The Next Five Days

byTelmari

2.7K followers

Updated 12 years ago

In case any of you are wondering, the last month or so has been a pretty busy one for me with summer and all - keeping up with family, travel, various events, and such - all of which, unfortunately, have stolen me away from WA and affiliate marketing (can you tell I'm not big-time enough yet to phone in to someone to check on my campaigns remotely? :P)

Not to mention in there, I managed to get laid off at my full-time job as well - which actually ended up being a good thing as I think I can find a better fit for a job somewhere else! In addition, they paid me a great severance package, and to top it all off, I've already found another full-time job here nearby, offering 20% more pay, better hours, and more fun work!

Of course, in my dream state of affairs, I would not even care about being laid off because I'd have my affiliate marketing campaigns that were doing well and making a lot of money and just use it as chance to go full-time on that. But unfortunately, that's not the case - I make but a few dollars a month through my current sites. I'm sure that will change in time and I'll really be able to quit my job, but for now, I've gotta keep up this full-time thing.

Which brings me to today! Today marks the start of my wife being out of town for 5 days, on a girls' trip to Hawaii - which of course leaves me plenty of time to work on affiliate marketing, and making SUCCESS happen. My goal is to have something successful to show her once she gets back, because up till now, she doesn't really think I'm able to make real, consistent money online - she's supportive, but also in a "Prove it!" mindset.

So, my goal is to focus in on one of my sites and see what I can do in 5 days to get some Success by Sunday. While this might read like some boring meeting agenda to all of you, I personally need to write this all down for my own sake to focus on what I need to do - and how to take action over the next 5 days.

The site I'm going to be focusing in on has been online for about a year but still hasn't made any sales. I'm not sure if it's just due to not enough traffic, or the wrong type of traffic. It gets traffic, and click throughs to the merchant, but doesn't get sales. All of my traffic for the most part is just organic SE traffic - no adwords or other ads. I'm on Twitter & Facebook, but not generating a whole lot of traffic there, yet.

Otherwise, here's the lowdown on the site:

Good stuff:
- Been online for about a year, good keyword-rich domain name for the niche.
- Physical affiliate product site with shopping catalog with lots of products that all politely redirect to the merchant
- On page SEO pretty much complete.
- Lots of custom work to get great high-quality images and automate a lot of the datafeed/back end support.
- Full integration with Google Analytics/Web Tools.
- Already has Facebook/Twitter set up for it.
- Already completed 10 days of the WA 30 day challenge for it.
- Currently getting some traffic, and some click-throughs to the merchant (but out of around 220 clicks to the merchant, I'm still at 0 sales).

Need to work on:
- Design revision is in progress. The previous version was okay but not great, especially given the higher-end sites people are used to shopping in this niche.
- Not much off-page SEO. I have 4 Street Articles pointing to it, but that's about it. Not many other inbound links
- Not very much content other than my category description pages. I have an articles or two, but otherwise it's kind of thin content. My goal is to really develop a resource site for people interested in this niche, but I'm still trying to figure out what content will be the most helpful for folks.


The Plan:
5 days is a decent amount of time, but I also can't work all day long - I have my younger son to take care of during the day - though I can work during his naps, and at night/in the morning when he's asleep. I'm guessing I can probably get a good 7-8 hours of work a day in.

But I really, really need some sort of results from all this action - not only to keep me motivated to continue to work on it (as I've had it up for 6 months or so but haven't really made any huge leaps in progress) - but also to prove to myself (and my wife) that all this hard work CAN pay off, and that it's possible to help folks and make money online.

So, here's what I'm going to commit to for the next 5 days:

Day 1:
- Finish the design revisions. Anything not done by the end of Day 1 will have to wait (assuming it's not just some horrific issue that makes my site look like MySpace or something). This includes the home page, category pages, articles pages, and product pages.

Day 2:
- Finish good, high quality category descriptions for each category and the home page
- Do days 10-15 of the WA 30 day challenge.

Day 3:
- Review current progress,
- Work HARD and do days 16-20 of the WA 30 day challenge
- Finish up any items from Day 2.

Day 4:
- CRANK through days 20-25 of the WA 30 day challenge. Gonna make it count.

Day 5:
- Polish off days 25-30 of the WA 30 day challenge.
- Review overall results, think towards next steps going forward.
- Write a final update here with my thoughts, and my progress.


While I can't predict whether or not this plan will be 100% successful, I DO know that it will get me closer to my goal either than just sitting here, or than doing random stuff and hoping it works out! As the saying goes, "failure to plan is planning to fail" - and I don't want that to be me.

It's time to make some plans, roll up my sleeves, get busy, and give it 200% effort - time to blow it out and get some results. Enough of me just sitting here checking my affiliate accounts every other day, hoping I've made a sale. Time to take action!

If any of you are interested in following my 5-day action, please feel free to let me know & leave a comment below - if there's much interest, I'll try to update daily with how things are going!