Reflections On My First Affiliate Sale

I'm happy to finally be writing this blog post. I got my first affiliate sale!

In this blog post I'm going to be walking you through my experience leading up to my first sale.

First of all, it did not happen quickly. I joined WA back in January of this year (2015), and I've been working on my website since (it is October as of writing this). I don't think there is an exact time frame within which you should expect your first sale, but I was hoping it would take me less than 10 months. In retrospect, here is why I think it took so long.

1. Poor niche selection. My site is about contact lenses. You can check it out at contactsadvice.com. I knew there were tons of huge, highly established, highly authoritative websites about contact lenses on the internet, with lots of marketing, advertising, etc., but for some reason that didn't dissuade me. At the time, I figured it was the only topic I was knowledgeable enough about, and would enjoy writing about enough to be my niche. In retrospect, that was a big mistake. I put out article after article and nothing was really getting much traffic. Luckily I did happen to hit on a really popular topic on which there wasn't much information about out there, so eventually traffic started coming. My site now receives between 100 and 200 unique visitors per day. It usually gets just under 5000 visitors per month.

2. Lack of consistency. Because I was always a little dubious about my site ever working out due to my niche selection, there were times throughout the past 10 months where I more or less gave up on it. That could have also just been a bit of laziness on my part, but either way, I definitely wasn't posting on a regular basis.

3. Failure to complete all the certification courses on WA. I got through levels 1, 2 and 3 pretty early on, but I stopped progressing through them at level 4, and I will admit that even as I write this I have not completed level 5. This is something I plan to correct very soon.

4. I strayed away from the WA community. For a few months I was neglecting the most valuable resource at my disposal, and that's all of the people here at WA. There is so much to learn here at Wealthy Affiliate, I don't know why I haven't been more active here in asking other for help and feedback.

I hope my reflections have been helpful to you. My final thought about this is whether you've already had your first sale, or still waiting for it, never stop learning, and never stop striving to improve. Whatever you do, never give up on reaching your goals. If you feel like something isn't working for you, don't get discouraged. Reach out to the WA community, find out what you can improve on and keep trying.

Together we will succeed.

Thanks for reading.

Jason