One year at Wealthy Affiliate - Bali Reflections

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Hey there Affiliates of Wealth, as you can see from the not-at-all-coreographed-completely-natural image above, I come to you today from beautiful Bali where my family and I are taking a week or so away from the daily grind to relax. I brought my laptop with me as so I could "just do about an hour or so a day and get some posts published" whilst I am here. Needless to say, after 4 days, this is the first time that the old girl has seen the light of day...

Anyway, I digress - must be the Bintang's haha. Last week as I was packing up said laptop for the trip I noticed my 1 year at Wealthy Affiliate (WA) badge pop up om my screen. "WOW!" I thought. that went by so fast... And to be honest, it has been on my mind ever since...

My reflections on the year

I mentioned the term reflection in the title above as that is what I have really done over the past few days as I questioned whether all of the work is worth it (I.e a lot of work for very few sales). This culminated in a long poolside chat with the minister for entertainment and finance ( a.k.a Nic, my beautiful wife) about the year that was...

To be honest, we were more discussing our Pilates studios that we own and what our plans were moving forward with them. The conversation moved to the websites as she asked me how I was going not having done any writing so far on this trip... I admitted I was struggling a bit but enjoying trying to quieten my mind without it (I will elaborate on this soon).

Almost in passing I mentioned the 1-year badge and she asked me what the year had given me and what I wanted from my online businesses when we are sitting in the same spot next year (we come every year as Nic does a retreat for the studios). So, I opened my mouth and about an hour and two beers later, I took a breath...

Now of course I am not going to subject you to the whole diatribe of the evening (I am not sure Nic's eyes have unglazed as yet - poor thing) but I thought I would just run through the things that she asked me to clarify as I think for me they are the key points...

Learn as you go

This is probably my biggest takeaway in the entire year. At the beginning I spent a lot of time undertaking and completing the Online Entrepreneur Certification training here at WA. In my opinion this is an absolute must. And if you are like me who had a little knowledge around this subject, please be patient and do the training step by step, word for word... it is well worth it.

From there however, I feel I wasted a lot of time doing other training just because I didn't know about the subject it was discussing. Now I am talking website build training here (plugins, how to's, website speed and even SEO) and the reason I say wasted was that I have actually not used some of it to date. This means that in essence, that was time I could have spent adding that all important content to my website. Now I seek training when I need a particular thing for my site. Sure I get other information - mainly via interaction within WA and Jay's online stuff - more on that soon - but when it comes to actual nuts and bolts training for your website - learn it as you go.

In fact, the longer I have been at this game, the better I have become and sifting through the stuff that I need help with and skipping the stuff I don't.

Note: That said, the best thing I have done to date is to get myself a personal coach/mentor. If you have the funds - I cannot recommend this approach highly enough - I reckon it advanced my site in 4 short weeks to where it would have been in 6 months if I had gone it alone.

Wealthy Affiliate rankings

This is an interesting one for me and something that I have constantly watched throughout my time here. I have seen many arguments for and against them here and I see some who have been at WA for years with rankings in the 20000s or so and some in the top 100 after what seems like a week. For me, my ranking is something I look at and I do feel pride in the fact that I am in the top 200 (well I was before I came to Bali - those Bali Hai's are not going to drink themselves after all).

The thing I find about it is that answering questions (which is how my rankings have gone up) is how I actually do keep my learning up to date. I usually don't answer questions if someone already has or if I don't know the answers but this is how I keep my knowledge up in the non website building capacity that I discussed in the previous section. The questions section to me is a goldmine of information, post ideas, learnings and just little tidbits that I can apply to my sites to make them just that bit better.

Super Affiliate Challenge

So when I started that short year ago, my website was in a different niche. However, once the Super Affilaite Challenge (SAC) was released, I jumped on board and went for it. At the start, as my first site was definitely not mature enough to put into passive mode, I went against every decent piece of advice here and tried to manage two sites at once. Don't do that - you just cannot do it.

