A New Year and One Year at Wealthy Affiliate

Happy New Year, WA! Welcome to a new decade as well! And in personal news, it is a new year at WA for me as well! My Wealthy Affiliate Anniversary passed a week or so ago.

I've officially been at WA for a year. I received my badge and everything.

It has definitely been a year of changes for me, a lot of learning, and a lot of challenges.

Accomplishments in 2019 (Business)

• Built TWO websites
• Bought three domains
• Went through all 5 levels of Wealthy Affiliate OEC Training (2x actually, helping me remember everything for my 2nd website)
• Made my first sale from Amazon Associates (and then some!)
• Started getting organic traffic
• Made the 1st page on Google, Bing and Yahoo (spot 1 too on a couple)
• Made a couple UK sales on Amazon too, which kept that account open
• Joined a few affiliate programs
• Opened a FB, IG, Pinterest, and Twitter account for my website(s)
• Made some connections!
• Had my biggest month in sales in December, which was from my new website that is only 6 months old now. Pretty cool.
• I had a post go mini-viral on Facebook
• I had a post on Quora go a bit viral as well.
• My IG account is the one going a lot more popular. Few hundred followers already. (And I'm not actively trying yet, I'm working on my website more)

Mistakes I've Made and Learned From

The biggest mistake in business I made was setting up a 'practice website' instead of just diving into my true passion. You cannot 'screw up' by practicing on your website permanently. Anything I did, the articles I wrote, I could go back and make them better, delete or replace them, change the themes or plugins, etc. If I screwed up bad trying to mess with code and broke my site, I have a back up both with WA and personally.

I was too afraid to ruin my 'dream', so I wanted to go through training with a practice website.

This learning experience set me back on my journey by around six months.

That's okay though.

I see a lot of people 'learning' their first year and setting themselves back a little bit, either by starting out with five websites, experimenting with traffic or articles or focus, etc. It can all set us back when these things fail.

I'm glad I chose to focus on one website for now, though. I do a lot of cat stuff on my own time and dime, and that's super important to me. My website is a huge part of that, too, definitely. But when I have a sick kitten, and lose one like I did this year, I put my site on hold for a couple weeks. Just no time.

I also realized I'm not quite as driven as I need to be to accomplish what some of my new friends at WA have accomplished! My goals are a bit more altruistic than most, what with cat rescue, but that doesn't mean I cannot be driven.

Goals for 2020

I plan on keeping my posting schedule for right now as I have a huge kitty emergency I'm fighting and just no time.

But I do plan on stepping it up a notch in 2020, getting way more organized and analytical about things. Since I foster kittens, sometimes my schedule is a little wonky, but I'm hoping to create my routine.

Without a routine, I flail a lot. And it's hard for me lately to get into my routine when things are always changing. My anxiety doesn't like not having a routine, it throws me completely off and then I end up researching bookends instead of cat crap because I'm all over the place.

Another goal for 2020 is to set up a database on my website for this cat stuff. (It's needed), but I am definitely having issues. I have a plugin I'm trying to use, but it's creating weird gaps in URLs for records. Plug-in creator says that is definitely not the plugin, so I've got to go through and deactivate my plugins one by one until I find the culprit. Sigh. It's either a database or a membership section of my site. I don't know which.

In any case, that's it in a nutshell.

Wishing You All a Happy New Year!

Stay safe, guys. Stay motivated. Wishing everyone a successful year! Oh! And spay and neuter your pets!

Lovies!