Wealthy Affiliate 3.0

Hi,

It seems to be a tradition or an old charter or something to do a 1 year Wealthy Affiliate post, so I thought I'd bore you all with my own as I'll have been in IM for 1 year at the end of this month. It is modest success by comparison to many other people, but a success to me nonetheless ... maybe a C+ with 'could do better'.

The year has had its ups and downs but it has been (mostly) fun.

The first target I set myself was to be earning $1000/week in 6 months (some of you probably remember the post) and I nearly did that. I was only some $60 short and thought things were going rather well. [There was a lot of Rolling Stones during this time with such classics as 'Brown Sugar' and 'Start Me Up'; had anyone had the misfortune to peek through my window at that time they would have had the rare treat of seeing me strut, Jagger-like to the kitchen to make my cups of tea and coffee. It used to upset the dog.]

But that's not the full story. I had campaigns die after that. I reached some sort of 'plateau' where I thought I should be doing things differently for some reason. Because of this 'over-thinking' I actually ended up doing nothing and things went backwards. I had a couple of months in the wilderness and - judging by some of the chats I've had with other IMers - this seems to be a common occurrence for people who take that next step up from being 'beginners'. I cursed a lot and the dog groaned but I did learn that income and consistent income are not always one and the same.

During this time I had a go at 'renting out' my adwords experience to a couple of small companies to try and make some extra cash and found that I could. This wasn't really part of the master plan but it's nice to know that the skills gained via IM can be used in places other than on ones own campaigns. [This was my heavy metal phase and had my hair not made a sharp exit during my 30's I would most certainly have thrashed it around to the Sabbath, Rainbow, Purple and Motorhead I was listening to.]

Anyway, I needed to shake myself out of this situation I was in and began with self-analysis. Basically, I'm not too bad at running an adwords campaign and I think I write decent presell and get good click-through rates to the merchant. The problem with me was twofold: (1) I have a huge tendency to over-analyze and I'm something of a perfectionist, and (2) I'm not very good at market analysis.

My way forward was partly inspired by this post, in particular this line: "Although I personally try to make it a goal to add 1-2 new websites a week". I would be spending a month putting a site/campaign together and then constantly tinkering with it. I clearly wasn't taking enough action.

I was simply spending too long on things in order to try to perfect them or wondering whether my ad copy should be written in iambic pentameter (okay, I wasn't really wondering that!). So I set myself a target of 1 new campaign a week for 2 months. I pretty much stuck to it and in there somewhere a number of pennies dropped. Suddenly it seemed easier and less painful to fail and therefore easier to just move on to the next - possibly profitable - campaign. And sure enough some of them worked and started making me money too - I'd then develop those further, but I tried hard to keep up the pace of developing new campaigns too. [I had unaccountably entered 70's disco mode at this point and a shocked observer would have seen me Dancing like a Queen to Abba, KC and the Sunshine Band, Chicory Tip and Typically Tropical].

I'd stopped worrying about my poor market analysis skills and just got on with analyzing markets as best as I could. Stuff it, I thought, just get the campaign up and see what happens. If it's a bad one, stop it quick and move on. Now I'll grant you this is probably what you might call a 'volume' approach and I think in the long run it will be better (and a lot less work) to develop my market analysis skills, but it was working at the time (and still does) and was the ideal solution to my particular faults.

I had my first $1,000 day on June 15th. I saved the screenshot of that for posterity, but please note that even though I have other income besides CJ to add to that, that was a particularly good time and of course there are expenses to come off that, so those figures in the screenshot are flattering compared to normal (one reason I don't really rate screenshots as telling anyone much).





For the last few months I've typically been making �200-�250 ($400-$500) a day of which about 60% goes on expenses, although taken over the last year as a whole it's a lot less than that on average of course. It's certainly no great shakes by the standards of some and I think I'm slower to progress than a lot of people, but it's a living I make from home and I'm my own boss.

80% of my work is straight PPC through Google with landing pages on my own web sites. I have more recently started building lists and I do articles here and there, but not much to speak of. I've tinkered with Squidoo and Hubpages, but I haven't exploited them at all really. I must have started two dozen campaigns in the last year but I currently only have 8 active and most of my income is from 4 of those.

The big change as far as I'm concerned, though, is that a certain something - a something that's hard to identify exactly - has 'clicked' and I seem to have crossed the line from struggling to find opportunities to having too many of them to pursue in a paltry 24 hours a day. I wish I could bottle exactly how to get that 'something' and sell it, but I think it has a lot to do with simply spending lots of time doing this stuff. Having said that, I still think there are certain 'somethings' that elude me - things that other marketers seem to find easy that I don't. I clearly need to do more work on these things. [I had reverted back to type a bit with the music now: Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, U2, The Clash and The Pistols could all be heard. Had I had hair it would have been green and if I was tough enough I'd have put a safety pin in my nose.]

I'm going to be tedious and say that all you need is here on WA because it is. This is a great place that K&C have created here: there is a mass of knowledge here and an excellent camaraderie too. The only other things you need are attitude, persistence, a willingness to take action and a mallet to hit yourself with when you leave the content network on by accident.

I'm reluctant to thank those that have helped me by name in case I forget anyone, but I'll try.

Kyle & Carson deserve a special mention of course for creating WA and helping us all, but I also think they deserve thanks for writing great ebooks (and I think WLM is particularly good) and telling things like they are rather than doing the typical 'guru list' thing.

Where would I be without Travis too. Not only are his posts enlightening but they're also fun to read. Big thanks to that man.

Thanks also to Dave B, Thad, Iggy, Steve(Katz), MR(omeo99), Adrian(Glim) and all the regulars for some excellent posts and/or a kick in the pants when I've needed it. But the beauty of IM is that even the most experienced IMer can still learn from a beginner, so it's really thanks to everyone. All these thank yous make it sound like I've just won Miss World ("I love cuddly animals and wish for world peace"), so I'll shut up now.

Here's to the next 12 months. I still have much to learn and a lot of work to do [currently listening to The Scissor Sisters]!