4 Months with WA

bylawnis04

199 followers

Updated 5 years ago

Hellooooooo! March 10th means it's time to check up on my progress here at WA. I've somehow been around for 4 months already. While I know that's not a long time in the grand scheme of life, it does mean I've stuck it out this far, which is encouraging to me.

This month I did a lot of writing again. Prepped almost all of my posts for April. I think I only have two more to write. In the past month I wrote 65,320 words for a total of 149,023 words in my four months at WA. The math on that doesn't really add up somehow, as my last month stats said I had 104,185 total words, meaning my monthly words would have to be more around 45K. Not sure what's up with that, but it says between Feb 10 - March 10 it was over 65K, so I'll take it.

I still haven't hit my big ole traffic boom. I may start digging more with keywords and such in the coming months. I'm averaging 1-3 visitors a day with spikes when I post in site comments. *sigh*.

On my first website, I've jumped from 70 visitors (68 new) and 328 pageviews in Jan-Feb, to 176 visitors (173 new) and 489 pageviews. So that's a pretty decent increase percentage-wise. 151% increase in users and 49% increase in pageviews.

I was originally going to wait until I had 1000 pageviews a month to join an affiliate program, but after speaking with another user, I decided to join Amazon Affiliates. Currently just the US site, until I make my threshold of 3 sales in 6 months. I decided to do this because it seems pretty low-risk. If I don't make the threshold and am booted, I can always reapply.

I've had some clicks. No purchases yet, but that's okay. Most of my articles don't even have the links in them yet.

I've stayed on track with my 17 posts a month for each site, meaning 34 posts a month.

I struggled with patience a bit again this month. I am starting to get nervous that my content isn't keyword rich enough to rank, but I'm trying to wait until month 6 or 8 before I start really worrying myself about that. Sometimes it just takes more time. And even if these two websites fail spectacularly, I'm learning a lot that I can adjust in the future.

I'm also impatient with wanting to start a new niche but I refuse to let myself do that for at least the first year. And that's if I manage to get the two sites I'm running now automated and kind of working on their own. Though I'm aware that may take longer than a year.

In more personal news, I celebrated my 27th birthday last week! Didn't do much. Ate cake, watched a movie, and worked a night shift. But it was really nice and I had a good time.

BUTTTTT I finally saved up enough money to buy a laptop!

My laptop (trusty 2011 MacBook Pro) died on me in December. I've been saving money ever since and finally bought a Dell G5 15 SE (trying to get out of Apple products at this point despite my love for the interface). So now I no longer have to use my less than ideal tablet when at home (though I'll still use it for writing during travel), and I can play video games again... goodbye productivity.

Trying to control myself on that end.

Anyway, that's about it for me. It seems to be warming up here and we've had some gorgeously warm days, but I know not to get my hopes up until mid-May. There could be some snowstorms yet!