Wealthy Affiliate Success Story – No College Degree

When people heard about Wealthy Affiliate (WA), they want to hear about real success stories. A lot of people tried to share some stories from various members but only their successful point in their journey. Somehow, it send a wrong message to other people.

Is it really that easy to be successful? A lot of people already set their mind to find a get rich quick scheme, especially because they are already have financial problem. So when they look into an article about people saying “I make $10000 with my website”, it’s either looks like another scam program or as it will happen overnight.

As for any new WA member, their mind already get stuck to start making money right away. They follow their training without having a big picture in their head about how long or how hard it is until they make money. When they realized that, most of them get frustrated, discouraged, and eventually given up.

They didn’t know that every successful members in WA had been dealing with the same problem they had. They thought those people were experts from the beginning and they were different.

For me, I would love to know every detail on what happen since a member join until they reach their success. That way, I have a better understanding of what I will be dealing with in the future.

This is my first writing about successful WA member. His name is Nathaniell.
I chose to learn more about him because he shared a lot about his experience since he started in 2010. Not only his success but also his failures.

He didn’t have any college degree, so hopefully this could encourage other with the same background that they could also be successful.

Here are the summary of what I can learn from him as WA member and hopefully it would be helpful for the other as well.

If you are not familiar with Wealthy Affiliate and want to know more you can read my review here or you can access the website Wealthy Affiliate.

Click or tab on any sections from the table of contents to jump right to that part. Use the red arrow button on the bottom right corner of the screen to head back to the top

A Little Background Story

Nathaniell was born in US and since graduating from high school, left the country to travel to Europe. He didn’t take any college degree and become a freelance English teacher and eventually a kindergarten teacher to make some extra money while traveling through Europe.

After a few years he continued to travel to China. He become fluent in Mandarin, made a lot of friends, also become an English teacher, while traveling all over the country.

Ten years had passed since he left his country, he began to think about the future. That time he’s just want to make extra dollars, like $30 a day which equal to his full time income in China.

He started searching for online money making programs, most of them were scams. After six months he joined Wealthy Affiliate in 2010. In less than 3 years he made $10.000 a month then quit his job, moved back to US.

Ever since then he continue to expand his business as online marketer, keep making and updating websites.

His Milestones at Wealthy Affiliate

• Member since: June 2010
• Start from Online Entrepreneur Certification training
• Google Index in 2 months
• Making first sale in 3 months
• Consistent sales in 9 months
• In one year received total $4,000
• After 18 months received more than $10,000 then quit his job forever
• 2 or 3 years before making a stable income
• 2013 start his bootcamp website
• 2014 until now has been on annually Vegas Super Affiliate Conference (out of
• 9-12 invited members)
• WA Ambassador for more than 4 years

Bootcamp Website (2013- now)

For those of you who are not familiar, Bootcamp website is based on Wealthy Affiliate training, Affiliate Bootcamp training, where people would learn how to build their website to promote Wealthy Affiliate. Nathaniell’s website as a result for that training is One More Cup of Coffee (OM2C).

Nathaniell actually has tried a lot of ways to make money both on and offline. His bootcamp website’s niche is actually about making money, mostly online like affiliate marketing program and anything related while Wealthy Affiliate as the main recommendation.

The design itself is just any regular theme. Other than the logo, there is nothing special or customize. The homepage is not a blog roll but a static, offering some chosen featured posts. The main menu only have three pages, the starting page, the WA page, and about me page.

There are also several post series to keep him posting regularly. They are written in a template, which is very efficient for the writing. Only if we read all of them, then we could feel a bit monotonous and repeated. The good thing was nobody would be accessing that way. Maybe that’s the reason why he didn’t put them on the main menu as obvious as any other would have. Here are some of the series.

Niche research and affiliate program review. He picks a niche, start by analyzing the trend. If the trend has upwards direction from year to year, he continues with doing keyword research. If not, he picks sub-niches, see which one of them has an upward trend, then he analyze the keyword.

