My First Ever Internet Search - Who'd Have Thought Where it Would Lead?

byPaulWatson

3.8K followers

2 months ago

Do you remember the very first internet search you ever did?

I do!

It was a cold, wet slow day in the office where I worked and one of the “nerdier” guys had worked out how to access the internet – which in that era, was no mean feat.

Then It Grew…

Now, for fear of stating the absolute bleeding obvious, the internet has grown and changed quite a bit since then – I mean my original search was undertaken way before the likes of Google was even a thing.

Now of course there is not much we don’t do online… from banking, to working, to ordering food and of course – shopping.

Think of your own behaviors online – How much do you buy? What do you search for?

Chances are, you are searching and buying more online than ever before…

And I Started to Make Money From It…

Of course back then, I had no idea that my first foray in the world wide web would ever lead me to leave that office and make money online – but that is what I did.

I got fired from a job I hated and was looking for something better. I was convinced by a friend of mine that essential oils were the future and that people wanted to buy them online…

After looking around and spending a lot of money on scam programs, I found a program called Wealthy Affiliate and joined on their free starter membership.

Each night after work, I would run through their training and before long, had an affiliate marketing website up and running – and had made the investment to join as a member too.

Now, to cut a long story short, after 10 months I realized I didn’t really like writing about essential oils, so I sold the site for about $2000. But I had learned so much that I started another – about fishing and camping!

After 18 months (by which time it had earned me close to $10k), I was offered $17k for the site, so I sold it too.

Then, through my travel blog, I was able to fund my passion for travel and explore different places around the world – earning close to $5k per month – all via a mixture of affiliate marketing and posting ads on my site.

Then It All Came Crashing Down…

And here is the one problem with this whole online caper – we need traffic to our websites in order to get readers to click on our affiliate links.

A few Google algorithm updates later and that was that – my travel site was effectively wiped off the face of the earth. I could spend hours explaining whether this was valid, or the injustices of it all but the facts remain…

My site was gone – and along with it my income.

Affiliate marketing is dead – or so the forums would tell us.

Regardless, I shut my laptop down and sulked – for a good month…

So I Went Back to Basics…

After my sulk, I realized that my travel site was going to take a lot of work to get back to where it was – something I just didn’t have the energy for.

So I went back to where it all began – my Wealthy Affiliate training – and started it all again.

From here, I built a new site – a much smaller site in a specific niche – and guess what?

It started to grow, and then, made sales – not a lot so far for sure – but at least it is working again.

Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

So, with all of these recent changes, does affiliate marketing still work?

Well, to start with, the days of building fast websites with a lot of AI based material and stock photos (as per my travel site) appear to be gone.

Additionally, when it comes to affiliate marketing (or many other online business models) the goal posts have definitely changed.

However, people still buy on line and want to do their research before they do.

So, even though affiliate marketing sites seem to have been hit the hardest in recent Google updates, my recent experiences do appear to highlight that the process itself is still sound…

Build it small and grow from there and the chances of success are still high.

Afterall, did your online shopping behaviors change just because Google went rogue? I am guessing they did not.

Which means, you can still sell stuff to people, you just need to do it a little differently is all!

Oh, And My Search?

It was “What is Chewbacca?”

The answer:

I never found out as after waiting for at least 30 minutes it timed out… haha… maybe some things don’t change afterall…