With the SAC, I admit to skimming through it and concentrating on the post goals etc. Until I saw a post from Chris (Benjis Dad) who advised that you follow everything on the SAC even if you know it or have done it. So I took that advice and went back as I did with my original training and forced myself to follow it all step by step. It works - I secretly think ole Kyle and Carson might just know what they are on about here ;-p - I still struggle with getting all of the site comment and internal blog numbers up there, but there certainly were some things that I had missed.

Patience


This is key! As I have said earlier, after 12 months my websites have not even come close to paying for this trip. But they are getting there. I try to do one thing every day to advance my site - whether it be 6 hours work or just a minute or two responding to a comment or answering a question. But just one thing a day WILL get you to your goal - obviously the more you do the quicker this may take, but one thing is one thing that wasn't done yesterday.

An interesting by-note here is that my first site had around 70 odd posts on it when I 'rested' it. I have added 3 more in the past 5 months that I have been working on my new site and it is actually still seeing little increases in traffic, organic comments and a few small sales. Websites appear to take time to mature so patience is definitely the key here.

If something isn't working, tweak it, if still not working, tweak it again or ask a question here at WA. 90% of websites fall away in the first 6 months - so if you are patient, you can rise above it all - I truly and honestly believe that - otherwise I would not be here.

What next?

In short. Business as usual - I am sure that I know 20% of what I will know this time next year (when hopefully I am writing my year two post from the same spot) but I am determined and open to learning new things.

I think the big reflection for me also is that fact that writing actually soothes and calms me... I am a natural stress head and Nic and I spend a lot of time working on that... but writing calms me and gives me an escape. It is almost like a good workout when you have that soreness the next day - after a full day of writing my mind is tired and I feel like I have achieved something. So for that alone I will continue - oh and I am just so determined to succeed here that I just cannot give up...

Conclusion

So there you have it, 1 year down and many more to Enter your own correction... I hope you all got something out of this, if so, please comment below, if not, please comment below - I would love to hear how things work for you.

And, as always

Have fun

Paul

now... where are my togs?

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Recent Comments

26

A great outlook for the future. In a year and 70 posts, you are making sales and progressing even if you are building a second site and somewhat mothballed the other. Best yet you have the skills to write this post from anywhere in the world including exotic Bali. Another year, maybe 2 and that trip and more will be paid for by your blog. You just have to keep scaling up and building out.

God bless you and yours.

Andy Zeus Anderson
Affiliate 3 Percent

Congratulations!!

Congratulations on your first anniversary. I have learnt something good from your post.
Joseph

Congratulations and happy Wealthy Affiliate first birthday. YAY

Keep up the great work you are doing

Here's to making it happen

Jennifer

Paul, Congratulation on your first year.All the best to you on your journey at WA .keep up the good work.

Thanks for the message, delivered in a very entertaining way. :D I loved reading it.

Paula

Any good suggestions in Bali? we are planning a trip to New Zealand next year to visit my identical Twin brother, and plan on several days in Australia and Bali while in that hemisphere. So I guess thats a good 2-3 weeks trip planning.

I will have to figure out the laptop part though since my wife is adamant a vacation is a vacation no work!
Ha Ha ! I bet I will still find time.

Vacations relax her a lot.. I am retired and do online and offline on my time, so we will see. LOL!
Year has flown for me also and similar bumps, but gaining ground now. Patience is key, but even though being older gives us patience, we don't have 20-30 years to meet expectations. Tiem will tell.
Have fun!

Hey William, we always stay in Seminyak.. A bit more relaxing that Kuta or Legian but close enough to check it all out.

Let me know if you want any contacts in Bali for a good driver.

Hope you enjoy NZ and Australia as well.. (and let me know if you want any local Aussie knowledge as well)

Paul

Hi Paul,

I think you hit the mark on following the training step by step and having patience. I too started the SAC this year and I certainly agree that should be the ONE thing you focus on, for now at least.

I also plan on being here next year, same bat time, same bat channel... lol.

Hope you return from vacation refreshed and full of new ideas.

Cheers,

Michael

Congrats on your 1 year WAnniversary!

Hello Paul and congrats on your first year.
We are coming up for our first year at the end of this month.
All the best and have a great time with your family.
Darren :)

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