8 Months in - My progress so far
I meant to write an update article for quite a while, but never really took the time to do it, it was always something else that needed to be done. And also, I have distanced myself from the social side of WA, since it was a distraction with questionable value.
The training, webinars, occasional post and all that is great, but reading through my feed, there are a lot of posts that (for me) are a waste of time to read.
Writing
To date, I have published 57 articles with a total word count of almost 100 thousand. This comes down to around 2 articles per week. It's a number I am and I am not satisfied with.
I'd certainly want it to be higher, but with the limited windows of time I have for writing, it will have to be enough for now (until the situation changes).
Projects
I started affiliating with another online store. Plan is to slowly move away from Amazon, as the commission is better and there have been some problems with product availability on Amazon lately.
I've implemented google ads on some of my top traffic posts, will see how that goes.
Another thing I wanted to start a long time ago and finally did is to collect email addresses with MailChimp. I've complemented that project with a giveaway on KingSumo, so that my mailing list got a boost start. It's working well, 80 emails collected so far.
My business is at a point where the owners of the products are now sending me mails, asking to review their product - with free or heavily discounted product on the way to my mailbox. This feels awesome and I can only imagine where this will take me.
Traffic
Now this is the part I'm really thrilled about. Until the beginning of march, traffic was but much. Usually around 10 organic searches per day plus some from social media (I do FB mostly) to a total of 400-500 per month.
Then something happened: my rankings bumped up, corona virus quarantine, my giveaway, something else or a combination of all those factors. Traffic started to grow dramatically.
20, 30, 40, 50, 70, 90, 101 organic searches per day. The numbers went up and up. OK, it has settled down a bit now - organic search is between 50-90, but together with my FB traffic, this amounts to about 2000 visitors in the last month, which is a great number.
Also, on 8th of April one of my FB posts got a lot of attention and got 167 clicks, over 250 total traffic that day.
I am very encouraged by these numbers. If I can have 2000 visitors, why can't I have 5000, 10k or 20k? I now see how it can happen.
Income
Unfortunately on the income side, things haven't been so bright. I get clicks every day, but only a handful. I've made a total of $6.54 on Amazon Affiliate so far and 9 cents on AdSense.
Although I am slightly disappointed - I expected to earn a steady income of a couple hundred bucks per month by now. But I by no means intend to throw in a towel. There's only one way the numbers can go.
Personal side
As said earlier, there have been limitations to how much content I could produce so far. I don't have a quiet place in my house, everyone is always buzzing around. Situation is even worse now with the quarantine and the kids stuck at home.
They demand a lot of attention and I love spending time with them, but they take away a lot of time and energy.
I've also been jobless for over 6 months now. Although the situation is far from critical, savings are getting less and less. So I started looking for a job and found one.
I was to start as a janitor at a local tourist attraction in April, but due to the corona virus shutdown, this has been postponed indefinitely. I have written guarantee that I will be hired - hopefully in May or June, if the situation improves.
The pay is not that good , but I have expectations that the job will have at least a couple of hours of downtime, which I could use productively and do the rest in evening when the kids are at bed.
Long time goal is to work at home as a full-time affiliate marketer, with kids at daycare/school, so I have a large chunk of time available when I can really work.
It's a long road, but I'll get there eventually!
Recent Comments
22
Undetstand being disappointed you cant produce more content due to life, I'm in the same boat. Just keep going and push through :)
Hi Vasili, you're doing great, I read from this post that you are determined, patient, diligent and willing to put the hours in when you have the time to do so.
All good to get you to your goals.
Best Wishes and well done.
Louise
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Hi Vasilij,
This is a message from a "Once a Towel Thrower".
If you reached those metrics already, keep it up, try not to go down your production, and whenever possible to increase, but keep it up.
Because as far as I know and from the results of many others, the traffic will continue now to multiply for you, is not growing steadily at the same rate, it will do exponentially.
You are in my opinion really close to that big bang that we all looking for.
So keep it up, be healthy, keep the kids safe and enjoy the time with them too, that gives you power to keep up.
I take my hat for you, 2000 visitors a month in 8 months... Wow!
It already shows you, from ten it became 100 a day.
As long as you continue the way you going, it will never go down.
Pablo
Thanks Pablo, I certainly don't plan to throw in the towel. I'm excited about the future of my website.
I'm slowly adding one thing at a time, for example I've just sent out my first newsletter!
As they say in our language: brick by brick the palace was built.
Way to go Vasilij!