The 3 month mark

byRMcKenna

274 followers

8 years ago

Ladies and gentlemen may I have your attention please?

For those of you who have been on this platform for less than a few months, let me introduce myself.

I first discovered Wealthy Affiliate back in October 2016. I was a struggling Aerospace Engineering undergrad student destined to eventually throw in the towel and withdraw.

I stayed on WA for about a month and then left in late November due to exams.

I had paid for the $19 fee for premium and much like many of you, I had that spark. The excitement. The images of working short hours at home and raking in money by the thousands.

Yeah. That never happened and you shouldn't expect it either.

Much like an actual business, online businesses take a while before they kick off. I will get to my own website in a bit but let me ask you.

Do you think you would be instantly successful in the first month if you opened up a business in any industry?

No, right?

That's my point. Too many times I've seen people question the growth of their website. They've done everything right, followed the training, applied everything they've learned.

Lot of hard work basically.

Yet no instant gratification for their work.

I'm sorry everyone but that's not how it is.

I'm only 19, going on 20 soon, still haven't even gotten through my first year at university because I had to leave and change schools but that's become a reality for me.

I came back to WA after my winter break. By then my ranking in WA had gone into the 20000's and my previous website was gone although to be fair, I was never going to do well with it anyway.

My old website was a smartphone review type website with the key selling point being that it was focused on reviewing phones in a more compact, summarized version instead of long technical ones.

Didn't work out because I left and also because I didn't have the perseverance. I put one post on that site in total before I left.

Now. Fast forward a few months. As I'm writing this, it's the first of May over here in the Netherlands. It's 1:34 am and I've just checked my analytics which inspired me to write this post.

If you'll please shift your attention to diagram A below:

As you can tell, that is my week by week growth of the website that I started up on the 5th of February, 2017.

If you're wondering why the dip at the very end, that dip basically doesn't count because the rising trend you see on the graph immediately before the dip at the end was only because that particular week ended on the 29th of April. That very last dip is only data for one day, the 30th, which was yesterday.

I got 67 sessions to my site on the 30th which is almost double what it was on the 29th if that gives any perspective.

I had planned it to be a membership website, had a whole monetized scheme going, even purchased a plugin called s2member pro for it. Not necessarily a waste of money but I was ambitious.

However, unlike with my first website, I set my goal of waiting. I would post as frequently as I could, improve my site to the best of my ability, improve my writing, include SEO-friendly everything's, you name it.

These past few months I've bided my time learning more and more about SEO and doing my best to keep up my motivation.

I'm going to be honest. I've suffered 1 or 2 major burnouts in the past few months.

I'd like to give credit to Jay (magistudios) for his online video webinars because it was only after I watched a video of his that I pulled myself out of the second crash and burn phase.

I'd also like to thank Kyle and Carson.

Everyone really needs to pay attention when they say this isn't overnight success. Heck, I haven't made a single cent off my website. Not even up until now.

That's not stopping me from continuing.

Why? Well take a look at my month over month trend below:

I don't know about you, but that's showing a rising trend.

I went from nothing in February to 312 sessions in March and then 452 in April.

My website technically isn't even 3 months old yet until the 5th of May and like I said. As of me writing this, it's the 1st.

So Kyle and Carson don't make this stuff up. A large part of this whole affiliate marketing process is a waiting game.

You can't instantly rank highly on search engines overnight.

Anybody that says otherwise is either kidding themselves, and you, or have been using Black Hat SEO tactics (which I won't explain here because it takes time).

As a matter of fact, I wish I could show you my Google Webmaster Tools progress. Basically, I've only gotten on the first and second pages of Google these past few days and I'm not even sure if that will change or not!

My point is success isn't overnight.

It also depends on what your definition of success is.

I've come to peace with the fact that I will not be making any real money just yet but just seeing my website gain traction online has given me hope.

My own personal success was to have my website get rankings and establish an online presence. I've achieved that so far with 764 sessions.

I will re-state what I've read up from many full time affiliate marketers. Traffic is the stepping stone to revenue. You see it in the training but I don't think people hear it enough.

My success at WA so far has been the fact that I've stuck it out for nearly 3 months with my website. I challenged myself to not make any drastic decisions until at least 3 months before deciding whether this was for me or not.

That was on the 5th of February. Ever since my website started gaining more visitors, I've completely forgotten about the fact that I was going to leave.

Let me also say this. It's not just about letting your website sit there while you post a few things here and there and hope for the best.

Be proactive. Search for new ways to improve you ranking to get more traffic.

Let me tell you why I saw a massive spike in the amount of visitors to my site. In fact, I really wish I had done it sooner.

Ready? It's Quora. The website Quora. I got hooked to answering questions to people on there. Highschool students who would soon be doing the IB Diploma highschool certification.

I discovered that I was getting a lot of views on my answers and capitalized on that immediately by putting my website in my own description as advertising. The result? Well see for yourself:

Have a random guess as to when I started answering questions on Quora. Have you guessed it? Yup. Right towards the end, right around the 22nd of April and just a bit before it.

What's my point here? My point is on top of persevering and waiting for your website to slowly rank and mature on search engines, you need to find other ways of improving your ranking other than content.

Find relevant websites that have tons of traffic and guest post. Find a forum for things related to your niche and advertise yourself as an expert. I think my own results speak for themselves when I say that it can work.

Find ways of bringing in traffic. Being patient and waiting for your site to grow is one way of doing it, being active and looking for opportunities to expand is another.

I tried multiple ways of bringing in traffic. I've used Snapchat which briefly saw my sessions increase to 73 in a day back in March through a friend of mine. I used Facebook, Google Plus. I've used a lot of different social media platforms.

Quora was my sweet spot. It was perfect and still is because there will always be people asking questions on there and always like-minded people reading the answers to those questions.

I would suggest anyone reading this post to go give Quora a try. It's a massive Q&A type website that can seriously benefit you if you answer tons of questions. I've personally answered around 90 in the past two weeks.

Now let me reiterate that this isn't overnight success.

This was a steady process. I've technically been at WA for an accumulated time of about 6 months including October and November of last year. This education has given me a whole new perspective of the internet and how it works.

Moral of the story? Well here it is.

I challenge newcomers to stick it out for 3 months. Make 3 months your goal. You may be surprised, much like myself, that if you get used to the mentality of patience and have an initial long-term goal for your growth, then you'll see results after a while.

My new website isn't even 3 months old yet but I'm encouraged by the progress I've made.

I'm not sure how to end this blog but I hope I've given some perspective to any newcomers or WA members who are going through a demotivating phase because they've convinced themselves that they're not getting results.

Don't worry. It happens to all of us. It's temporary. The most important thing to remember is that your progress and growth is never truly over until you give up. I'm not trying to sound cliche. I'm dead serious.

The moment you give up, it's over. So don't quit when the going gets tough. Bulldoze through it and challenge yourself to get to 3 months.

"But what happens when I get to 3 months?"

Go for 6 months. Once you've gotten there go for a year. Then 2 years. Then 4 years.

Or you could just go up by 3 month increments but either way, you get my point.

So ladies and gents that wraps up this rant from a 19 year old undergrad student. Again, I hope this has helped anybody going through a burnout and has given newcomers some perspective on what it takes to grow online.

Anyway it's 2:16 am so I definitely need to sleep. Kudos to you if you made it this far! Goodnight!