Update #4 : 2 Months After Joining Wealthy Affiliate

264 followers

Updated 4 years ago

Hello there WA Community!

It's been 2 months since I joined WA to get back into online income generation.

Thought I'd make a blog here just to show what I have done and where I am at in the interest of providing some tidbit of insight to others who might be looking ahead.

WHAT HAVE I DONE DURING MY FIRST 2 MONTHS?

Registered a total of 10 domains. Ha ha!

When I get into something I tend to really get into it. And originally I had the idea of this being long-term and needing to build many websites to be sure I can consistently earn at least $1,500 per month income.

Yes, I know that any website can be worked on enough to eventually grow it to make $1,500. And some would even do it easily.

But since I have no idea at this point which ones would most easily do it or which I will enjoy working on the most and I don't like to "put all of my eggs into one basket" I set out with the mindset that I need to build many websites.

I am actively working on 3 websites

Of course, I am not actually building out all 10 at the same time. I wanted to. I tried a few different times to hire article writers to that end. But none of those experiments worked.

So, I accepted I need to write all of the content myself. And that, of course, slows things down a huge amount.

I actually came up with an idea though... I think I can hire out the article writing.

The way to do it imo is to outsource all of the article writing for an entire website. The problem I ran into with hiring article writers is that I didn't like the way they wrote in comparison to the way I write.

The articles had a very different "feel" to them. And they definitely weren't "me". Which, of course, makes perfect sense because I mean... yeah... they really weren't me! lol ;)

Ayway... I will try that sooner or later. Building a website by outsourcing all content on it. Maybe $500 worth of quality original articles. That should get me around 20 solid pages of content.

But for now, I am just writing it all myself. 3 websites.

Well... really 2 websites and 1 blog. I know here the emphasis is on blogs for everything but for my first two I wanted to go with the traditional website style. For the third it is an actual blog.

I might change this later. Should be super easy to convert the websites to blogs if I decide to because with WordPress is just some settings in a theme basically.

How Much Writing Have I Done?

Website #1 Launched Mid September... 12 article pages 13,507 words
Website #2 Launched end September... 5 article pages 5,674 words
Blog #1 Launched first week of October ... 11 posts totaling 19,695 words

TOTAL: 28 articles and 38,876 words

Of course, there was more than that. I didn't count home pages, etc. Plus I also did work on a couple of other websites. I am pretty sure in total it is close to 50,000 words. BUT, I will only count these 3 websites.

Overall, I consider this to be very solid progress for 2 months. Because, as we all know, there is other work needed such as researching to identify the niches, the key phrases to write topics around, etc.

And there is all of the work to do privacy policy and GDPR compliance, etc. A lot of nonsense work but is necessary.

Researched & Tested a Lot of Stuff

I also researched to find a lot of different paid traffic sources. And I tested these things. I used my WA affiliate link as a test. First I sent traffic directly to WA pages. Then I built landing pages that pre-sell the WA membership and I sent traffic to the landing pages.

Some of the things I have tested...

Various PPC such as eLeavers.com

Various Guaranteed Visitors - Yeah I know this is junk traffic but I kept looking for some with high niche targeting and tested a few of them. It is all a waste because is expired domain traffic redirecting people (or bots lol).

When I was into this many years ago there was quality traffic available because people would buy expired domains and instead of redirecting visitors they would display several different text links on the pages of the expired domains. And then visitors had to actually click on one of those to visit your website.

Although I come across those websites from time to time I have not found any service selling expired domain traffic using this highly targeted click a text link ad model

My Lead Gen Secret - I started looking into autoresponders because for the other half of my business model I wanted to start on building email lists. I came across this MLGS service. Basically you pay $60 the first month and $30 per month after. For that, they deliver 100 opt-in business opportunity seekers per day to your email list inside MLGS. And there is a built-in emailer in there to contact them.

I was leary of trying it because I hate spam and it seemed very suspect to me. I mean sure it is a co-reg but still getting 3,000 leads per month (6.000 after you refer one person to MLGS) for only $30... that is 1 cent per lead. I personally know of no way to generate a real lead for a penny. At least 50 cents and more likely $1 or more.

Anyway, I tried it for 2 days... sent out one email to 200 people... not one person clicked through to my landing page. I canceled it. I canceled it because I felt uneasy about using it to begin with (I have no idea where the leads came from) and in any case they seem to be completely uninterested in actual real build an online business stuff.

I do know on YT there are many people showing results. Although I don't interpet the results the same way as they do. Like I saw one guy happily showing the $22 commission he made from mailing out to 7,000 people and making 1 Clickbank product sale. To me it looks like most people making some money from it are doing so by selling the service itself to the leads.

Solo Ads - I tested a couple solo ad mailings from Udimi. 0 sales from those tests as well.

Other stuff - I looked into many other things that I don't even remember.

My Online Income Plan Continues to Evolve

I see building these niche websites through article writing as a long-term thing. I know it works because, as I have mentioned before, I did it many years ago. But it takes time. In fact, seems to take much longer now than it did back then.

So, I work on this stuff of course. But since it takes so dang long the other half of my income plan is to work on more direct stuff.

