Perspective of a New Content Creator

bySara626

108 followers

4 years ago

As someone who has craved a flexible work schedule for a long time, I was afraid that creating online content was overglorified by travel bloggers and unlikely to be sustainable for normal, non-traveling people. Believe me, I've looked into it. The idea of being a freelancer and having to hunt for clients, then write topics I'm not familiar with and not interested in didn't excite me.

My Work Background

My college degree required a year-long internship period between my junior and senior year. It was my first office job... and I hated it. I really, truly hated it, although I didn't realize just how much I loathed it until the final week. Looking back, I was extremely depressed during that year. After graduating, I abandoned my degree and sought jobs that, in my mind, would give me a more flexible lifestyle.

But over the next couple of years, I became a job hopper. I'm a lifelong learner; as soon as I start to get bored and fall into a rut, I'm ready to move onto something new. I delivered beach equipment to customers along the shore of Lake Michigan. I became a cage cashier at a casino, then later worked in the casino bank where I was in charge of millions of dollars. It was a high-stress job for pathetic pay; the hostesses made more money than I did, even though the casino couldn't function without accurate money flow. Then, I tried my hand at being a waitress and worked in several restaurants.

What I discovered was that "flexible" work schedules really weren't all that flexible. Although I initially didn't mind working weekends and holidays, I soon became frustrated that I couldn't make plans with friends and family or even schedule doctor appointments unless I requested a specific day off, and even then, my supervisors made it clear that "you can put in the request, but it's not a guarantee. If we're short that day, you'll be on the schedule." And that was the case. I'd requested a weekend off (the audacity; that's prime time in the restaurant world) to attend a writing conference across the state (yes, I'd already paid for it), only to discover that my request had been ignored and I was left scrambling to find a coworker to take my shift.

My life had no structure. I had no idea which days I would be off. I had to beg and barter if I wanted to take a vacation during the tourist season. I hated being forced to come into the restaurant an hour early to clean, knowing that my time was worth less than $3 and the owners were using us to do this work for next to nothing rather than pay a real cleaning crew. I hated being run into the ground with big parties, then splitting my tips with other servers, bartenders, and bussers, even if I bussed my own table (which I usually ended up doing). I waited on corporate parties and watched them laugh and toast, and I realized I wanted to be on the other end of this deal. I wanted to toast success and the future, not be the one refilling the glass.

I finally admitted defeat and accepted an office job again. If I was going to hate a job, I might as well have weekends and holidays off so I could spend time with friends and family and get health benefits. My goal was to stay at this job while I published my science-fantasy book series until I could earn enough money on the books to quit. Spoiler alert: writers make very little money unless you hit a miraculously lucky break. I published the first book in 2018 and recently released the second one a few months ago. The books were well received--both even received awards from an editorial review agency--but after crunching the numbers, it became depressingly obvious that I wasn't going to be able to quit my office job anytime soon. I still needed a steady source of income to sustain the real dream.

How COVID-19 Changed My Perspective

My company, like many others, sent its nonessential employees home to work remotely in March. And I was much happier! I'm not a morning person, so I hated getting up early and having to commute to work. I had peace and quiet, no distractions of people constantly walking past my desk, and I was saving a considerable amount of money in gas. I truly enjoyed staying home.... so much so that I began to dread the day I'd be forced to return to the office. I started experiencing stomach-churning anxiety just thinking about it. I didn't want to go back, but the thought of starting to hunt for a new job, especially in the middle of a pandemic, was too daunting.

And then, the reason for my persistent unhappiness was illuminated; I realized I'm a creator at heart. And I was so, so tired of dedicating so many hours of my life to making someone else's vision happen. Forty hours a week for someone else is a lot. I'd rather use that time to make MY vision happen. I've always been a night owl; I don't want to conform to someone else's schedule that dictates I have to get up way earlier than my body was programmed to wake. I don't want to live for weekends and holidays. If I could work on my own creations on my own time, even if it's two in the morning... if I could spend my time building my own platform and brand instead of someone else's... a lot of fanciful what-ifs.

Cue Wealthy Affiliate

The Internet must have read my mind, because while listening to YouTube, an ad started running. My mouse hovered over the skip button, but I didn't click. I knew the ad was one of those too-good-to-be-true solutions about earning millions while putting in only a few hours of work each day and being able to travel the world and work anywhere. But I was tempted. And I Googled whether or not it was truly a scam.

