Tenth Month of WA - Slow Movement

647 followers

5 years ago

Hey Wealthy Affiliate members, it's been almost a full year in this program now! This is my tenth month of WA and it has become a tradition for me to document what I have done.

Here's last month's post if you want to read it: Ninth Month of WA - Mixed Feelings

Throughout my other months, I would always post some updates regarding all the sites I own no matter how much work was done on them. But after reading some of the comments of my last post, I decided to take some of the advice and focus solely on one thing. So only updates about one site today because nothing was done on the other sites.

Progress and Numbers

Let's start with the numbers and progress on my badminton site, Get Good At Badminton.

If you haven't read already, I made a post on Wealthy Affiliate regarding my first Amazon affiliate sale. Although it was only $0.67, it was still a breakthrough that helped clear many doubts I had with Wealthy Affiliate.

However, the first affiliate commission happened early in the month and I haven't had any other sales. I still need two more sales to retain my position in the Amazon Associates program and that deadline is coming up in about a month.

Google Adsense is also marginally better. For most of the month, I was getting the same amount of money as last month, around $0.03 everyday. Looking at the last few months of May though, I do feel like improvements are happening. Right now, my average is starting to become more like $0.05 daily.

Not much, but everyone starts somewhere.

I speculate that the main reason why I'm not consistently getting sales is because my traffic has remained relatively stagnant since the last month.

Sure, I did have spikes with one day in May being my highest number of visitors at over 100 and two or so other days with 80 users. But other than those days, I sit at around 40 users daily.

It doesn't help either that my session duration is extremely low at around 1 minute average and that my bounce rate is abnormal at 85%. So in reality, only like 5 of the 40 users everyday actually read my posts.

Now before, you comment about how my posts are probably un-engaging or low quality, looking at my Search Console performance and Google Analytics has data that tells me why my averages are so low.

I will get into that later. First, social media reports.

Social Media

All of my social media has seen improvements. My Facebook and Twitter have had miniscule gains of one to two followers but Pinterest and Instagram have been much better.

Although Pinterest did not get the dramatic increase of 4k extra viewers, it did gain a lot more followers and still got monthly viewers up to 10.1k from 8.5k. There were more link clicks and repins but it did not significantly affect my traffic.

Instagram is the same thing. Increase in followers and likes, but not much increase in link clicks. I did get a dramatic increase though from 83 followers, with 54 posts to 491 followers with 99 posts. There are a lot more comments and engagement on my posts as well now.

All would be smooth sailing except for the recent copyright infringement notice I received.

Just a few days ago, I got a copyright infringement notice from Instagram saying that I was posting things that Star India Private Limited owned. I am extremely pissed off from this.

Because one, I did have notices saying that if anyone would like me to take down things due to reasons, they can directly contact me. And two, Instagram banned my account for three days and took down 7 of my posts that were all driving my page up.

But there are more reasons to be angry about this.

I researched this company, and it seems like they have been making copyright claims on many small channels. They're basically corporate bullies out to crush small business owners like us. It's also highly speculative on whether they actually own the content I posted. I got those videos from the BWF YouTube channel which Star India has no holdings in at all.

And then when I reached out to contact them, they do not respond as well. Other channels who had the same issues also found themselves with no response when they contacted Star India as well.

But I can't do much here. The company is a subsidary of Disney.

I just have to bid my time and be more careful when I post things on Instagram. I am also attempting to get my own media rights to actually have leverage in the future.

Posts and Rankings

Alright, back to the actual blog.

I will finally explain my phenomenally high bounce rate and low session duration.

It all started with the days that I spiked in visitors. What I found was that they all went to my Yonex BG66 Ultimax Badminton String Review. Good right? More people to my review, more potential buyers...

But that wasn't the case. I actually ranked number two for a different keyword, the BG66 Brilliant, a badminton string that has yet to come out. Because I used the word brilliant in my review and my post was already targeting Yonex BG66, my post happened to rank at number two on Google.

Which meant that all those visitors did not get what they were looking for and thus clicked off very fast. The data follows this trend as well.

My other posts that were getting clicks from a keyword that they actually targeted had significantly higher session durations and lower bounce rate. The posts were mostly around 3-7 minutes average session duration and 40% bounce rate. Pretty average results.

But because that one post was sitting at 97% bounce rate and 30s average session duration, it significantly dragged the average down.

Just a funny little story I thought I would share.

What I actually did this month was fairly normal. I stayed relatively consistent in getting posts out although I did get way more reviews than how to posts out.

It is rather unfortunate that the snowball effect hasn't really started for me yet. My newer posts are not getting much traction. However, my older ones are definitely seeing more views and getting higher rankings though which is a good thing.

Goals

For the next month, I'm going to continue writing blog posts. I'll write even more as summer vacation comes up. I need push for those next two affiliate sales!

There is also something that has been dragged on for way too long. YouTube.

I have wanted to start a YouTube channel since three months ago, but I just never did it!

I am extremely disappointed about myself...

But this month is going to change. I vow to start publishing videos on YouTube no matter what. I will have to be careful though as with what happened with the Instagram copyright situation.

Hopefully things will be fine though.

And that's it! Continue posting on social media and my blog and things will continue to grow. Just going to keep it simple.

Thanks for reading!