Keeping it simple

byTracyWA

405 followers

6 years ago

About 10 years ago I sold, gave away, or threw away, most of my possessions, moved away from the town I had lived in most of my life. I headed south – who wouldn't, right?! Since that time I have lived with a couple of people, and lived on my own. But I have kept my possessions very streamlined. I could move everything I owned in the back of a pickup truck.

Now, most of my possessions are stored in a storage unit, on a small island, 4 ferries away from where I live now. And I can’t afford to get them moved over here.

The point of the story is, I’m fine. I can actually live just fine without most my ‘stuff’. There are a few things that I wish I was able to bring with me when I moved here – my guitar, my paintings, and some books that I quite miss – but all in all, I’m doing just fine without them.

Jay’s ‘simplicity’ post the other day, reminded me that life doesn’t have to be full of ‘stuff’ to be good. We don’t need to be going to town and buying more stuff to fulfill our lives. The stuff we have is perfectly fine. In fact, we probably have too much stuff. We probably have so much stuff that we’ve actually forgotten about some of it, tucked away in storage somewhere. : )

And the isolation we are experiencing because of the pandemic should remind us that we don’t need to be ‘busy’ all the time, either. We don’t need to be zipping around, here and there like some drunken butterfly, to be happy. Being home can have its own joys.

For instance, it’s spring! It’s time for gardens, and flowers, and baby things. It’s time to open the windows and doors and let the spring air flow through our homes and take away the stale air and cobwebs. And we have more time to put toward our online businesses!

Hopefully, getting rid of stuff and busyness will trickle down into other areas of our lives. As Jay pointed out in an earlier post, less is more when it comes to our websites. I have read a lot of posts where people are putting off flooding their websites with content until they have them ‘just right’. I think this is a mistake.

Consider this: no one is looking at your site in the beginning. No one can even find it, because there is little content, and that content is probably showing up on page 20 of the search engines. And no one looks at page 20.

Without traffic, there are some affiliate programs that won’t even let you sign up if you don’t have content and traffic. So it’s in your best interest to fill up that site with great content!

Besides, people are mostly looking for your words, not a fancy website with all the bells and whistles.

To be perfectly honest, when I go to a website that is too complicated, and has tons of ads and moving parts, I generally take off pretty fast. I find most things on a website too distracting, and it’s hard to read the content that I want, with videos popping up, and ads flickering in the corner of my eye. Drives me nuts.

For your websites, I suggest a simple layout, a really great image at the top, and super images within your post. And that’s it.

Yes, some of you are going to use Adsense, or some other ad network. Okay, fine. But try not to load it up! It really is annoying when there are a bunch of ads with moving flashing stuff in them.

This is my idea of simplicity in publishing an affiliate website:

• Keep your menus simple, so all of your content is super easy to find
• Keep your titles simple, so people know what the article is about
• Add an attractive ‘feature image’ for each article
• Put a few attractive images within the article
• A few tasteful and unobtrusive ads
• Use the spelling, grammar, and punctuation checking software of your choice
• Get someone else to proof your articles, if necessary
• Publish the article
• Write another article

Just keep writing, and leave the website tweaking alone. To be honest, all of this talk about plugins is way over my head. I’m doing just fine with whatever came with the site, plus some social media sharing buttons. And I don’t plan on adding anything else until I need it. Perhaps as time goes on I’ll want to automate some stuff, or add special features.

Right now, all I am adding is content, content, content. I have been doing this for 10 weeks, and I have published 54 posts to my site. And I plan on keeping up that pace until I have 100 posts. Then perhaps I’ll slow down a little. : )

But content is King in affiliate marketing; and it is my intention to be royalty in the affiliate marketing world. Perhaps not a Queen, but at least a Princess. : )

I hope everyone is staying safe, and looking for the joys that can be found when life has been simplified. There are lots of them.

Best of luck to all in your ventures.

Tracy