Basically, I want to spend most of my time focused only on tasks that earn me money.

And the way I see it that comes down to basically these 5 things...

1. Building a landing page
2. Driving traffic to the landing page
3. Collecting opt-ins and building email lists
4. Marketing to those people providing value and selling affiliate products.
5. Supporting them helping them out as needed AFTER the sales.

I think this is a much simpler model. In some ways at least. Because once it is all set up the focus is on just driving traffic to the landing pages and then building trust with the people who opted-in by providing value and then letting them know about products and services that should help them.

And, like I said, the other half... building these niche authority websites is such a long process where even if I bust my ass on it now I am not likely to see any income until at least 6 months anyway.

Also, I don't know about others but I find this very boring at times. Sometimes I have to really force myself to just write write write on these niche websites. It is not something I enjoy doing. I don't want to do it. But I make myself do it for what it will bring 6 months or so from now.

I think it is because of being constrained to the specific topics centering around key phrases. Those are laser focused topics that other people have an interest in and are searching for information on.

Actually, I think drilling down into that more... the root of it is because I end up with many different key phrases that are all basically the same thing in the end. And that is what makes it boring. Writing about the exact same topics again and again just because the key phrases are great and the wording of each is different but of course trying to not cover the topic the same way as I have already covered it in previous articles.

So... I need to find a solution for that. Come up with a process. Like identify a 10 to 15 different ways to write about a given topic.

ANYWAY... I ALSO DECIDED THIS TIME AROUND I AM DOING IT DIFFERENTLY!

Many years ago, I used Amazon and other affiliate programs and despite making a fair number of sales the commissions were all peanuts.

Again... I don't know about the rest of you... but in my firsthand experience if I am selling anything that has less than a $50 commission it just isn't worth it. UNLESS it is monthly recurring revenue.

Many years ago I sold many items... sometimes hundreds per month from a website and commissions ranged from 50 cents to $8. That was quite simply... stupid. A waste of time. I was generating sales and being paid crumbs to do so.

I won't do it again. It is fine if you just want to make some extra spending money. But for an actual real online income that is meaningful I think a person just cannot waste their time on such nonsense.

For me, it is either monthly recurring revenue of at least $10... or higher ticket sales paying one time commissions of $50, ideally $100, or more per sale.

Think of it like this... you do all of this work... and you wait 6 months... and then you are happy to make 50 sales in a month that averaged $3 each. Are you really happy with that?

To me that is disappointing. On the other hand, if you did all of this work, waited 6 months to get any results and started making 15 sales per month but each sale averaged $10 per month recurring and people stayed with the service for 3 months on average now you are making 3 TIMES as much money with about 1/3 of the sales.

But imagine same scenario and you made only 2 sales per month and each averaged $375. Now you have made 5 TIMES as much with only 2 sales instead of 50.

MAKE THE SALES COUNT! MAKE THEM MEANINGFUL!

I learned that the hard way years ago.

Other Stuff I Came Across During My Research

I came across a good number of products and services during my research.

I will list those below.

Keep in mind I have NOT personally tested these firsthand yet. So don't blame me if you try one and it doesn't work out. I am just sharing what I found with the hope it will be of interest and help to someone. These were things I was looking for. I am guessing others may be interested in such things as well. And these can give a jump start on your own research.

In the end, you will need to do your own research and make the choices that are best for you.

I cover things I find continually on my actual blog (outside of WA) but will share some of the things that might be most useful here.

AUTORESPONDERS

AIOP - Response $11.50 per month regardless of list size or number of lists
TrafficWave $18 per month regardless of list size or number of lists
MyCapturePage $20 per month pre-built very high quality landing pages included

LEGAL / BUSINESS SUPPORT

# Hastag Legal From what I found in my research this is higher quality service than the other popular legal site that I cannot remember the name of at the moment.

"PUBLIC FACING" TELEPHONE #

These days it seems like it is becoming standard for people to plaster their phone # all over their websites, FB pages, YT videos and of course in emails is needed.

I don't know about all of the other people but I consider the practice to be a big risk. First, for identity theft and second it seems like a great way to get masses of spam calls. Kind of odd too because not that many years ago places were always warning about not listing your email or phone online where they could be scraped.

Anyway, I knew I needed to find solutions for listing what I call "public facing" telephone number and address.

Here are two services for the telephone that look good to me. Again, I haven't tried them yet. Just found them a few days ago.

YouMail Second Phone Number $6 per month
Sideline $10 per month

"PUBLIC FACING" ADDRESS

Of course, you could get a po box for this but sometimes you need to list a street address and these places have that covered.

iPostal1 $10 per month
PhysicalAddress $8 per month
PostScanMail $10 per month
AnytimeMailBox $7 per month

Profit and Loss So Far

September -$545 (many domains, WA membership for a year, ad tests, article writing, etc)
October -$114 (couple more domains and ad testing)

TOTAL: -$659

So far so good! lol I am serious about that. I have done a lot, tested a lot, bought a lot of domains, etc. As time goes on money will probably be consistent around $300 per month or so on advertising costs and monthly service fees. Way it is. Building a business takes money.