My first $1000 month - 4 Years To Become An Overnight Success!

Hey there WA'ers. Earlier this week I was looking through some stats and realised that in August, I made over $1000 in affiliate and advertising revenue on my fishing site. This marks the first time I had hit that milestone in a single month.

And as I was looking at that, I popped in WA to check some stats in regards to WA income on my other site and up popped a notification that I have been a member of WA for 4 years! FOUR YEARS! It really didn't realise it was that long.

How long did it take me to make the $1000 in one month?

So, I kicked my fishing site off on October 2020 as a case study for some training I was creating on my other 'make money online' niche website (you can find it here also if you go to my training section on my profile).

I followed the basic SEO principals that we are taught here at WA and nothing really more and made my first sale after 4 months. - You can see more on that here.

From there, the site has grown to 326 posts and has made a total of:

• Affiliate income: $2314
• Advertising income: $4394

That is a total of $6708 in 23 months

And with over $1000 of that in August, you can see why it feels like being an overnight success. And I would say without looking too hard into it that around 70% of the rest has come in the last 4 months. So again, it does feel like it happened overnight.

What were my biggest learnings?

As I mentioned above, this site has been built following the basics of SEO only. I am also in a lucky position that my other site also makes a little cash and my wife and I have a fitness business on the side so I could afford to hire a writer to do up my buying guides as well as paying for some premium plugins such as lasso and generate blocks.

However, 326 posts over 23 months is only around 4 per week so it is still doable for those of you still in the bootstrapping stages. Anyway, apart from doing a lot of the training here in WA, my biggest learnings/pieces of advice are as follows:

It only takes a couple of posts

Out of the 326 posts on my site, I would say that when it comes to the advertising revenue especially, that the most of my income comes from around 10 or so posts. In fact, in my experience you can do all of the best keyword analysis in the world and not get a single viewer to your post - if it ranks at all.

Then you can write a post on a subject that you expect to only appeal to a smaller group, or has extremely high competition and it just goes nuts. I mean I wrote a post on whether you can eat striped bass to fill out a parent page link and it gets around 800 views a day.

My point here? If you have an idea, write a post about it. You just never know what will take off.

Watch your stats

This is something that I didn't do a lot in my early days but as the site started to get traction, watching my stats in Google Analytics and Search Console became critical to my success. There have been numerous training sessions here on the subject so I won't into it all here but when it came to updating internal links, new codes from plugins or even shooting up a quick video, starting with your most popular posts will get you the best results the fastest.

From here you can also start to see what patterns are there based on what your viewers are looking at. For example, I wrote my post about eating striped bass based on the fact that a post about lures and bait for them was popular.

There really is a lot to this and I think it will be easier to follow this up with a second blog on this subject alone. But at the end of the day, knowing what is ranking well on your site will allow you to mirror this moving forward - as well as link poorer performing posts to them.

The trick however is to make sure you are taking enough time to check this out without falling down a rabbit hole.

Google Discover

And finally, a few months back Jay ran a training session on Google Discover (premium plus members can find it here). This has been a huge traffic generator for me and something that I highly recommend you do.

Basically, just make sure you have a 1600x840 social image in your metadata section of any informative post you write (6 tips..., how to... etc.). This is definitely one that will surprise you as to what ranks there.

For example

Can you eat Striped Bass? - over 800 views a day

Can you eat Sturgeon? - 3 a day?? I mean really? haha

Blows my mind at times but again, you just have to keep going.

Conclusion

So there it is, I hope that was helpful and I hope that you take away from this that with some work and following the training here at WA that making money is within reach for everyone regardless of their niche.

I will add a few more posts over the next few weeks elaborating on some of the above but of course, let me know of any questions below.

Paul