He follows them by review of top 3 affiliate programs with more detailed comments and also several more relevant affiliate programs that he haven’t tried. Details about affiliate program includes the product they offer, the commission and the website’s link.

He keeps a list of keywords, maybe around 30 with low competition and high traffic. Anybody could actually use this list but the important thing is doing the research and creating a consistent quality post for each of them.

Based on his story, he used to buy a lot of domains and create websites and maybe to try all of those niches. Maybe some of them had some success but he said it’s better to focus on the few so he sold some.

Every posts he closes them with an action plan on how to build business with this research and a promotion to help anybody whose willing to try those niche with help by joining WA. The action plan is about what kind of article post that we’re going to write, maybe reviews or tutorials.

So far he already write almost 50 different niches. There are also separate affiliate program reviews, either individually or collectively as top ten for relevant niche.

Job with no degree requirement. The idea is come from his life experience as someone who has no college degree. He does a research on which occupation that doesn’t need any degree to do but he explains another requirement before getting that job.

Nathaniell starts with a description about the job and any skills that could benefit the job. Then, he explains how to get a recognition for the job, about how to get some certifications or training or about the career path before the said job.

He also explains the potential salary and any additional benefit the job could get. From starting salary and the potential raise based on several websites. The additional benefit is like the insurance or access to high end products. He follows them with two or three similar occupations with the said job.
So far he already write like 50 jobs, and there are lists of jobs with no degree based on salary.

Review about Making Money Programs and Apps. The money making program can be a survey, MLM, online writing job, etc. Each has its own category with a lot of reviews from various programs.

Basically, he explains how any of this program could be an income then compare them with how he can earn better with Wealthy Affiliate or by having a website to build our own business. He just creates a link, not explaining the Wealthy Affiliate program on every post.

Most of the post is a brief explanation about the program, how far he can access the program, even how he install for the app and some review by researching on Google.

What we can learn from this website

I think the web design is very simple yet very effective. Unlike the other or the default that put the latest post on the front page as blogroll, he chose a static one and not even the latest post. Actually, he did but he renamed that recent post category into something else.

For me, this is a good example of how a website was built based on Google Search activity. Every search engine, offers us an option not to access any website from the front page but directly to the relevant post.

Unlike a real shop or building, where we are limited to access them from certain point like the main entrance, the parking area or maybe a helipad. We then have to go through the lobby or some area before our destination.

The good point is that everybody accessing any post has minimum information from the website. Why is this good? It means that by doing this, we have a better control on how any visitor would access another part of our website. In this case, the main attraction page, Wealthy Affiliate, has a better chance to be access.

The misconception is that even though we need to update or make a new post in order to get a better index and rank, that thing is just for the search engine. It doesn’t mean that we have to show them all to the visitors. A related articles to our website’s brand but it doesn’t necessarily means related for the visitor.

This is just an example of how the website design is not the essential thing on affiliate marketing. We can just use the standard theme and do some little tweak. Content is the king, we can see that from this website.

Even though he didn’t put everything on the front page, the number of the posts could be more than a hundred, well as of this writing around 2000 since 2013. Each of them are not just 1000 words, he even said one of them has 30.000 words, not to mention the blog post he made inside the Wealthy Affiliate since the main goal is to promote WA.

Most of them are reviews and top things post, which he said convert highest to sale, not just traffic. The reviews are mostly anything relevant to WA, such as hosting, affiliate program or keyword tool. Since he slightly widen his niche from WA into money making program, he could pick other topic not so related to WA, like the job with no degree, the writing job, survey, etc.

The question is how did he do that? I think the key is to use the template, not just the template of writing structure but also the template on how to do the research. Each of this topic has its own template, like anything related to apps, we could look for a review on Google Play Store or maybe on OS if available, maybe not to review on Amazon product.

