5 Year Anniversary in Wealthy Affiliate 2015

bynathaniell

101K followers

Updated 10 years ago

Another year has sped by, and it's now been 5 years since I joined WA in the summer of 2010. In general, it's been a year of cutting the fat, and solidifying the businesses that I already have. This was a great feeling, because I had a lot of loose ends like half-built websites earning a few dollars a month.

Gone! I cut my domain ownership by about 50% and now have only about 20 active websites. That number will shock a lot of you, but keep in mind that I only added content to my beer site and WA promo site this year.

How in the heck are those old sites still earning? I have no idea. But they are!

Anyway, let's take a look at my goals from 2014

• 1. Double my income by any means necessary (Done)
• 2. 5,000 visits per day to One More Cup of Coffee (Fail)
• 3. Make at least $100/month from my beer site (Fail)

Let's look at the fails first, because they weren't really that bad of failures.

Though I didn't even come close to the 5k visits I wanted for One More Cup of Coffee, I did increase traffic by about 50-100% from last year, so I didn't meet my goal, but I did make progress.

And even though I didn't make $100/month from my beer site, I made about $800 total this year, which works out to about $67/month. That doesn't include all the cool training videos and webinars I was able to make with it, which I'm sure helped my conversion rate for premium signups within the community here.

As for doubling my income, how crazy is that? When was the last time your boss gave you a 100% raise?

How'd I do it?

The main thing I did to accomplish this was to take existing traffic to my websites and work on converting to sales at a higher rate. This was done across a few different websites. Unfortunately I don't have a step by step formula for how I did it, but in general, I just analyzed my traffic and messed around with my affiliate promotions. I also focused some of my old campaigns to promote 1 specific affiliate offer rather than a bunch of different ones.

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/analyzing...

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/analyzing...

I also worked out a special deal with one of my affiliates and was able to increase my commission rate which helped out too!

Conspiracy Theory Addressed

One thing I hear from time to time that annoys the heck out of me is that the only people that make money in WA are the ones promoting it. People don't even stop to think that maybe the ones promoting WA are doing it because the training made them successful in other areas!

So I'd like to take the time to address this.

Counting all my income related to online marketing from the past 5, commissions from WA still make up less than 40% of what I've earned. That means over 60% of my online income for the past 5 years has NOT been related to promoting WA.

Of course, now that I'm working hard on One More Cup of Coffee, those stats are slowly changing. As of now, on a monthly basis, WA commissions count for about 55% of my income.

Not that you guys asked, but I just wanted to get that out there for the next time this question comes up :)

Goals For Next Year

This past year has been one of consolidation, so I think I'm ready to branch out and start building again. I have an idea for a new website that I'm really excited about. It's still in the beginning stages, but coming along nicely.

Goals For 2015

• Continue to create weekly training and blogs in Wealthy Affiliate
• Double my net income (yeah, again)

Simple, but to the point! This is of course in addition to maintaining my current websites. But how exactly do I plan to make that much money?

• Start and follow through with a new website related to PPC
• Continue to write content for my current websites

I have a few other projects in the works, so we'll see how they go. But it looks like it's going to be a busy year for me, so I'd better get started!

Past Anniversaries

• https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/nathaniell/blog/4-...
• https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/nathaniell/blog/3-...
• https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/nathaniell/blog/tw...
• https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/nathaniell/blog/on...