathe for a while, I will lose all momentum, a year will pass and I will forget the site. I guess I'll just have to keep my eye on the goal. It's a process and now I know for absolute certainty this stuff works, I just need to have fate my hard work will eventually produce results.

Anyways, I feel a bit stuck with my site and my day job is getting me down (don't let me get started, you wouldn't believe the drama) as well, so any encouragement and tips where to take things next would be much appreciated!

What would you do next?