Surprise Transferable Skills from Wealthy Affiliate training

byLTidswell

257 followers

4 years ago

So, it's Saturday, I've been back at work now for slightly more than two weeks and life is starting to settle into a new normal. My corporate escape plan is well and truly underway and I'm currently taking a break from the writing (read splashing words down as fast and semi-coherently as possible) phase of two massive blog posts. As I sit in the garden in the warm sunshine and reflect on what I've written so far today, I'm blown away by the unexpected benefits I've received from my Wealthy Affiliate membership in the form of surprise transferable skills.

Expectations and Value

So, as some of you know affiliate marketing is one of the pillars of my corporate escape plan. There is a lot of attraction in being able to continue to generate income from past work and I truly view blogging as a semi-passive income stream. I joined Wealthy Affiliate in January 2020 because the offer was a no-brainer from the Irrestible Value perspective (hosting + training + community + support) all rolled into one competitively priced package worked well for me then, and it works even better for me now.

Roll on mid May 2020, 4 months into my affiliate marketing journey, and although I have not yet made any income from my affiliate marketing adventure that does not mean I haven't extracted considerable value from it already. The surprising bit is not this value as it's related to learning to generate affiliate income (it's definitely there and better than I anticipated when I joined), but rather the value that is coming from unexpected places in the form of transferable skills.

Context first

I'm an analyst. I've spent all my career surrounded my numbers and my superpower is making numbers tell stories. I started in an experimental research laboratory maintaining exciting equipment (lasers, vacuum chambers, electron guns and analysers) and analysing the experimental data that was output. It was a fantastic combination of lasers (did I mention them?), torque wrenches and mathematical modeling and I loved it.

The corporate job I'm currently fleeing has many fewer torque wrenches and no lasers or, at least as an analytic senior manager, none that I'm allowed to play with, but it does have lots of mathematical modeling. I feel like my life would be incomplete without a model or two kicking around in the background so a second pillar of my corporate escape plan includes creating a scaleable income stream around my analytical superpowers.

Now, why is this important today - well, as it's Saturday, this is the day that I track the analytics on my two blogs (one niche, and the main one following my corporate escape). I use a simple spreadsheet and log some key Google Analytics and Pinterest Metrics for both blogs, because if I didn't constrain myself to once a week I'd be staring at the numbers all the time rather than doing the work that drives the numbers... there is value in knowing yourself well!

Why are the Numbers Important?

Today the numbers are telling me I've got 50 new Pinterest followers on last week (I slacked on my Pinterest activity this week massively, so it's down from over a hundred new followers in the previous week), but more important, 5 pins that have generated over 10,000 new impressions this week and almost 8% increase in social traffic to my blog from Pinterest!

But what does this mean?

Some analysis shows:

• half the impressions came from 1 Pin design with different titles and it generated the most link clicks too - good design!
• the titles were optimised to things that Pinterest users search - good SEO!
• Problem Statement included in the title and description - solving the customer problem generates excellent value!
• Call to action included in the description - increased click through to blog!

Now all of these things are explicitly taught in the Wealthy Affiliate training for use in blogging as traffic generation to affiliate marketing offers, but by taking that knowledge and transferring it (with small tweaks to suit the medium), I can see tangible evidence of progress through the numbers.

The tweaks truly are minor - things like:

• making sure the Pin graphics were high quality and the text can be read on a phone screen
• optimising the title for the default displayed 30 characters
• optimising the description for the default display of 50 characters
• making sure to include Pinterest targeted keywords in the description

Generating Even More Value

Returning to concepts taught in the Wealthy Affiliate training - defining your niche is extremely important to your blogging success. But, don't forget we're talking about transferable skills here, so actually defining your niche so that you are delivering exceptional value to exactly the right audience is a key element for all businesses, but particularly important for startups.

Think about it this way, when you're a new business, no one searches for a general problem solution - they are looking for a solution to their very specific problem. A new vegetable to me turned up in my veggie delivery box this week, but to learn about how to cook it I didn't look for "cooking", I looked for "best recipes for globe artichokes". This is actually the area of skill generated through the Wealthy Affiliate offer that got me onto this track today... so back to where we started, and why the two, ginormous blog posts I mentioned in the introduction are important.