So the first thing we need to do is find the template and how we could find the information we need on Google. After that we could use that template to write reviews efficiently. We might need to do more for several products but at least we could save a lot of time, no need to think about what to write anymore.

Another thing is that he has been outsourcing the writing to several freelancers since very early of his internet marketing work. So he already have several template of all kinds of posts he want, then find the right keywords, assign the writing to freelancers.

What about promoting Wealthy Affiliate?

He has two different pages promoting WA placed on the main menu alongside the About Me page. One of them is the WA review, as the number 1 recommendation. The other is the getting started page offering his direct support and training if we become his referral. His WA review start with the affiliate marketing, how we can make money online with that before elaborating the WA features.

Both of this page is a clean page, without widget, menu, header or footer. I think this is a nice idea so people would not be distracted other information but focus on the story. It can be very overwhelming at first to learn about online business.

He also shares on both of them his success story from his niche websites, which I think is the great point on convincing visitors. People would love to see some proof.

Even so, some people might still think that this is all just made up but we can respond to that using the comment section. There’s also a post about any complaints he got over he years and he answered them there.

On every post he always end with a signature which has link to WA review page. On reviews, he add another link in the conclusion part.

Niche Websites (2010 – now)

Nathaniell has a lot of interest that he could turn into niche sites. For the first time he managed to make 5 websites at a time. At one point he had like more than 100 domains just to secure the name when he had time to build those websites. About sixty of them become a website.

But then, he realized that it takes a lot of time to focus on one. He ended up keeping and expanding just few of them. Most of them failed due to lack of content idea, others made a few sale from affiliate program, some websites were sold and there were also problems like trademark name on domain.

Here are some of the niches that he tried:

• first niche: horse care, failed
• first successful niche: computer software
• sprained ankle, selling eBook from clickbank.com, made $500 sale, successfully rank 2 and maybe because of the product name on domain
• alcohol flush reaction, clickbank affiliate program, $800/year
• coffee for enema, sawilsons.com as affiliate program, get $400, expired
• home brew equipment, sold domain for $500, morebeer.com and amazon.com for affiliate program
• weight loss
• cosmetic
• gaming chair
• mobile phones
• edible gold, amazon affiliate, lack of other affiliate program
• plant vs zombie game, made only 75 cent, only promoting toy
• make money with phones, clickbank, outsource the article, didn’t check the quality

Beer brewing niche website. (xbrewx.com)

Aside from the one he sold, he already created another beer related website. For this one, he writes more about beer than just the brewing equipment. The website design is very standard, we can see the categorized pages on the menu. The side bar consists recent post a search bar and a drop down menu for categories.

There are four main category which he put on the main menu. First category is the recipe, in which he writes about the beer recipe he adapted and tried based on someone else recipe (he mentioned the owner, giving them credit).

He stated in which part of the original recipe that he changed. Every post has a list of ingredients, brewing process condition, tasting and evaluation notes.

The second category is craft beer. This includes the tasting of certain brand (although there is a dedicated category page for tasting), events story like festival and glassware that match with the beer. This category is very loosed compared to other category.

The next one is a taproom/ breweries review. Here, he writes about his experience for specific taproom. From how he get there, the decor, the service, the food, and of course the beer they offer.

The decor is about the size of the room, sitting or standing style. The food is about whether they serve something, or that we may bring our own. The service is about the people who run the place, how well they know about the beer. For the beer I think he describe any beer he could find and highlight the special one.

The last of the main category was the beer club review. Beer club is about service of delivering beer to its member’s home. So far there are three reviews. Each of them includes the beer product available, ordering process, via email or app, limitation, pros and cons, their customer service and who is it for.

There are several more posts not in the categories on the main menu. One of them is about beer magazines review and the other is about how he built a keezer in his garage.

The affiliate program is mainly from Amazon, and maybe Etsy for some brewing equipment, glassware and magazine subscriptions. The others are from the beer club subscription.

