Scaling To $1M Per Year? (Back After 3 Years Away)

bykevinzshan

752 followers

4 months ago

Hi Wealthy Affiliates! It's been a long time since I was last actively engaging in this community.

It's been about three years since I last posted here on WA, and a lot has happened since then. Between blowing another $10K on a failed e-commerce store and a brief stint trying to make an architecture YouTube channel, I've found new paths in writing about investing and making badminton YouTube videos.

I also just got back from a 10-month trip in Southeast Asia, with many new insights gained during and after the trip that have ultimately brought me back to WA.

Writing About Investments

I always loved talking about investing, and what started out as my personal investing stories on Medium evolved into my full-time job last year due to Seeking Alpha.

I had improved my skills to the point where Seeking Alpha accepted my articles and made it possible for me to write about investments full-time if I had wanted. Depending on the article, I earned a flat $45-85 on top of variable earnings that came from how many people read my articles.

If I had done really well and written about popular investments, I could often earn $100-200 per article or even more. $700 in one month from my article was my record.

Unknowingly, I had finally broken the initial goal I set when I first joined WA in 2018. I was a high school kid back then, and all I wanted was to make $1000 from blogging every month.

It took me longer than expected, but I have hit that goal plus more. And while the goal wasn't accomplished on WA, it does finally feel like I have something solid going for me online.

The only problem now, however, is that the jump from $1000 per month to $1M per year is a steep one that will require a far different strategy from me writing on Seeking Alpha.

My WA-Hosted Income Investment Blog

For some context, I went to Southeast Asia to play badminton. My whole reasoning for joining WA and learning how to make money online seven years ago had always been to fund my badminton pursuits.

That has not changed.

My trip to Southeast Asia gave me my first taste of the freedom working online can offer. It was amazing seeing how I could earn money while traveling through Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.

There was a major problem, though.

My online earnings had not reached the state where I could only work a few hours a week and sustain my lifestyle, and I needed that if I wanted to train effectively.

Instead, I ended up spreading myself too thin and failing to meet my expectations both financially and badminton-wise. The five-hour intense training sessions would make me too tired to work, but my financial situation forced me to work and led me into a brutal cycle where I never properly recovered and failed to do my best in either activity.

Those were the experiences that gave me a direction and philosophy that income investing plus having some side hustles (usually online) was the key to living the life I wanted.

And that's what brought me back to WA.

Writing on Seeking Alpha is great, but I am limited. The audience I build is limited to that platform, and I cannot do things like build an email list or recommend them products as an affiliate. I'm also limited by the content I write where articles must generally focus exclusively on one or two tickers and offer in-depth analysis.

If I'm writing on my own website, however, I get more control over those activities, and it could be equally as profitable.

In the last year, while I was writing for Seeking Alpha, I also became a Seeking Alpha affiliate. A few Medium articles I wrote did lead to the occasional affiliate sale and showed me the potential of what could be if my traffic stream was steady and consistent.

I was also deploying a strategy where I reposted my Medium articles on another website and locked the content to email subscribers. Essentially, to read my article, you could either be a Medium member or subscribe to my email list.

It was a move that had great success. Despite only writing on Medium sporadically, I built an email list with a few hundred subscribers using this strategy, and what worked great was then sending them my Seeking Alpha articles in affiliate links.

Now that I'm back in Canada, my goal is to build on this strategy. I'll be putting badminton on the back burner for a little bit and spend more time building out my whole income investing business.

Becoming More Active On WA

What building out my income investing business really means is that I'll be expanding beyond Seeking Alpha.

Seeking Alpha is not the only affiliate product I can or should promote.

The goal of spending more time on my own website is to promote other products as well. Wealthy Affiliate is one of the platforms I plan to recommend to my audience.

Naturally, that'll mean I'll be more active here on WA again, and I hope I can share and help everyone learn just as much as I learn from everyone's own experiences here. It never stops to amaze me in how Wealthy Affiliate has continually been one of the best places to learn how to build a business online despite the rapidly changing world.