These two posts are huge because they cover, in great detail, particular areas of my expertise that are relevant to the second pillar of my corporate escape plan: analytics and pricing. These two elements are complete bugbears for people who are not analytically inclined; but they are often the necessary evil for optimising small business growth. Like I've just demonstrated with my Pinterest data, key business learnings can be taken from seemly random data if you know how to understand it - and I do! These pillar posts contain all the elements I have learned explicitly at Wealthy Affiliate and they are currently being problematic to craft for a few reasons:

• I know so much about these topics that I want to get it all in!
• I need a strong proofreader (enter my Mother) to make sure that I haven't accidentially left out key elements for my target audience (people who are not analytically inclined) - I will have inevitably assumed some level of base knowledge that I will need to actually explain but my Mum is good at this and will tell me, and I will listen to her!
• They need to be targeted tightly into my niche because the call to action is going to launch the 1-to-1 coaching elements of my new business income stream.

Have you gone mad? Coaching is the Opposite of Passive!

Thanks! I'm glad you're still awake and caught that! Bear with me while I explain my logic - and it harks back to exactly why my mother is the world's best proof-reader for my posts (and it's not just because she'll work for love and heartfelt thank yous!).

Now, while it's perfectly possible to earn a full-time income doing affiliate marketing and if you meander through the blogs here at Wealthy Affiliate you will find people who do, that has never been my long term aim. As I mentioned before, I always want to have some form of mathematical model around me, and I've come up with (I'd love to say cunning, but sadly it really isn't!) plan to use my superpowers (for good, of course) and to have them help me generate both income (because my mortgage company really does appreciate being paid, and I generally work better when well-fed and watered) and value for my customers (because I get my warm and fuzzy feelings from helping people, not from sitting on a pile of money).

Whew! OK - so, if you're ready and sitting comfortably, here is the plan:

1. Nicheing specifically into Creative Businesses delivering a tangible Product with non-analytical leadership.

2. Understand the detail of their problems by delivering 1-to-1 coaching on Pricing and Business Analytics to solve their specific problems, develop methods of capturing and using their data to drive business improvements and pricing their products to deliver success.

3. Capture the standard range of problems and existing data solution types (not the actual data - NDA's and ethics prevents this!) within this niche to scale my business by creating passive and semi-passive income streams while still delivering high quality and valuable solutions to the business problems in this niche. I'm thinking training, courses, books / ebooks, videos etc. with opportunities for software partnerships, and high value (in terms of delivering the right product to the right customer) affiliate offers. "A-Ha" you say, and you are correct, (OK this bit is a little cunning), the customers are actually going to pay to participate in the market research!

4. Satisfy the problems of 90% of the customer base through step 3, and leave 10% of interesting, gnarly, exciting problems requiring bespoke solutions and high levels of personal focused involvement for the remaining 10% through high-end coaching and consultancy options.

Now, back to why my mother is the perfect proofreader. My mother is a very intelligent lady who would have excelled in the business world, but due to era and circumstances ended up taking an 18 year sabbatical from the workplace to raise my brother and I. In this time she developed a series of artistic and creative endeavours and has become a well recognised artist and teacher in her niche (with a series of awards). She hugely undercharges for everything that she does to the point where she is lucky if she covers her costs. Going back to the niche description - creative, tangible product, and non-analytical leadership - and she has serious contacts ... so enter phase 2.a - pilot test with my Mum and a couple of her contacts, forgiving, nonjudgmental and will be quick to tell me where it's going wrong or I need to clarify elements.

So, transferable knowledge...

You're 100% correct if you're thinking this isn't the core of Wealthy Affiliate. However, if I hadn't joined Wealthy Affiliate in January 2020 there is no way that I'd have handed in my notice at the end of February and be leaving the corporate world by the end of the summer.

So, all the skills that I've developed through undertaking the Wealthy Affiliate training, watching Jay's webinars and interacting with the community combined with additional research outside Weathly Affiliate has lead me here. The skills that you learn here are transferable, and if you find yourself applying them in other contexts, good for you! Who knows where they'll lead.

For me, right now, it's back into the abyss of writing these pillar posts and breaking my 4 step plan into some smaller, more manageable chunks! I'll let you know how it goes!