There is no significant update on the website since 2016. According to Nathaniell he tend to drink a lot while writing content for this website. That’s why he’s decided to be more productive on other website and make this as a hobby.

Protecting lawn from animals niche website. (motionsensorsprinkler.com)

If we look at his website, it’s like a website dedicated to promote one type of product, a motion sensor sprinkler but the idea didn’t come from the product. It was based on his experience trying to keep his lawn from cat pooping everyday.

The homepage was actually describing how he come up with the idea, other failed methods he tried, how he set up the product on his lawn, followed up by how the cat move from his front lawn to his backyard, and how he has to set it so no people including himself getting sprayed.

After that the second part of the homepage is a review comparing three of the best sprinklers. Each of them has the official promotional video, he mentioned every pros and cons he could find from the Amazon reviews and ratings and also the description of special feature like, maybe solar powered or no hose with self tank of water we could refill manually. There is also a list additional item he use to set up the product.

The website also has two more page. One page for more reviews from other sprinkler models.

The other one was articles about how to deal with specific animals like cats, foxes, dogs, birds, deer and a lot more from entering lawn. Generally, each of them describing alternative methods and ended with the sprinkler as the best choice.

This is a nice example of a small targeted niche website. I think he can still expand to a broader niche but It seems like there is no significant update since 2016, aside from adding another similar new product review due to availability from the Amazon.

The website was built in March 2015, start showing result on July. This is after he finished both training from Wealthy Affiliate not build alongside the training. The article was written not formally but more casual, somehow kinda funny to read.

There is no special feature to the design other than the logo showing a sprinkler and a cat. The website has colorful background but the article still in white background and black text in general. Only the heading and page number has green text.

What We can Learn

ABOUT WEALTHY AFFILIATE AND PROSPECT OF ONLINE MARKETING

Most people might think that they can’t make the same success as Nathaniell. It’s like they already missed the train and because of too much competition, they can no longer compete.

Nathaniell said that he get this a lot but, according to him, it’s easier to make money online now. First of all, there are more products being sold online. From the big industries, digital products, even small local industries are selling their products online. Which means, we have a lot of products to review and sell them.

Second of all, the tool. People are also creating more and improved tools (also as digital product to review) to help us succeed in online marketing. Wealthy Affiliate is an example.

Back in the day, Wealthy Affiliate didn’t even offer the free website. Even Nathaniell used Blogger for his first niche website. There was no free Starter Membership but now people can even have a free website without spending anything.

There will be competitors but success in online marketing didn’t come overnight. The success was based on the consistency on adding quality contents for months maybe even years before they could be a full time income. Most people will quit before that. Competitors might even steal our ideas but not our commitment.

Even if they stay put and working as hard as us, it doesn’t mean we can’t succeed. Nathaniell showed us how he can only write two program reviews out of 18 he receive in two months. Nobody could make a review of every product. Our opinion still counts, so even with the same product we can write our own review.

Nathaniell also said that nobody could get rank one on everything. They might get rank for one keyword but a good article would get rank for many other keywords.

There’s also an article showing us how a small website could outrank the big website like Amazon, Cnet, The Guardian, even a website with the product’s name on the domain.

Articles are written by people and people make some mistakes. They are not perfect. Some big websites even outsource the writing and they didn’t check the quality. Their target is just to make money, getting clicks, traffic and they forget the human factor of the reader, how important to engage with the real people.

There’s always a room for anybody to outrank them, opportunity to make something better than other guys no matter what our niche is.

Everyday people in Wealthy Affiliate are encouraged to write their success story. Some of them would love to share every detail even more than him in order to motivate the other. They are still a lot more people not sharing their success because they don’t want to make unnecessary competition.

