Sixteenth Month of WA

Sixteenth Month of WA - Limitations

647 followers

4 years ago

Here I am in China, relieved that I can still access Wealthy Affiliate and the majority of my websites. At first, I thought I was done for when all my VPNs stopped working. The Chinese government only recently upped its firewall again and it made just about all the VPNs useless. I thought it was the end of the world. No Instagram, no Facebook, no YouTube, no Pinterest, no Medium, everything Google related and my online school courses are completely blocked.

Luckily, Wealthy Affiliate, my websites, and email marketing tool are not blocked which means I am not completely unable to do anything.

Thus, here I am in Changsha, Hunan, China writing my progress report. Check out last month's post if you haven't: Fifteenth Month of WA - Chugging Along

The Stats Off The Top Of My Head

Since Google and all the social media I use are completely blocked, it's difficult for me to come up with exact numbers. The numbers off the top of my head are somewhat accurate though.

For my Get Good At Badminton website, things are progressing well. My traffic numbers continue to increase, and I'm earning a little more from Adsense every day.

I'm starting to average over 200 people everyday and making about $0.10 per day. I haven't made any sales via Amazon Associates however, but I do see a few clicks everyday.

The website redesign plan has been working fairly well. Posts that formerly ranked on the second page of Google are being pushed to the first page and being seen more. I'm starting to get more organic comments on my website and a lot more clicks on my links as well.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen as much progress to the orginal main goals of decreasing bounce rate and increasing conversions as things have remained stagnant with no affiliate commissions and a bounce rate of 80%.

I am still working on step 2 of the plan where I make my original content better, but I moved into step 3 a little bit by reintroducing a few different types of ads.

The ads have been working pretty well increasing my revenue by a little bit without cluttering my site up.

I'm still writing new blog posts although not as consistently as I hoped so. I'm writing a lot on Medium being able to write one post everyday until I came to China where Medium is blocked.

But I got a few posts out and I hope to keep generating more posts.

As for social media, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all remained relatively stagnant. Pinterest I don't remember, but YouTube just keeps getting better.

I haven't posted another video yet, but the initial video I posted on my YouTube channel is at more than 22k views now. And it just keep increasing!

Last month I was able to record two 10-minute videos of myself which I can potentially use later on. I'm still working on a set-up that I like especially regarding the angle viewers watch me play.

Right now, I'm in China and I actually have the opportunity to train with some provincial players here. I'm hoping I'm able to record some footage to use when I come back.

For the other two sites, I can't say much as I haven't really checked up on them. My website in the MMO niche still hasn't got Google Analytics installed yet.

But sometimes I do like to check the Wealthy Affiliate affiliate program stats and I see people that have viewed my review and clicked through the link. No one has ever signed up unfortunately.

Majority of these viewers actually come from my badminton site. One of my posts on how professional badminton players make money is ranked on the first page of Google and gets a lot of views.

I checked up on that specific post and added a small section at the end about how my readers could make money playing badminton without being a professional player and linked my external Wealthy Affiliate review to it.

And thus, a website that's only 1-2 months old gets consistent daily traffic. I need to keep posting on my MMO website to make sure it also starts ranking organically :)

Changes At Wealthy Affiliate

My rank dropped quite a bit. I'm no longer top 200 as I sit at rank 304 at the time of writing this post. I'm also no longer a certified commentor.

But I did create my very first training at WA. It's about productivity and how you can do more in every workday.

I explained 7 of my personal productivity tips in the training which you can check out here: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/kevin-shans-product...

It is my first training, so I would be grateful for any feedback you can give me.

I do plan to create more training too as I want to share some of the things I learned on this blogging journey to help others succeed.

I'm planning on making another training on building habits as I continue to get better at consistently writing everyday and another training on productivity as there are a few tips that I wanted to talk about that I didn't talk about in the first training I made.

Depending on how my website redesign plan goes, in the future I will also talk about a bit more technical things more focused towards blogging. But that's for the future!

So although my rank has dropped and I lost certified commentor status, I feel like I still made progress by producing my first ever training.

Goals And Plans For December

This is the final month of 2019.

If you follow me on Medium, and scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll find a blog post titled "2019 New Year's Resolution."

I recently reread that post and I laughed out loud.

So many things I wanted to do and I got none of them done. Making 5 figures in 2019 was one of the big goals that I never accomplished.

With 2019 coming to an end and my sites only making a few bucks a month, 5 figures is a number quite out of reach.

Being able to make just $100 would certainly be glorious.

But 5 figures, 6 figures, 7 figures, or even 8 figures isn't out of reach. With enough discipline, motivation, and work ethic, I can certainly reach those goals.

First, I need to set myself up for success.

The plans have all been laid out. The month of December will be focused on creating my assets, self-discipline, and executing my plans.

I will be spending a lot of time writing e-books, training, blog posts, and automated email sequences for KAZSMoney.

Most of these e-books and blog posts will be things that provide value to whoever I refer into Wealthy Affiliate and the automated email sequences will help send them out.

In addition, I will continue writing blog posts for Get Good At Badminton.

Unfortunately, since all the social media I use are blocked, I cannot share any of the potential new posts I make on those sites. No YouTube videos either which is a huge loss.

Medium is blocked as well so I cannot continue my streak of writing one blog post everyday on that site. Luckily my websites and Wealthy Affiliate still work so I can continue building a habit of blogging.

Chinese Social Media Sites

Most social media sites are blocked in mainland China which is a huge limitation.

Before I realized that Wealthy Affiliate worked in China, I was entertaining myself via some Chinese social media sites, notably Weibo and DouYin (Tik Tok).

I noticed that there were a few people advertising on these social media sites and I was pretty interested by the potential of these social media sites.

Especially since my biggest site is my badminton site and China has a huge market for badminton. What if I could tap into the Chinese market and siphon a ton of traffic?

Of course, I would need to find a plugin or something to automatically translate my website based on geographic location or make a sub-domain that shows a Chinese version of my site.

Baidu Search Engine

You know how in English speaking countries, we generally say, "Google it?" In China, people say "Baidu it" instead.

I've become more interested in the Baidu search engine since Google is blocked here.

With so many people using Baidu, it would be a waste not to rank my website on that search engine especially since my niche is more popular in China.

When I have spare time, I will spend some time diving deep into the SEO of Baidu and see what kind of things I could do to further improve my website reach.