3 Hard Lessons From A Newbie

bymtninja

62 followers

5 years ago

Before I stumbled upon Wealthy Affiliate I had already tried my hand at building a blog. My niche is web development, and I had been working on it for about 6 months. I stopped working on my site for around another 5-6 months before starting up at WA and getting things going again.

I'm going to go over 3 lessons I learned my first time around, and why WA has helped get me back on track.

Lesson #1 - Authority Matters

When I first was writing articles for my coding blog, I hadn't been a developer for very long - around a year to be exact. That's not nearly long enough to be considered an expert, and I hadn't even found employment.

Thus, my confidence was down a lot and I was very limited about what I could talk about since I didn't know even 10% of the knowledge I probably needed. I knew there was just no way around it, I needed to learn more before I could establish any sort of authority - and without that I knew my site would never be able to take off.

Now I know so much more than I did back then, and I can easily write about 100 different things and actually provide value to people in my niche, and do so confidently.

Lesson #2 - People Can't Consume What They Can't See

When my blog was fresh and had some content, I decided it best to just focus on paid search campaigns in AdWords. While I gained a lot of useful experience that way, looking back it was a poor strategy. Sure, people were clicking into my blog - I actually had a decent CTR on my ads - but they weren't sticking around.

Once my budget ran out for the month, that's it, my site went dead and wasn't getting any views anymore. That's why I should have taken more steps to getting permanent traffic flows, like working on Google rankings, posting in forums, and on social media. But I did none of that and expected way too much from paid search alone.

I think when marketing a site you need to take many angles and not just one.

Lesson #3 - Love Your Site Even If It SUCKS

Back in those days, my site was a horror show. I was trying to become a web developer, so I thought it'd be a good idea to try to customize my own WordPress theme. It was a disaster. The positioning was all messed up, the color scheme was too dark and drab, and my site took forever to load.

This is definitely a huge reason why people weren't stick around. Thing is, I knew my site was a gastly image, and whenever I talked to someone about it I always put it down. It got to the point where I talked so much trash about my own site that I lost motivation to even work on it anymore.

Now, looking back I realize that this is a completely normal process. You have to accept your site no matter what stage it is in, and keep that vision of what it could be strong in your mind, cause once you lose that you will lose all desire to improve it.

WA And Getting Back On The Horse

I really wish back then I knew about WA. Because now that I have this guidance, my site is looking a lot better, and content is flowing faster than ever before and for once i'm actually excited to build it.

It used to take me 2 weeks to write out a single blog post. But in the past couple weeks since i've joined WA, I've written 4 full articles!

I think the reason it took me so long before is because I had no structure, I was just flailing in the dark.

Now it feels like the dam has broken and the ideas are just pouring out. There are so many possibilities, and not just with the niche I've chosen.

Anyways, time to get back to the training and see what's next!

See you all around.