My First 3 Months in Wealthy Affiliate

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Hello WA family!

I just hit the three-month mark here at Wealthy Affiliate today, so I wanted to share my progress so far.

Progress Report

I took off from work my first two weeks after joining WA so I could focus on completing the training and building my website. With a decade of previous training in the industry, I flew through the initial WA training and got my first website up and running. There were several relatively small things on my website that consumed a lot of my time trying to figure out, mostly cosmetic stuff that wasn’t necessary but I wanted it. I finally went and outsourced the issues and they were fixed in no time. This taught me a valuable lesson about the value of my time. I probably spent at least 12 hours a day working on my site during these first two weeks getting it to look the way I wanted.

With the plethora of information in the Affiliate Bootcamp training, I decided to make my first website about creating an online business and being an affiliate for WA. I completed the Affiliate Bootcamp, but I’m still working on traffic generation. I imagine that I’ll be working on this for quite some time.

I also spent some time working to build social media accounts to support my website. I didn’t put too much effort into this beyond building out the profiles on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. I’ve been using these accounts to push out my website posts as I publish them. I also did an experiment early on with Twitter where I boosted my first post to see what would happen. I was pleasantly surprised at the results in traffic to my website, so I’ll be boosting some more in the near future to drive traffic.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working within WA building my friends and supporting the community. Through my interactions with new comers, I’ve become a mentor to at least a dozen of them that were struggling with the training. I’ve learned that I need to be very cognizant of the amount of time I spend on WA to keep it balanced with the time I spend on building out my website. The WA site can consume you if you let it, it’s very addictive.

Some of my successes to date:

  • posted 6 major articles (all over 2,000 words each) to my website.
  • 582 followers on my business social media accounts.
  • 1,326 shares of my website posts on social media.
  • Two of my posts reached the #2 and #7 positions in Google for their keywords.
  • brought in 7 WA referrals, with 3 going premium (2 annual).
  • got 2 Amazon affiliate sales.
  • Made $367 to date in WA commissions, which more than paid for my WA Premium annual membership.
  • reached 5,523 WA followers.
  • reached the rank of 75 toward being a WA Ambassador.
Goals that I set for myself this past month that I accomplished:
  • boost a post in Facebook to see how much traffic it drives. I did test boosting posts in Facebook with a friend this past month with some interesting results. We were measuring the cost of getting traffic (in the form of Likes) to one of our websites. We initially targeted our demographic in the US, UK and Canada, but it was costing us over five cents a Like. Then we tried targeting English speakers in Pakistan, Nigeria, Philippines, Thailand, South Africa, Turkey, Cameroon, Egypt, Algeria, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Romania, Mexico, Ghana, Liberia, Brazil, Uganda and our Likes quadrupled. We were able to get Likes for under a penny each. There are 226 million people that speak English in these countries. We haven’t marketed anything to this group yet, but it seems that there’s an opportunity here. We’re also looking at using Alexa.com to gather demographic information to create targeted Facebook ads to promote our products.
  • reach 5,000 total friends in WA. I exceeded this target by over 500 additional followers. I want to explain that this wasn’t a goal for me, it was the result of the method I was using to follow new members in the hopes of helping them if they needed it.
  • rank under 200 toward being a WA Ambassador. I far exceeded this goal by reaching #75 in WA. This as well was a result of the daily method that I was applying in order to reach and help as many newcomers as I could. I also found that writing blog posts and questions within WA is essential in order to move up the ranks. I’ve only written 17 blog posts and asked eight questions (all but one of my questions was written to teach something) though in my 90 days with WA. I’m hoping that creating training will also help in moving up the ranks (you’re not allowed to create training until you’ve been a Premium member for over 90 days).
Goals that I set for myself this past month that I didn’t accomplished:
  • publish at least 6 more posts to my website. I was only able to post one additional major article to my website this month. Between my “day job”, my kids starting school and all the traveling that I’ve been doing for business this past month, it’s been difficult for me to focus on this more tedious task. But, I do realize that this is why I joined WA in the first place and this is what will eventually put money in my pocket, so I promised myself that I will focus on this task over the coming month.
  • double my WA referrals. Over the past month I have not been able to solicit any new referrals to WA. I attribute this to my lack of attention to my website over the last month.
My goals for next month:
  • publish at least 6 more posts to my website.
  • create at least one training program.
I’ve been asked quite a bit over the last month about how many hours a day I spend on all this and if I still have a “day job”. I wanted to share a little bit about what I do with the rest of my day while I’m not on WA. I’m in charge of all strategic (international) surface movements for all branches of the US Military. My team of both Military members and civilians, which are stationed at various places around the world, contract space on ocean going vessels, planes, trains and trucks to move the US Military’s equipment and sustainment cargo to our troops all over the globe. We planned, shipped and oversaw the delivery of almost two million pieces of cargo this past year. I typically put in over 50 hours a week with my “day job”. I also still have two children at home that need their dad when I get home from work to help them with their school work, take them to Taekwondo class, etc. I’m also trying to play catch-up with my family since we were separated for almost a decade while I was in the Middle East supporting our Warfighters. I tell you all of this not because I want to gloat but to encourage you that regardless of your situation you can be successful with Wealthy Affiliate and with building a successful online business.


