Twenty-First Month of WA

Twenty-First Month of WA - My First $100

647 followers

4 years ago

Hello WA friends, it has been a very busy month. I've been running around doing all sorts of things. Taking new courses, starting new business models, and of course working on my blogs. I've definitely been hit by the shiny object syndrome a little bit and thus, I need to choose and focus in on only one or two of my websites instead of 7.

Make sure you check out my last month's post: Twentieth Month of WA - COVID - 19

Without further ado, let's jump in.

My First $100?

I made my first $100 in April 2020 and I will likely continue earning an extra $100 for the next few months or even my lifetime depending on how much value I provide.

I did not earn this money from affiliate marketing.

I was actually at my part-time Kumon job. COVID-19 has drastically changed the way we're operating. Normally we will have classes three times a week where students come into our building to do their worksheets.

Now that we can't have classes, we needed a strategy to help Kumon students online. We have been using Zoom occasionally, but my employers wanted something else. And thus, I randomly blurted out the idea of creating a website with a forum where students can ask questions.

My employers loved the idea and I built them a prototype. They played around with the website a little bit and decided that they'll pay me $100 per month.

It's quite amazing what Wealthy Affiliate has given me. While I'm not making much money off of affiliate marketing, the skills I learned here at WA is what gave me my first $100 per month.

I could only do it because I had previous experience building websites with WordPress.

In the future I will also have to build this website into a local lead generation website for my employers and I'll make sure to update myself with some of Jay's local marketing training.

This is what makes WA so worth it. Even if you don't find success with affiliate marketing, you still gain a plethora of useful skills you can use to make money with. For example, you can start a marketing agency which is what I kind of did. I'm not sure if I'll actively promote myself as a marketing agency just yet, though.

Thank you to Kyle & Carson as well as all the amazing staff and members of Wealthy Affiliate for great service and pushing me to the next level.

April Stats - Traffic Down, Payday Up?

To be honest, I haven't done much at all in terms of blogging so I wasn't surprised to see my traffic drop. However, I was surprised to see my overall earnings increase.

Get Good At Badminton:

Blog Stats:

Number of Posts Written: 0
Average Daily Traffic: 122
30 Days Users: 3.7k
Bounce Rate: 82.74%
Average Session Duration: 1:29
Clicks (Web): 3.45k
Impressions (Web): 84.1k

Earnings:

Google Adsense: $1.97
Amazon Associates Sales: 3
Amazon Associates Earnings: $14.41
Total Earnings: $16.38

Social Media:

YouTube
- New Videos: 0
- Subscribers: 233
- New Subscribers: 7
- Views: 2,166
- Watch Time: 123.6 hours
Instagram
- Followers: 1,962
- Following: 399
- Posts: 259
Facebook
- Followers: 127
- Page Likes: 114
Pinterest
- Monthly Viewers: 11.4k
- Followers: 161
Twitter
- Followers: 32
- Link Clicks: 0
- Likes: 0
- Impressions: 725

Last month, I talked about how I was going on a hiatus with Get Good At Badminton. I wasn't going to post anything and I didn't. It showed in my stats. My traffic went down, I'm losing followers on Instagram, and my Google Adsense earnings decreased significantly.

However, I was very surprised to see my Amazon earnings increase. $14.41 is my all-time highest earnings in one month on Amazon. This was giving me a little motivation until Amazon announced their commission rate slashes.

I'm in a niche heavily affected by Amazon cuts as I primarily promote sports products. 5% commission is already low and 3% is even lower. So despite earning more than ever, I quickly forgot about promoting Amazon products.

One day, I was scrolling through my hundreds of emails and I came across a short workshop on Print On Demand. I had been in the e-commerce space with no success prior to Wealthy Affiliate and had always wanted to start a print-on-demand store.I wanted to sell clothing with custom designs but didn't really know how to go about it.

The badminton niche also lacks good affiliate programs. Most badminton stores lack affiliate programs and the ones that do have affiliate programs have products that are overpriced like crazy (double - triple normal prices). So I'm stuck with Amazon which has very low commissions and isn't a popular place for badminton players to shop on.

I've had the idea of transitioning into my own store and linking all my product reviews to the products I'm selling. This way, I will take more profit and offer my readers/customers better service.

The only issue is my age and money. I'm not old enough to set up agreements with the large companies that I want to sell from and I don't have the money to buy a large amount of their products in wholesale prices. Thus, this idea has not come into fruition until now.

After seeing the print-on-demand workshop, I thought, "Hey, why don't I start the Get Good At Badminton store and focus on print-on-demand/dropshipping in the beginning? Then build into a store selling branded badminton products later on?"

This method would allow me to build the cash supply I need as well as create a buying audience I need when I am ready to sell branded products. Of course it depends on whether or not I succeed and thus, for this month, I will break my hiatus and work on Get Good At Badminton a lot more.

Medium:

Stats:

Number of Posts Written: 9
Views: 336
Reads: 193
Followers: 274
Partnership Earnings: $5.77

I did not have as much success on Medium as I did last month. I had significantly less views and reads and my earnings were $5.77 compared to $9.45.

I was definitely writing less on Medium and my new posts were not as popular as the ones I posted last month. In fact, most of my earnings came from the articles I wrote last month.

I will continue writing on Medium, but I will be writing a lot less and more in a style of a daily journal.

Overloaded By Shiny Objects

Shiny object syndrome has been killing me in April. First, there was Grant Cardone's Cardone University, then I started learning not 1, not 2, but three new languages, as well as that print-on-demand workshop. And because I took that print-on-demand workshop, I restarted an e-commerce training I bought a long time ago.

On top of that, our family subscribed to Masterclass and I bought 4 new courses on Udemy which I have hardly looked at yet. All that while I have existing websites in the MMO programming niche that I have to work on.

That's not even the end of it. My part-time job has actually had its hours increased. Instead of working two 4-5 hour shifts per week, I'm working two 5-7 hour shifts instead. The website I made for my employers also brought about new work as well.

But I don't regret all of these new things. I am more knowledgeable and have more skills now. However, it's time to focus and get something done.

There are three things I'm going to focus on.