With online marketing, Nathaniell said that we can make as much money as we want. It’s just a matter of how hard we are willing to look for it. Just like any regular job, we need to find it, start from base and get some raise. The difference is that with online marketing, we can be our own boss, work anywhere and let the internet run our business 24/7 while we can rest.
——————————————————–

ABOUT THE COMMUNITY

We shouldn’t be shy to ask, we already pay for it. The expert got a choice whether they gonna help you or not. As a newbie we tend to think that we would bother the experts by asking very basic thing. If we are their referral, we are part of their income, their business, they would be happy if we could succeed.

Ask the community as much as possible, annoy them if we must. There is even a statistic shows that there is a big difference in success rate between those who ask and those who don’t.

With that in mind, as an expert we should be patient with newbies or referral. We weren’t expert when we start it. Our customer might be asking a dumb question.

We can use WA blog to separate with your affiliate marketing blog. If our business blog we tend to be professional, use WA blog to ask question, comment, feedback, share our feelings, success and failure.

By following people, we could learn from them, get idea and solution for problem that might happen to us in the future. Find serious people working on their business. Having more followers will make us easier to get help.
——————————————————–

ABOUT CONTENT CREATION IN GENERAL & HOW WE SHOULD PERCEIVE THINGS

As an online marketer, getting sales is our goal but it doesn’t mean that our website should be filled with advertising. It’s said that there’s a difference between selling and getting people to buy. Even in conventional marketing, an executive must follow three steps, know their audience, develop a relationship, and make recommendation.

Skipping these three steps and they will be hated because by default, they are stranger for the customer to begin with. Even if let’s say they successfully made the sale, they might be creating a bad impression, increasing the possibility of buyers remorse. The same thing also applied on online marketing.

The general idea of content creation is to answer what people have been asking through keywords they use on search engine. We write the answer in an article and post that on our website so people would come to read and we get the traffic. That is how we understand our audience.

By doing this repeatedly, we begin to build our credibility. People will start to notice our website and they will come back for more information. Hence, we’ve built a relationship with them. We have their trust and they begin to ask for recommendation.

In online marketing, money come later. Our website doesn’t need to be tied down with one single product to sell. There are a lot of ways to make money with our website. Getting people’s trust to generate the traffic is the most important thing.

So if we skip all these three steps, creating our website content just for the sake of making sales, we are heading down the wrong path. We should build our website as an information hub not a store. The main job is not to make money but to help people get their information.

But we are not an expert on anything.

Not an expert? Good. It means that we have a lot more to write starting with the basic article, grow our knowledge. Neither are those people asking on search engine are an expert because if they are, why do they even search.

So we don’t know anything about a subject just like the rest of the people. We learn one basic thing about the subject then suddenly we become an expert according to most of those people. In a way, we are doing the research on their behalf, collecting the relevant information from 20 or more sources and present them as articles.

Focus on writing for many people know less than you, not for one expert know better. People searching the internet for information want friendly, easy-to-understand advice/answers. Be the expert translator, like talking to a friend, using the word they understand.

Nathaniell said that some people will always love what you write but some other won’t. Write to yourself not for invisible people. If you try to appeal to everyone, you ended up appeal to no one.

Turns out, by writing a product review, especially a scam product review, Nathaniell received some threats maybe from the owner or those who promote them. I even found two free blogs from one guy, saying that Nathaniell is a scam. Nathaniell said that he didn’t take that seriously because he knew they are just being frustrated.

But it takes a long time just to write one.

Yes, it takes a long time. From finding keyword, research for content, looking for them on various websites, forums, and write them down as an article easy to read, not to mention putting on image, link, video, and also the responding to all the comment section.

In learning, no time is wasted. Practice makes more efficient. First time we might need several days to write one article but after writing a lot of articles, we now can write one in one hour. Success and learning are cumulative, adds up over time.

The first time is hard, whatever niche we pick even if promoting Wealthy Affiliate. Not only we are going to learn about the niche itself, but also the general of online marketing.

We better get started right away. The sooner we do it, the sooner we can get result and the sooner to fix or make them better. Every great article will pay dividend. Creating a quickie article, takes more time to fix later.