Final Thoughts

I feel that my first 90 days here with WA have been very productive and rewarding. This is the farthest I’ve ever been toward reaching my goal of establishing a viable online business. My motivation is extremely high. As a matter of fact, I can’t get WA and my business out of my mind. Every spare minute of my time is spent either on the computer supporting the WA community, building my website, or reading to increase my knowledge in the business. I plan to retire from my job within the next five years, so I think if I can keep up this pace, I’ll be on glide path to replace my income by then.

I want to thank Kyle and Carson for creating this wonderful site for all of us to collaborate and reach our dreams of financial freedom. And a huge thank you to the WA family for all of your support and encouragement, you are truly the life blood of this amazing site.

To everyone’s massive success! Kevin



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Recent Comments

182

Hi Lundquik,
Quite impressive,it is an Honor for me be part of your family, and I've enjoyed reading your Progress Report. I also saved your page in my favorites so I can return as often as I need to. Thank you for your concern and help you are offering us here @ WA.

To Your Continued Success;
Forever Grateful and Indebted To You:
Respectfully;
William

This is very interesting and I'll be coming back to your profile for more help later on :) Can I ask if how much money you make currently isn't something you are thinking of and if it will be more important in the future? if so how do you think would be the best way to earn more commissions from sites?

Georgina, I'm still in the early stages of building my first website, so I'm certainly not making enough to live off of yet. I'll take what I learn from my first site and then build multiple sites in different niches once I'm ready. I do plan to live off my websites in the coming years.

What a resume` Kevin! You are a MACHINE!!!
The way you lay out your goals AND accountability for not reaching some goals... THAT is the key to your success ANYWHERE life will take you. You understand that, you got it made. Complete respect to you Kevin! Thanks for the post!

Great 3 months accomplishments, Kevin! You are an inspiration to all of us here, at WA. In spite of your hectic schedule, you still manage your time wisely. Your positive growth mindset is overflowing. Thank you, Kevin, for your service to your countrymen and for sharing your accomplishments with us.
All the best in achieving your next goals!
Adel :)

Thank you for writing this! I feel encouraged by your efforts and progress. Trying something new can be overwhelming fast even when there is so much great information, knowledge and insight to gain from WA. What I get from reading your blog is if you put in the consistent hard work WA really works and that is a comfort to my ears ;) Keep sharing.

Peace and Blessings and a personal thank you for fighting for our country too!

Cheers to Success!

Thanks for sharing. I loved what you said about WA can consume you. I have been thinking a lot about that and my next post is going to be about organizing and dividing up my time because trying to read a few posts and welcome a few new members and check out the latest question and all my alloted time is gone. What about my site?? Also...you are a very busy man!! Surely I can find more time to spend on here. :) Good work!!

Wow, that's an awesome progress in just 3 months. Congrats!
I have been here slightly longer than you but I wasn't able to achieve the progress you have achieved because I'm in the army and only have the weekends to spend on WA and my website. So it's quite a struggle to juggle with time and maximize the limited time I have to build my business.

You seriously put in hard work with solid plans/goals. I admire that. I'm just wondering if you could give my website some advice because I really want to hear from you what you think given the kind of achievement you've done and you being quite a mentor in this community.

My website is http://longdistancementors.com really appreciate your advice if possible:)

Thanks

Way to go, Kevin, you trully are a focused individual and an inspiration to the ret of us. Being able to focus on the objective is the key to online success. Keep up the good work and your will reach your goals ahead of schedual.

Even though I am Canadian, your service helps keep is free as well so i thank you for that service.

All the best, Wayne.

This is amazing. I'm almost to my one month and might have a quarter of the excitement you have. I personally haven't made any money yet but I keep most of my nights to correcting and making my site better all the time. I hope we both get to the point of quitting/retiring from our 9-5 jobs.

Extremely impressive Kevin and a model for us all to follow, albeit a difficult one because of your experience and organizational abilities. You are a very hard act to follow :-)

Thanks for helping so many members as I have seen you do on a daily basis! Also, your warm, welcoming messages and offer to help all newcomers is a benchmark for all the rest of us.

Congratulations. But, you are accustomed to succeeding and will not accept failure, so none of this comes as a surprise to me.

Thanks brother for the very informative and helpful tips for target acquisition!

Have a good weekend,

Steve

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