A Reflection on the Past Year

byphil1944

8.6K followers

3 years ago

A Reflection on the Past Year

As the year that was 2021 draws to a close, we should all sit back and reflect on the year that was. How did we go as affiliate marketers? How did our online businesses perform, individually and overall? It’s a time for realistic introspection.

The process of looking back over the past with hard data to zero in on what went well and what could be improved in 2022 is an incredibly important one.

Many of us shy away from an objective and sometimes brutal assessment of our performance. It is far easier to stick our head in the sand if things don’t go well and tell ourselves we were unlucky, or that Google isn’t fair, or whatever makes our ego feel a little better.

Like a teenager leaving school to face the world, you create your website full of hope and excitement, sure of your ability to make money where others have failed.

The teenager soon discovers that entering the workforce and fighting for survival with others working hard to step on their head on the way to the top is easier said than done.

Relationships fail, jobs are lost, money is tight.

This life thing turns out to be a lot harder than anyone let on.

Letting go of childhood fantasies and stepping into the reality of life is a long, hard road that we all face.

But face it we must or end up flat on our ass when life kicks us so hard that we are forced out of our stupor.

The journey for creating our online business is the same.

There are many models to follow – affiliate marketing, drop shipping, developing our own product or a combination of these. There are many niches to specialize in.

You either align yourself with the realities of being involved in this space, or you lose money. If you are distracted by the bright shiny pebbles, you lose time and money.

Unlike life, there is an objective measure of how aligned you are with the reality of the markets:

Your net earnings, your profit or loss.

Create a spreadsheet that records your online earnings and expenses. Expenses include the cost of your internet connection, your Wealthy Affiliate membership, Facebook advertising and so on. If you want to use it for tax purposes, include your home office expense as well, but seek a qualified accountant’s advice to get this absolutely right.

This is your scorecard.

When looking at the scorecard in retrospect, you can clearly see where you went wrong. When you approach the process with an open mind and a desire to improve, you can have profound realizations.

A chart of your P+L over time is a valuable tool. it will show you what you did right. Do more of it. It will show you what you did wrong. Do less of it. Allow for lag. Whether you do something right or wrong, the effect may no show up for some time.

On the other hand, learning to see the signs before things get out of hand is an important thing to learn. Especially if you are spending money on Facebook or Google advertising. You must monitor that very closely.

The process of planning and reviewing your website development and promotion on a regular basis is the way to improve quickly. But many would-be internet entrepreneurs don’t do it. As a member of Wealthy Affiliate, you have access to some of the best training and advice available on the internet. Use it. Follow it. Implement it. Get your money’s worth from your subscription.

Most of us work so hard to protect our flimsy egos that we would rather not stare at ourselves warts and all.

Closely examining your profit and loss is as stark a mirror as you can find. It will point out every flaw. Each and every pimple.

Ranking and badges are nice and are an incentive to keep going. But they don’t contribute to your bottom line. If you want to improve your online businesses, you have to be willing to stand back and assess yourself in an objective way. Here are some things you can do:

Re-Assess Your Niche

Today I heard about a website whose niche is Yoga Pants. Not sportswear, not Yoga clothes or equipment, not health and fitness, just Yoga Pants.

It generates $1.9M in annual profit!

Could you benefit from focusing on a sub-niche of your main niche? There might be fewer prospects but they might be more motivated to purchase. It might be easier to position yourself as an expert. And it will be easier to find long-tail keywords that you can rank high for.

Create Landing Pages

Decide exactly what products you are going to promote on one website and create a landing page for each one. Use the landing page to pre-sell the product and to link to its vendor page. Be enthusiastic. The visitor should be excited to learn what this product is all about.

Write Blog Posts

Set up a schedule to write 2 blog posts a week for this site. That’s perfectly doable. For multiple sites, you need to outsource or you’ll burn out.

One blog post should be informative. Its purpose is to maintain your position as an expert in this niche, backed up by FB groups, Instagram posts and Pinterest.

The other post should be about one of your products. Give it a good review. Possibly review other products that suffer in comparison. To learn more, provide the visitor with a link to this product’s landing page.

These are just three things you can do. Other Wealthy Affiliate members will have more.

Please chip in with you own ideas or questions in response to this post.