If we feel like getting overwhelmed, just go slow, pick one and focus on that one. Try to rush things is not going to work. Remember to set our goals in years not months.

Based on Nathaniell’s experience, he wrote for the first 6 months with almost no result. Like getting only less than 10 visitors a day for his bootcamp website. In one year, he made 300 sales and has been invited to the Conference every year.

Look far the future of our business.

But that’s him. He never fail.

Wrong. He actually failed a lot. He even lose money for trying new things. There is a backstory for every success story, what we see is just the tip of the iceberg. There was also a time when he complained about not getting any traffic to Kyle, the owner of Wealthy Affiliate.

His first niche was about horse care and it didn’t work. You can read a lot more above on the niche websites part. He even bought a lot of domains for a lot of different niche, thinking that it would be successful. He let some of them expired, even sold a few because he didn’t have time to develop them. Imagine how much money he wasted on paying those domains.

Yet, he’s still here. Doing even more. Because in the end he knew that one successful is enough to profit and cover the lost. Master the art of failing, risk something to get something.

Our first website might not be the home run, not the best niche, not even making money, not lasting for the rest of our life. Maybe just something expired as a story we laugh at on later years.

We can’t let our failure stop us. If we stop trying, that would be the reason we fail but if we keep moving on after failures, that would be the reason for our success.

Every single person has the ability to try, learn, fail, and DECIDE to try again.
Do we need to do it like him, spending money before making money?

No. That’s just the way he is. Making money is his hobby. He loves to spend money trying new things.

Sometimes he didn’t even take his own word. Any advice that we got from him probably right after he found out that what he did was a mistake. Making mistake is the way he learn what NOT to do.

Spending money could be minimized. We now have a lot more successful people to learn from their mistakes not only from him. Writing content is the essential. Write them first before spending any money to enhance the result or to enhance the productivity.
——————————————————–

ABOUT NICHE

Picking a niche is a start for online marketing. Most people are having trouble while picking the right niche for them. The general idea is to pick something we love, our interest, hobby or passion. Even if they could say that they have interest on something, they afraid that they are not expert enough to write about it.

Becoming an expert is part of the goal, the journey. Start learning something and write from a basic article before moving on to the expert stuff. This is our work. Whatever niche we pick, learning is inevitable. There is no way we could expect people to read our article that we don’t even know.

We have to remember that the reason that we’d better pick something we love for our niche is that we are going to write about it a lot. Nathaniell recommends three articles per week for years to come. Imagine doing that with something we hate, giving up after only the first month is very likely to happen.

With that in mind, a niche isn’t just something we love. We have to learn how to gather the information about it. Maybe from some forum, any similar website, from the comment section of any e-commerce selling any relevant item. Most of them can be done online but some offline information from people around us or our own experience could be a great information.

So, our niche might not be what we love the most. It could be something that we don’t really care about but we already familiar with. Maybe from any problem that we have to deal as our daily routine, like food, drink, personal care, parenting issue, or certain ailment.

Too broad or too narrow niche.

A niche can’t be too broad or too narrow. Generally, people would suggest a narrow niche. The idea is that if we write about something specific, people with the same exact concern (targeted audience) will access our article instead of crawling to a bigger website.

That way, both the audience and the marketer could save their resources, like time and money, for a more accurate decision. Marketers could build a better relationship with the audience, maintain them, to repeat the same sale and result. Satisfied customer would suggest our website to their friends.

Unlike picking a broad niche, a narrow niche will get result faster, easier to analyze and optimize. The problem comes when we don’t have anything else to write about the niche. This usually happens if we focus too much our writing on selling a specific product. We can only wait for another similar product to come and write a review about it. That is what we called too narrow niche.

We need to update our website with another content from time to time in order to maintain our rank in search engine. Instead of picking a product as a niche, pick a condition as a broader niche. For example, instead of treadmill as a niche, maybe weight loss where we can write not just the fitness equipment but also food, supplement, diet or training program.