What I found was an article by someone named Dale who talked about this company's faulty methods. No, it wasn't necessarily a scam, but they wanted money upfront to teach you how to write keyword-rich content, then you'd scope out the web and reach out to companies that had poor content and pitch your services. The idea was to build up clients who would supposedly pay you lots of money on a monthly basis for your amazing content-writing skills. But, Dale explained in his article, why go through all that trouble finding clients and writing content for them when you could create your own content, your own business, and have total control? And then he talked about Wealthy Affiliate. He broke down the concept and shared screenshots to showcase that it's truly a community, which the other company lacked.

Now that I'm almost done with Level 2's training, I can see how Dale did exactly what the WA program is teaching us. He knew people were wondering whether that running YouTube ad was a scam. I fell right into his niche, and he earned commission when I committed to the premium membership. No, I'm not bitter about falling into the trap; rather, I'm in awe. I know this program can work because it worked on me.

My Early Content Mistakes

I'm a natural-born skeptic, and I still am. Despite my appreciation for Dale's prowess with bringing me to WA, the idea of actually being able to do this myself and earn a living still feels out of reach. I appreciate that WA doesn't force you to pay upfront in order to access lessons. That being said, I did hope that I could advance further on the free membership than I was able to, but I just have to have faith that this investment is worthwhile.

I've always been very open about my mistakes so I can help other people avoid the same pitfalls. Content creation is nothing new to me; I've had my own blog/portfolio website for almost five years, and I also created a second website around the book series. But I'd never realized the potential I had right there at my fingertips. I viewed my websites as a means to build my platform, but as far as revenue went, they lost money on the SSL certificates, domains, hosting, etc.

As I worked through the first WA lessons and starting thinking about my niche, I latched onto the wrong idea. Remember the football snack helmets? I fixated on that example. I hadn't seen enough of the big picture yet to fully understand what I'd need to do with my website. I thought I'd basically be creating a shopping page for a specific niche, so I decided to make a website about pet harnesses since I'd recently been shopping for one for my cat.

But after doing the bare minimum WordPress setup, I paused. I didn't see a lot of directions to take that niche, especially after later lessons focused so heavily on content creation. How much could I really write about pet harnesses before I became bored, just like I did with so many other jobs?

I'll admit it; I stopped following along with the steps for each lesson and just started binge-watching the videos. I couldn't follow step by step without seeing the destination; I felt like I was moving forward but staring at my feet and likely to run into a wall if I didn't look up. But also, I was impatient to learn about the affiliate marketing since I already had a website that was recognized and ranked by the search engines and I could now seen potential there that I hadn't before. The farther I advanced in the lessons, the less I loved my pet harness idea, but I didn't know what niche to pick.

When it hit me, it really did hit me. That's always been how my brain works; I need to take time and do a lot of thinking, and then the pieces fall together and a vision is illuminated. I knew what I wanted my niche to be. I could even envision a logo for it in my mind. I paused on the lessons for a little while so I could create my logo in Photoshop, and then I went back and started following the steps for each lesson. Now, I'm well on my way!

Keywords Really Do Work!

I noticed something interesting happening with my original five-year-old website. Comments would periodically come through on a blog post I wrote two years ago, which garnered attention since I don't usually get very many comments. I'd often shrug it off, thinking it was strange and wondering how the commenters had found that post since it was buried fairly deep in the archived posts on the website. I didn't think much of it, until my WA training started to piece together the notion that this blog post must be ranking in a micro niche I hadn't even realized I'd targeted. The post was a review and comparison of two different independent-publishing platforms for authors.

I looked at Google Analytics and was able to see the keywords that people were searching that were bringing them to this article. My content hit them pretty well, but with this list of variations, I went into WordPress and added the new search items into the keyword list for the post. Here are the analytics from my website with the arrow showing when I added the keywords:

My website traffic nearly tripled the next day! It had gone from averaging 20-50 visitors a day to a new record of 192, just from adding a few extra keywords to a two-year-old blog post! Even after that spike leveled off, I was still seeing consistently more traffic than I had been before. Seeing the proof of the power of keywords definitely made me feel optimistic about the new website I'm working on through WA, and it's got the gears turning about how I can bolster my old websites as well to turn profits rather than losing money.

What's Next?

I feel well-equipped to write content-rich posts that target low-hanging fruit with niche keywords. But, as I mentioned, I'm naturally skeptical, although I'm being cautiously hopeful that I can turn this into something that will give me the financial freedom and flexibility I want. It still seems too good to be true. I hope that's not the case! I keep hearing that sites should be ranking and starting to earn a little income around the three-month mark, so I'll keep working on it as much as I can between the full-time office job, marketing the books, and writing the next one in the series. I approach most things hoping for the best while bracing for the worst. But, with every failure, with every job that I've given up on, I've learned valuable takeaways, so even if this doesn't allow me to quit, I've already picked up tools that I know will help me in my other endeavors.

I'm excited for the future. We'll see what happens from here!