Fourteenth Month of WA - Really Amazon?

bykevinzshan

647 followers

5 years ago

Hi WA friends! It's me Kevin back with another monthly update. My fourteenth month at WA has passed and it was certainly ones with lots of ups and downs.

Here's last month's post if you want to read it: Thirteenth Month of WA - Consistency

Before we get started, I'm just wondering how's it been for everyone? In Calgary (AB, Canada), we've gotten some serious snowfall 4 days ago. Everything is melting right now, though and the weather is quite sunny and nice.

Just wanted to talk about it a little since everyone else has been talking about Autumn while we are heading into Winter already...

Back on topic, though. Let's get started!

Progress And Numbers With GGAB

I started September pretty good. I was posting once or twice on my badminton blog everyday, training consistently, and posting on Instagram and other social media a few times a day.

Things were pretty good as a result. I was averaging about 120 people everyday, about 10 cents per day from Google Adsense and I made a few Amazon affiliate sales.

My Instagram now sits at about 2,100 followers. My Facebook and Twitter both increased slightly, and although my Pinterest seems to be down in monthly viewers from 12k to 9k, many more of my pins are being clicked through.

After that, though, things went downhill.

I got hit in the face with a lot of stuff. Personal stuff such as catching a sinus infection that rendered me useless for a whole 2 weeks and tying up loose ends from school.

I didn't post anything for a whole two weeks straight. No blogs, no social posts, no nothing.

On top of that, just recently my Amazon account has been reviewed as well and I got my account closed again.

They said my posts did not comply with the terms and services and pointed out my affiliate disclosure as an example.

What I think was the problem was that I had YOURWEBSITE.com in one of the paragraphs instead of getgoodatbadminton.com. Just one time too!

So I changed it and emailed Amazon again hoping that they would also give me more details about what was wrong with my site should there be anything else. And if there wasn't anything wrong, I emailed in hopes my account would be reopened.

And all I got was, "If you really fixed your issues, you can reapply at Amazon Associates website. Unfortunately we cannot reopen closed accounts."

Really unlucky. This would be my fourth time reapplying and I would have to change all the links again.

It's quite unfortunate, but it is life. I reapplied and actually spent 3 hours this morning replacing all my old affiliate links.

I will probably do a lot of reading and implementing of things that will make sure my site qualifies. I don't want to spend another few hours replacing links for something that could have been added on my website so easily.

On a more positive note, when I recently checked up again on my site's analytics, the amount of people visiting my site has been going up. I'm now averaging about 150 people a day and I see spikes to more than 200 occasionally.

And this is without posting stuff on social media or sending out posts to my email list.

I did notice a few issues with my site, though. From my analytics, I actually have a bounce rate of 85%. That's up from the 80% I had before. Session duration was no better either at 59 seconds compared to 1 min 30 seconds average before too.

Part of the reason is because I wasn't using social media and email marketing (those viewers tend to stay longer on the site and not leave right away) which used to be making my average better.

It is, however, troubling to see these kinds of statistics.

And after looking further in, it's like there's a few posts that are the main cause of this problem. Like one of my posts have a 97% bounce rate and another has a 2 second average session duration compared to other posts that have been okay at around 70% bounce rate and 5 to 8 minute session durations.

It will be a good idea to tackle some of these posts individually and improve them. Perhaps reread and edit them to become more interesting.

On the idea of going back to older posts and revamping them, it will also be a good time to improve my website SEO as well.

I will probably add some keywords and make some of the posts longer in general, especially with the new Google update valuing longer form content.

Many of my reviews are sitting below 1,000 words and I really want to take them up to at least 1,200.

A full website redesign will also be in question, but likely set for a later time in December or the 2020 New Year mainly because I'm lacking funding to tackle this project and that I want to create a few of my own products and let them become my main source of monetization.

Currently both Amazon and Google Adsense is unreliable. Like mentioned above, my Amazon account has been canceled 3 times already and there's no saying that it wouldn't be canceled again.

Google Adsense has been messing with me too. During the beginning of the month, although ads appeared in the sidebars of my website, I wasn't being paid for any of the impressions or clicks. Once I went back into the widgets section and pasted new code in, everything was completely fine again.

If stuff like this keeps happening, though, I would be in trouble if I had to rely on Google Adsense.

So when I redesign my site, I want to optimize it better for mobile, SEO, and speed and also design it in a way that leads people into my own products more.

But anyways, those are some things that should be said in the goals section.

Progress At Wealthy Affiliate

Normally, I would go into my goals section now, but having spend so much time at Wealthy Affiliate everyday compared to before, there are certainly things to be said about my progress on this platform.

If you have been following me or read some of my recent posts here, you'll notice that I have reached both top 200 and I have gotten a certified commentor status.

The ranking doesn't matter as much as the certified commentor status. Becoming certified has actually open some ideas for side hustles that I can do to support my businesses since they're not earning money right now.

From commenting on other people's websites, I've earned $6.00 this month. Not even close to the $47 that covers the WA subscription cost that I dreamed about, but it is certainly better than surveys.

It's pretty interesting exploring the WA platform. In the future, I will probably continue to update everyone on how everything has been going.

Plans and Goals

Well I ditched the videos. One blog post every day was good until I fell sick. Every month it's a learning experience about myself and what I can do.

So after learning that videos are super slow for me right now, I decided that I'm going to put all my efforts into blogging first.

Goals will continue like last month with a few additions.

1. Continue Writing 1 Blog Post Per Day
2. Edit previous posts and improve readibility, call to actions, and SEO
3. Start developing my badminton courses

And that's it for this month! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below. Have a great day!