Nathaniell said that even weight loss could be too broad as a niche. He suggested adding a user condition to a broad niche. So in weight loss example, maybe weight loss for women over 50.

From what I understand is we can pick a broad niche as or goal, the big picture maybe as our domain name but we need to focus on one sub niche and when we get stuck we could move to another sub niche. Pick a domain name with multiple interpretation to pivot from subniche to another sub niche.

Passion based or profit based niche.

Any niche is profitable whether it’s based from passion, hobby or interest. The question is how much money can that make? Is it decent enough considering the amount of time we spend on researching and writing those articles.

We should consider the business side of niche. Writing a content with the intent to make sale only is wrong but picking a niche with good potential income is highly recommended.

Nathaniell gave an example about stuffed toys for kids niche. How much money can we get per sale? Six percent commission (Amazon) per $20 toy. How many sale every month to become a decent income?

He suggested to change the niche to educational toy for kid niche. Now, with a broader niche, we can sell tablets for digital toy or board games which has larger commission and potential income for us.

So, when we pick a niche, we also need to consider any available affiliate program that we can use as an income. The worst case is to use a display ad program like Google Adsense. Less commissions but work for any niche. Choosing an affiliate program is another matter to consider.

There are still another options to monetize our website but the key is the same, getting traffic by writing quality contents. So, don’t build your website based on profitability instead of personal interest. If you don’t like it and cannot write anything, you won’t get any traffic let alone any sale, even if the potential income is big.

Other consideration on specific niche.

Social media gives better respond on non money making niche. So, if we want to promote something like Wealthy Affiliate, it’s best not to rely on social media. People already become suspicious and will start comparing anything we offer to other scam program. It’s not that it doesn’t work but we will constantly have to explain it.

On the other hand, sharing our hobby niche is a lot easier and well received. Based on Nathaniell’s story, his beer niche article got him invited to a gathering with the community, get a long conversation with another enthusiast.

There are people out there really looking a way to make money but handing them directly like a salesman won’t do any good. We should let them find it from the search engine.

There are also several niches that rely a lot on visual aspect like fashion, furniture, travel, cook/recipe, craft, or home renovation. Pinterest would be a great tool to share, even better than Instagram, according to Nathaniell. We might want to consider invest our time learning how to use it if we have niche from one of the above.

Some niches are also seasonal, like surfing, snowboarding, skiing, or maybe holiday event like Christmas or Thanksgiving. It can have a serious downtime. Even if the information can be used for people from other part of the world but they won’t make any sell unless we change the affiliate program.

It seems like at the time the season come, it can have a very high traffic, enough to be yearly based income. What we need to do is to plan and write ahead. Depending on how fast can we make the content, a good rule of thumb would be 3-4 months in advance or further or even wait for the next year.

Here are some idea to add on any niche to give some direction as sub niche: kids, natural, electronic. For example, fashion for kids, cooking gadgets, organic cook.
——————————————————–

ABOUT AFFILIATE PROGRAM AND MONETIZING

Affiliate program is one way to monetize our blog. Usually we start our online marketing from our niche then find the relevant affiliate program. If there are a lot of them, we need to understand how to choose them to optimize our earning.

Large commission. Large company like Amazon will pay us up to 10% per sale, with fashion category as the highest. Other category can get as low as 1% (video games and console as the lowest). Nathaniell said that offering 100% commission is pretty rare, might be as sign of scam, although he said that he did get one, didn’t say which, but only for the first time sale. Between 15-50% is not uncommon.

Once again this is just a consideration, especially if we have other affiliate program we can choose. It would be better if we do research on affiliate programs before jumping into making a niche website. Convincing one person to buy $100 product is easier than 100 people to buy $1 product.

Recurring Commission. As an affiliate, we can get a one time commission per sale, but we can also get another commission for reordering from the same customer. Not every program offers this, usually the one offering a membership not just a product. If the same customer renew their membership monthly, we can get paid monthly without an extra work.

