First 3 Months Update: All My Successes So Far

The Felino at the Montreal Grand Prix, June 2019. My other great car was towed to the mechanic's this morning :( LOL.

Overview

It's been a great first three months. I've learned a lot, accomplished a lot, made friends, and enjoyed many aspects of affiliate marketing.

YouTube and Extroversion

Searching for ways to succeed online has pushed me to behave in a less introverted/more extroverted manner. Every step in that direction has been very good for me. I strongly believe that this is required to succeed.

An important direction I've taken is to get started on YouTube (with thanks to Benjisdad for inspiration). My posts use my YouTube videos, and the videos point to the relevant posts.

I've got over 20 short clips there now, mostly demos of very different things: figure skating, acroyoga, breathing, 5 Tibetans, some Image Streaming, some travel videos, some cultural stuff, and soon I'll add piano, dances and improvisational dance.

I still have a barrier to speaking on YouTube, but I'm confident I can overcome it, and in time (maybe not soon!) I'll speak aloud the contents of my posts, and vice versa.

Creativity

Being creative is super important for me. I get bored easily. The other best thing besides extroversion that I got from taking part in WA is being creative.

I'm enjoying creating content: text, pictures and videos. But sometimes it's hard, I don't feel like it, and when I don't feel like it, I don't do much at all. So I'm a dilettante, not a professional at all the things I do. Whenever I tried to be professional at something, I get bored. Maybe I need to grow up ;)

The Training

I've gone through watching/reading all 5 modules, but I'm stuck at Module 3 (Making money), and I know Module 4 (Social) will be really hard for me. I also started the Bootcamp.

The technical stuff is super easy for me (except that I've got several broken things in my websites that aren't so easy to fix, but I know I'll manage...), but the business and social stuff are hard. So at this point, there is no plan for me to get through and complete modules 3, 4, 5.

In particular, when I hear Kyle's perspective, that in hindsight, it's best to start with a full business plan of success, I just turn off: I'm no businessman, and I hoped online business would have been different, but I have to accept the fact that it's a business, and that's too bad.

With this realization, my perspective has shifted. I see it's quite unrealistic for me to aim to have a full income from affiliate marketing in the near future (say the next year). So I'm going to continue "just for fun", and I'll get a job at the end of September when my unemployment insurance runs out. After I get a job, I'll just watch my websites, like a few hours per week.

The Stats

I've got 3 websites, one on Creativity with "awesome" health, and 12 posts. The other 2 have 7 and 4 posts (on AmazingToilets, and my travel blog). There is also a 4th website, which is the translation into French of the Creativity site, with 3 posts, and where I realize it's nearly as much work to translate an article as to write one. I'm struggling with all of them.

But there is much good to say about how well the websites are doing.

- 13 articles have been indexed by Google. I'm surprised that not more pages have been found though, since I'm submitting a sitemap.xml for all my sites. Perhaps I'm not doing it right...

- according to SerpRobot, I have 2 pages that have the top rank in Google, and 2 more that are in the top 10.

- In 3 months, I have "45000 words written in Site Content, more than 97% at WA". My writing isn't the best at times, but I'm clearly not paralyzed by perfectionism.

- My WA rank reached 500 last week, another sign that pushing myself to be extroverted is working.

- I'm enjoying commenting on others websites. Becoming a Certified Commenter sounds like an easy worthwhile near-term goal for me (with thanks to Twack here for the idea).

- I can see traffic on all the websites with Google Analytics, however nearly all is from robots or people at WA encouraged to comment on my websites. With Google Webmaster Tools, I can see I got 5 clicks on one website and 1 on another. The rate at which people click on my pages from organic search is very low, like 1-2%.

- other small traces of success are: one person most likely not from WA spontaneously wrote a comment on one of my YouTube videos, and another one liked one other video.

The next 3 months

One task in Module 5 is to come up with 30 keyword titles for new articles. I'm working on that. Maybe I'll start a new niche, or build on the current stuff.

It's pretty clear I'll get booted out of the Amazon Affiliate program from making no sales in 6 months. With that, as I said, I need to keep doing affiliate marketing for the fun of it, not the money.

To conclude: all is well, I'm happily creating content and helping on the WA platform, and will be there for another 3 months. All my best wishes to you all!