Newbie tips and tricks and blunders

115 followers

5 years ago

Hello!

Hello! I'm pretty new here, only about 2 months. My site is really coming along! It's been an amazing whirlwind of excitement, frustration, pressure for success, and a huge learning curve!

I had a web store with merchandise for about 4 years that was pretty successful (35K/year at peak) until Amazon, Walmart, and all those stores took over my products, went under pricing that I was allowed as a small business, and could offer all sorts of discounts, free shipping, etc.

I feel I was smart at the time (4 years ago), sold the business for 35K and went back to my career job making much more. My kids were starting to get older and I thought this would be a good move.

It was financially. However, the grind of working for someone else, with ever-changing mandated rules and expectations has been waring on me for a while. I'm 53 and started to not "go with the flow" as well in my younger days! I craved to get back to my creative side and build a business, have the freedom of my time, create something big and exciting, have my life be more of a positive vibe than the negative one I was feeling at work daily.

When I found WA and decided to give it a go, my mind went into overdrive. I mean 110 MPH. I had an idea of what I needed to do, but was thinking about 3 months of work swirling in my mind at all times and I just couldn't possibly get it all out in the 2-3 hours a night I had to work while still working my full time job, caring for kids, one with health issues. It kept me up at night, planning my pages, niche, what I would sell.

What I Did Right:

I followed the first few trainings exactly and got my site up correctly
I did the keyword rich writing and feel it really help set the stage for future writing correctly
I did my keyword search and followed Kyle's recommendations for keeping under 100 QST and actually followed other's advice of under 50.
I'm writing at least 2 posts a week while I'm in intensive training and I plan to go up to 3 shortly.

When I Started to Stray

I got hung up on my site aesthetics. Which I think was good AND bad. I felt the template I chose wasn't going to take me where I wanted to go and too many plug ins were getting me a low score on my website manager and I was worried about my site slowing down. So I changed themes - twice, maybe 3 times which created a lot of work of re-doing some of the visual stuff. Should I have just focused on writing articles instead? Not sure, but I know LIKING how my site LOOKS makes me feel good, confident and more motivated
After finding the theme I liked and installing I noticed my site speed went WAY down. I spent 2 days figuring that one out, sweating bullets I screwed everything up. I think what happened was I had uploaded images WAY too large. I ended up removing all of them (which wasn't too hard for 7 articles) and re scaling them before re uploading them. I also watched some videos on the topic in WA and on word press info sites.
I started "skipping through" the trainings to get ahead and see what seemed important to me. I still haven't finished all the training - which I think is fine, because I'm still a newbie with only 10 articles/posts on my site. But I have to remember to go back and make sure I'm not missing things - which I'm sure I am because reading things on other's posts that I didn't even know existed
I tried to start up a YouTube channel to compliment my site. This is a long term goal and I don't think I was ready for it. I can't do it all in 2 hours a day and my learning curve is too high to do both. I'm going to wait a few more weeks at least before revisiting making more YouTube videos.

Advice So Far from Someone Who Knows Little

Decide what you are going to do on a certain day and keep focusing on it until it's done. Try to avoid getting up and putting in laundry, doing dishes, emailing your kids teachers, etc... Carve out a time you will do those non-business family task and put them on the back burner while you are writing and learning your business
Use the Site Feedback and Comments. Take the time to review other people's sites and give good comments. You will actually learn things by being on other's websites - both what you like and don't like to improve on your own site. Getting comments on your articles feels amazing (and hopefully will help my rank) and makes things feel a little more real!
Consider holding off on signing up for Amazon Associates. Why? Because if you don't get sale in 3 months they will drop you. And I think you have to wait an entire month before applying again? I signed up right away as part of the training module before I even had anything to sell. Now I have some things, but I have very little traffic. So based on what I'm reading it can take 3-6 months before you start to get sales/clicks for sales, so will I make a sale in 2 more months? I'm not sure I'm sweating bullets a little on that - and may need to call in a favor from a friend or family member to purchase something off my site (since you can't do it yourself)
Use the search feature on WA to get answers. Also go to other trainings and live events to see what they are teaching. I've learned that I don't know what I don't know. Once I know it I'm scrambling to correct mistakes I've already made on prior posts/settings. The more you know upfront, the more "correctly" you will build out your site the right way.
Sign up for analytics and search console (which I'm trying to learn now thanks Jay). You can see what pages are getting views and start to write link pages off those on similar or complimentary topics to keep the traffic you ARE getting engaged and staying on your page.