2018 Progress Review

byKettei

1.4K followers

Updated 5 years ago

I decided about a month ago that I was going to review the last year to see how I did and how I could improve for the coming year.

Other members are doing similar things, in some cases reporting impressive five figure results. Mine was much more humble than that but it was still an encouraging start.

A little background to my year

Although I joined WA in 2016, I didn't really do much here. It wasn't until May 2018 that I came back with a make or break attitude and started doing the training in earnest.

The trouble is, my wife is away at university for up to two weeks at a time (she's training to be a medical professional) so I spend most of my time looking after an autistic five year old and her three year old sister... which I have to fit my 'day' job as a web-developer around.

This leaves me with very little time to do anything else and sometimes it's all been too much and my WA activity has declined as a result - I was just too busy between August and November to do anything on my affiliate websites.

I was also trying something new in those intervening months that might have distracted me too (more on that below - it's going to increase my income this year).

I guess that means that my 2018 was actually just May, June, July and December.

This might sound like I'm making excuses for poor performance but actually I see it as a really positive thing - in just four months, I actually achieved quite a lot. I didn't make much money but I did progress towards making 2019 successful.

My WA Blogs

I have two blogs that I'm currently working on. One is my niche website and the other is what you might call my WA Bootcamp website.

The niche website is a bit stagnant at the moment as I've been focusing on the bootcamp website since November (as in, I literally started the bootcamp website in November) so it needs some seriously new content if I'm going to start building traffic for it.

The bootcamp website is starting to look pretty good. It's now got ten posts on it, eight of which were written since the start of November.

• Niche website - 7 posts
• Bootcamp website - 10 posts
  

My income streams

I currently have side income from three main sources (four if you include the language tuition but I don't count that as it's "active" income that involves a direct exchange of my time for an hourly rate).

They are:

1. Wealthy Affiliate (training and referrals)
2. Skillshare (I have just 1 class on there)
3. Amazon KDP (paperback publishing)
   

Wealthy Affiliate
This year I actually achieved two referrals. I assume they were from the detailed review that I wrote about WA on my bootcamp blog. Only one of those referrals completed their profile, resulting in 2 credits ($1.00).

I also created four training modules that I'm pretty proud of:

• How to make a tough choice with the Weighted Decision Matrix
• Wordpress Pages & Posts with SEO secret sauce!
• How to submit your site to DuckDuckGo
• How to overcome the fear of failure

I didn't create them with any intention of earning money from them (to be honest, I didn't expect them to) as I just wanted to help people so it was a nice surprise when each of them were popular enough to rank, resulting in a further 40 credits ($20.00).

I didn't make any money from my affiliate websites. I did make an Amazon sale earlier in the year but my affiliate account was closed a few months later because it didn't meet the minumum sales threshold so that was lost. To be blunt, I hadn't written enough quality posts to build up the necessary trust and traffic.

Skillshare
Skillshare is a teaching platform that anyone can create classes on. You're paid for every minute that subscribed members watch of your classes.

I have one class on there and it's consistently producing a small passive income of $20 to $40 each month.

Amazon KDP
Amazon KDP is a publishing platform that enables anyone to create a paperback book and publish it across the Amazon network (i.e. all their global sites).

In July I started an experiment to see if I could make money publishing low-content books on there which has resulted in a modest return of around $5 a month (I've been selling 5 a month on average). This is actually encouraging as I didn't expect to sell anything and I have a very small catalog so far.

A low content book is a book like a notebook, log book or diary that the owner generally writes or colors in. They're called low-content books because the amount of text in the book is a lot less than a normal book.

Stats

Here's the statistics for the year:

• WA Income : $21.00
  
• Skillshare Income : $385.72
• Amazon KDP Income : $29.97 (including non-US currencies)
• Total Income : $436.69
• Total blog posts : 17

My Entrepreneurial Plans for 2019

I've had a small amount of success in 2018. Most of my WA income has actually been based on training published here rather than referrals but I only really started working on my bootcamp website in November so that's to be expected.

My niche affiliate website has stagnated for months so again, the lack of success from that source is also to be expected.

Here's my main goals for 2019:

1. Publish at least two posts to my niche website every month
2. Publish at least four posts a month to my bootcamp site, preferably more!
3. Post social media alerts for each post (Facebook, Twitter, & Pinterest)
4. Extend my existing class on Skillshare
5. Publish a new class to Skillshare
6. Continue creating new books for Amazon KDP
   

Based on my limited success in 2018, in spite of the time pressures and limited production, I expect 2019 to show an increase in production and resulting return.