Top 5 Ways Wealthy Affiliate Members Are Wasting Time
Last week I published a blog about how WA members are wasting money. This week I wanted to follow up with a few ways that WA members are wasting time.
I've also included 3 ways to be more productive with your business!
1. Image Spacing
I used to spend hours crafting the perfect spacing between text and images. I would right align some, left align others, and sometimes even create hugely long blog posts with 20+ images trying to create a perfect list of items to promote on my blog.
Then I realized that almost no one was seeing the results of my effort. People have different monitor sizes, and a large percentage of people are using tablets or smartphones.
Now, my general rule of using images is to use 1-2 images on general articles for my blog (non-monetized posts). I prefer to center align, as described here. For product reviews or some special cases I may need more images but if I use more, I try not to squish them all together.
1.1 Finding The "Perfect" Image
Images are important for your blog posts. They add color, visual interest, and break up the monotony of walls of text.
However, unless you are paying for images, it may be hard to find the "perfect" image. I use Shutterstock now, but it cost me $3,000 for a subscription for a year. That's a lot of money!
Even a much cheaper service like Canstockphoto.com will still cost you a dollar or two per image unless you buy in bulk.
So for newbies who are still using free image resources, you may not find the perfect image for your text. Don't waste hours looking for it. Find a good one, and move on.
For product images, I LOVE using Flickr Creative Commons. Just make sure to give proper attribution to your image source.
For free photos, I like Pexels and Pixabay, but you can search "free images" here in WA and tons of resources will pop up.
2. Text Color And Size
One of the most frequently asked questions is how do I change the font of my blog. The best answer is don't change the font, change the theme. Changing font for a theme requires that you dig into the code of your theme. I tell people just to pick another theme if they are unhappy with the font.
Remember, simple and big (17-22px)) usually performs better than little tiny fonts. No need for fancy scripts or interesting looks. It may be hard for some people to read.
2.1 Avoid Rainbow Text
As a subset of this time-waster, rainbow text is a common mistake people make too. If you have black text, and blue links, then add purple h3 tags, green bold text for emphasis, and and red bold for a lot of emphasis, pretty soon visitors don't know what's a link and what isn't.
I try to limit myself to 3 colors per page (for fonts). Text color (black) + Link color (your choice) + one other color for mega emphasis (used sparingly). That's it. No rainbows please!
2.2 Avoid Roller Coaster Text
Also, be careful with too many text sizes. If you find yourself using h2 h3 h4 and h5 + bold/italics/underline in a 400 word post, that's probably too many sizes. This can be confusing to know what's emphasis, what's a link, what's a paragraph title, etc. Simpler is better!
3. Complicated Menu Navigation
Sometimes I'll check out new websites for feedback and see 20+ menu items in an intricate set of categories, sub categories, and drop downs. The catch is that none of these menu items have actually have content. They are all in "preparation" for content.
Publishing a bunch of blank pages on your site isn't doing much for you or your website. Just create a simple menu to start, and grow the menu as you grow your site. It's a waste of time to create an intricate navigation system with no content behind it.
A much better plan is to keep a spreadsheet with your ideas so you can keep track of them.
4. Focusing on WA Rank
Looking at your WA rank can be a fun way to be social and gauge your interaction in the Wealthy Affiliate community. In fact, I highly recommend you participate in the community because it expands your "help network".
At the end of the day however, it doesn't affect the traffic on your website or the money in your pocket.
If you find yourself doing stuff inside WA just to increase your rank, it's probably a waste of time. If you are doing stuff in WA because you enjoy the community and your rank increases because of it, there's nothing wrong with that!
5. Checking Your Traffic
I'm terrible at this, but if you are checking your traffic stats more than one time per day, you're wasting time. It's not typical for your website traffic to fluctuate huge amounts from day to day anyway, so chances are that your traffic on Monday will be similar to Tuesday.
Google Analytics is great when you need to analyze your traffic sources and the actions people take on your page, but don't log in 10x per day just to see how many visitors you had since you last checked!
5.1 Looking At Competitor Websites/Stats
Checking out competitors for ideas is fine, especially if you're a newbie and not realy sure which direction you want to take your site. Learn from the pros! That's totally fine.
However, don't get caught up in trying to recreate what someone else did. Build your own brand. Be your own person. Be unique!
Also, don't be jealous of other people's earnings. Everyone has their own journey, and hating on people because they are successful is not good for your mental health.
3 Ways To be More Productive
Rather than just be a downer about wasting time and money, I thought I should provide you guys with some solutions too. Instead of messing around with menu items and text color, here are 3 ways to be more productive with your time.
Product Research
Spend some time looking for potential products to promote. Look on Amazon, browse forums, and google trends to see what's selling. See what the complaints are. Think of related products to your niche that may not be so obvious right away.
Reviews are extremely powerful for earning affiliate commissions.
Blog Post Brainstorm
Plan you next week or month of posts. Take a look at your old content for new ideas (and update any older blog posts while you're at it). Check out what the competition is writing about.
Continue Your Education
Do another lesson in your training. If you are done, there are hundreds of training modules in classrooms and created by other members. There are too many past webinars for you to ever watch them all. There's always something to learn inside Wealthy Affiliate!
What's your #1 way to waste time?
Recent Comments
93
What's my #1 way to "waste time"?
All of the above -- trying to be "really good" from the very beginning. Thanks for the post -- it helps a good deal to get advice from others that have had success.
I'm a one month and a half newbie and I'm making some of these mistakes so THANK YOU for this! :)
Damn you Nate, I was just going to write a post like this because I see so many newbies focusing on everything else but writing content which we both know is the key to this business.
I've seen people fixated on sidebars, and other minor things that have little bearing on making them money or ranking. So this is a welcomed post that will be bookmarked and referred to many times!
Thank you sir!
Probably. lol But why bother when you've got my point across but so much friendlier than my in your face wa posts. lol
I probably spend too much time reading all the WA emails, but there is usually a lot of good stuff, so maybe it's not all a waste of time lol.
Thanks for a good post and reminders. I need to do more product research and training. :)
Ahhh, that's a common one too. But it gave me an idea for a #5 I will add above: Focusing on WA rank!
my # 1 way I waste time is fiddling with my theme...lol...I have gotten better at not doing that. I sometimes worry that I am wasting my time on WA, but I am mostly reading and learning on here.
I often need to tell myself to "just write content".
I am guilty of this too. I find that it's often an excuse for me to "do something" when I'm avoiding doing something else.
See more comments
Thanks Nate,
I'm a newbie and I will definitely take your words as advice... I was beginning to think this was a Facebook site! :)