My Progress With WA So Far.

bynightwatch

830 followers

Updated 8 years ago

I've been building websites for years and WordPress sites specifically for about 5 years. Building sites is easy for me and I even run a service that builds blogs for affiliate marketers and SMEs (small & medium enterprises) over at http://www.topdesignblogs.com. My speciality is in building sites that are search engine optimized and secured from hackers.

What I'm not good at is promoting sites so that they rank well in the search engines. It's a lot of work and, frankly, it's not something I've ever enjoyed. Techniques change too quickly and no matter how white-hat you are, you're still subject to Google's whims.

In 2012, I had a lot of websites that ranked highly and were earning good Adsense income and commissions from affiliate sales. Google then overturned the applecart with its new algorithm updates. My sites never recovered. But I wasn't alone. Many legitimate small businesses were wiped out because their sites lost their rankings and since customers couldn't find them, they couldn't run a viable business. I wrote about it in these two posts:

http://webbizkb.com/web-traffic/continuing-fallout...
http://webbizkb.com/blogging/with-more-google-upda...

The "build it and they will come" paradigm died several years ago. So while I can crank out sites, two time-consuming issues still remain:

1. Writing content

2. Promoting a site

I joined WA to, in essence, throw out what I thought I knew about promoting sites in favour of learning techniques and strategies that work in 2016. More than that, to have access to promotional methods that will be added to and updated as the search engines change and what they're looking for from sites.

So I'm now at the end of Course 2 and I've built a new site to use with WA - http://www.InvestInGoldNow.com. The reason I didn't use one of my existing sites is that they have some backlinks, and possibly some baggage, that would skew the results I get purely from using WA strategies.

My site has all the pre-requisite pages - Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Disclaimer, Contact and About pages - and I've added 5 posts to the site, one of which is now the home page.

I jumped the gun a bit and have a couple of affiliate offers on the site already, but I've kept the offers as low key as possible. I've earned no commissions as yet, but that's to be expected for such a new site.

I set up a new Google+ profile (I'm building the site using a pen-name rather than my own) and I've been seeking followers and following other WA members.

I don't know how many visitors the site is getting (most would be WA members amyway at this stage) as I haven't added Google Analytics code to the site yet (haven't come across that in the training so far).

I am happy with the way the site is developing though.

Another thing I jumped the gun on was in adding a popup to the site to get people to join a membership site I'm creating in conjuction with the main site. It's a free-to-join site that features a number of videos about investing in gold and silver, along with videos explaining how the economy works and why it's in its current sad state. You can have a look at the site here to see the layout if you're interested:

http://investingingold.smartmember.com

As an aside, if you'd like a site like that to use as a lead magnet, PM me and we can talk! :) I've built several others to showcase that you can build a site like this about anything.

Successes

I got the site built, populated with 5 posts and a lead magnet popup. I have ideas for several more posts.

I set up my Google+ profile and and have about 30 followers so far: https://plus.google.com/108975137506971185973

I've been answering questions in the Activity Dashboard when I can and my Member Rank is now 798 and my Helper Rank is 608.

I've now got 109 followers.

Plans For The Next 3 Months

The plan is to get through the remaining courses within the next 3 months and to have the site earning some money. How much that will be I can't say. This is a niche I've never been in before so I don't have a feel for how the site will play out. But I would hope that the site is making enough to cover its bills - hosting, Jaaxy sub, domain name and my time for writing posts.

Plans For The Next 6 Months

I would like the site to be on autopilot, pulling in a regular passive income. I would post an article every 1-2 weeks and the site would be ranking high enough that minimal additional promotion would be required. I'd also be promoting other sites I own using WA strategies to revive them. So I'd hope that several existing sites that are in the doldrums would come back to life and start earning for me again.

Onward and upward!