Feeling doubtful.

So just by looking at the title I'm sure you can already be thinking of a few things.

"Is this person doubting WA?"
"Is he skeptical of the training?"
"Is he another one of the doubters that don't put in all their effort?"

Nah. Not even close. As of this writing, it's the 30th of March 2017. I started up my website back in February. The 5th to be exact. I had a site before that was in a niche I discovered wasn't actually too interesting for me.

So I created a new one. A membership website which I poured hours and hours of effort into. Still am. It looks great. I'm even at the stage where I'm contemplating a change in themes but that might be where the title starts making itself relevant to this post.

Today and last night I started feeling doubt. The fear of having not been able to draw too many people to my site. I know it's barely been 2 months and I'm not realistically supposed to be seeing results yet, especially since I started as a complete newbie.

I love my website too don't get me wrong. It's great to have something to work on where content creation is as easy as breathing. It's just...I don't know. It's not even about the money. It's jut getting my website out there. I've advertised it through my friends and the site managed to be seen in quite a few schools back in Dubai, even by a few teachers.

I've looked at ways I can rank my site higher. I've shared it on Google Pings and various other sites, indexed all of my posts, made sure to update my friends on my snapchat story whenever a new post I write comes out.

After all that excitement died down though, it's been slow. I've had 3 completely unknown people subscribe to my site this month, hopefully students because that's my target audience. That's progress and I'm quite happy with it don't get me wrong.

I guess I could just use a little advice right now. I decided not to post this as a question because it's far too long and it would be awesome if I could look back on this blog in 8 months, hopefully having found success, and lament on how I stuck it out and never gave up just like we're told here at WA.

How do you deal with the doubt? I don't want it to be too long of a feeling because it's really affected my productivity on the site and I hate it. I don't want to go off creating a new site either because my current site is something I'm so good at and I wouldn't know where to start if I tried to go into another niche, most likely one I'd become very disinterested in.

I'm committed to my current site. No doubt about that. Not leaving WA or the site. I've been checking my analytics in google as well as webmaster tools and my website is definitely getting found there, albeit most likely on the 10th or 11th page. My organic searches are few in number but it's progress nonetheless.

I guess I just need somewhere to spew my thoughts. I'm only 19 with only a little bit of work experience and in the middle of a university transfer. My main goal above all else is financial freedom from my parents, hopefully by the time I get to my next university.

Though I really worry that this doubt of mine is going to hold me back from maximizing everything I wanted to achieve through my site. I really don't want to give up but feeling doubtful is horrible. I'm sure there are quite a few people on this platform who have felt the same before. How did you do it? Overcome all the doubts and push through it?

I sometimes feel like there's something I'm missing with how I've tried to get traffic to my site. I feel like I've done everything I can. It's strange. Up until now I've always felt so enthusiastic about getting back into putting work into my site, no matter how little the traffic may be.

But like I said. Today and yesterday have been low points for me. My productivity is being strangled and I'm going to have to overcome it somehow. I've got my site open in another tab and I've got a draft of my next post up but it's not going as smoothly as hoped. I'm being distracted by every little thing with this tiny voice in the back of my head going:

"What's the point? You're not getting any traffic anyway. Were you even thinking properly when you thought a membership site would be a good idea for highschool students? Just because they're doing the same IB Diploma you're doing doesn't mean they need advice from you. You're not even a blip on the radar in Google and there's so many competitors who have more established, professional websites. Why would people visit your little blog?"

Yeah sorry to get negative. It's just how I've been feeling these past 2 days. If you had told me everything the tiny voice had been telling me before this week started, I would've gone:

"Who cares? I'm willing to put all my effort into it these next few months. This is going to be successful and I'll make sure it becomes a big rival to those sites. It just takes time and everyone knows it"

Anyway if you've made it this far in the post then kudos to you. I know my content is very disorganized. All I really want to do is ask advice from whoever's been at this point before even though it's ultimately up to me to get over it. I believe I will. I'll get over my doubts but right now, if anyone has some advice for a newbie like myself, I'd be extremely grateful.

Thanks for reading if you made it to the end. I'll stick it out but I have a feeling that it's going to suck for a while. Hopefully my next blog is happier :)

- Rhys