4 months of progress

byjolier

480 followers

Updated 10 years ago

1st Feb 2015:

Hi Everyone, it's been about 4 months since I've been at WA and I'm making fantastic progress, so I thought I would summarize:

Website: www.betterbuttchallenge.com

98 posts/ 11 pages/ 318 comments

Facebook page: 23 likes (more Likes are most welcome, and thank-you in advance!)

Revenue: Nil to date

Pros/successes:

• One of my review post on first page of google! My review is sitting at #3 on google for my target keywords as well as other keyword combinations around that product. I have been noticing around 2-4 referrals from google per day via this post. I actually targeted this keyword in early days going for super super low hanging fruit, but thinking it would never get any traffic (it seems like a low-grade product, and the stats for my target keyword were 32 traffic and 1 QSR. Some would argue that is too low for traffic, but even just seeing a daily referral from search, plus the fact I'm on page 1 of google, is hugely inspiring!!).
• Found a heap of products to review, and requested review copies from the owners. A number of these actually got back to me and sent me over some review versions of their products! I now have a good plan for material and a list of products to review.

Cons/mistakes:

• Forgot to port across my domain email address to WA hosting when I moved my hosting to WA. The result was that I could somehow still send emails from my address, but anyone who tried to email me got a bounceback error. Thankfully some awesome people let me know about this so I could fix it up! Too bad this didn't happen before I had sent out a heap of emails requesting for review copies of products (I have no idea if the people actually replied or not, as they would have had emails bouncing back!)
• Not doing enough review posts or having a way to monetize. About a month ago I realized that I was posting a heap of content, but none of it was really going to get me any sales, because I wasn't selling anything! I believe now that the key to making this successful is making product-orientated posts. My new plan is to review a heap of products (good or bad), and point the bad ones to my recommended products - basically the same strategy that the bootcamp training uses.
• Haven't found a great product to recommend as my #1 recommendation yet!
• Doing too much. Going for quantity over quality. I initially was trying to post every day, but this was really killing me - it has resulted in a lot of lower quality posts that I need to go back and 'fix up', in some cases I even just hit the publish button thinking I will go back and fix these on the weekend when I have some free time, but there are still half-finished posts all over my site!

Key learnings:

• Focus on reviewing products/services, as this is what will ultimately get you an income.
• Quality over quantity wins every time. Don't feel bad about reducing your posting frequency if you need to in order to end up with a more complete and ready-for-publishing post.
• Contact product owners for review copies of products, in most cases they are willing to oblige!

I'm not where I want to be yet, to be honest I thought I would have at least made a sale after 3 months. I've put in considerable amount of hours, for the first 3 months straight I was working on average around 1-2 hours a day and nearly all day on weekends. I've tapered that off recently due to other commitments getting in the way, but I am looking forward to spending more time creating review content!

Thanks for reading, and I hope to update again soon with my first sale success post!