The good thing about recurring commission is that instead of getting payment from a lot of different people, we get payments from the same customer.

Maintaining our relationship with small number of people is easier. We can feel the sense of growing our business, not just random customer come and go. We don’t have to convince or explain again the program.

Affiliate program with recurring commission is the one worth to stick to.

Reward for results. Most of the companies don’t really care about their affiliate. Affiliates make sales and the company pays them. But there are still some companies offering another incentive for those with hard work.

I know that one program offers a higher payment class if an affiliate makes certain sales. Nathaniell said that there is one program increasing the commission percentage every new 10 people by 1%, but the count restarts every month. Start from 15% and he can get to 20% each month.

Active affiliate managers. At first, having someone supervise our work or website, getting criticize or reminder could be very annoying. It’s like having a boss. But in the case of affiliate manager, they could be useful when things are not working.

As stated above, most companies don’t really care about the affiliates, but some of them really care because they know, by helping the affiliate, they can get some money too. As the very least they will help us with link or commission.

Based on Nathaniell’s experience, there are managers who are willing to help us from checking any link, which one is broken or working, explain or inform us about new products, even giving an idea about the content or the infographic to add. He even get a special commission because they like the content.

Marketing resources. Most companies will offer us banners with link in different size that we could place on our website, some of them just the link. Some of them could offer more like image for content, idea for content, even training how to do it.

Tracking tool could be one of them. If we barely start our website, we might not care enough about how we get the money or sale. As we develop our website with a lot of content and links, we might want to know which part of our website can make money.

Having a tracking tool means we could find out which of the content we could optimize most to make money, be more effective. There are still some ways to track using a third party tool if the company didn’t offer.

Compatibility between the program, affiliate, target audience and/or niche. An affiliate program might be working as advertised, but it doesn’t mean it is compatible to everybody. Most of Nathaniell’s business and experience are based on the US, might not be working for other country.

Every program has its own rule, TOS that we need to learn before, to make sure we can get the benefit. For an affiliate, one of the problem is the payment method.

For example, if we promote Amazon, we can still get a check as payment even though there is no product shipping to our country. The problem is we have to find out how the bank would process the check. Maybe there will charge an extra fee and we need to change the cashout limit from Amazon. Delivering the check itself could be another problem.

If the product we promote is a digital one, it has a better access to any audience, but for the physical product, even if the product could arrive, maybe with additional fee or tax from local government. Maybe it’s better to find a local program so the price won’t be so high.

As compatibility with the niche, as I explained above, a niche can be very narrow, or even product specific. Even if it can work, it’s not recommended.

Some products on Amazon are manufactured by local industry with very limited supply. We should at least recommend several products in a review so we can still get some sales.

On the other hand picking a broad niche where we can have sub niches to work on, would give us opportunity to expand our website or business. This could open to another related topics, another product and of course another affiliate program.

It’s better not to rely on one product or even one affiliate program. if not sure with one affiliate program, look for the same product from alternative affiliate program, might be less earning better than nothing.

Signing up. Assuming the program is compatible to other aspect, there might be some requirements just to sign up with one. Some programs would require us to have at least a website or social media account to promote, some would ask minimum traffic or even a quality guideline. It’s best to focus on build our website first, get some traffic before applying.

If we got rejected from affiliate program do not give up easily. Send them an email ask them why or explain the details about our website, the traffic, and the money making plan. Even an expert like him got rejected. Affiliate program might get a lot of applicant everyday so sending them an email might tell them which one is the serious one.

Using affiliate link on our website. There is a saying that we shouldn’t put an affiliate link because it will hurt the SEO, so we should wait after getting some traffic. Nathaniell said that he’s being skeptical with that.

Although he will wait before putting them, not because of the SEO but because the most important thing for him is the content that will generate the traffic. There is no point on putting any link if we don’t get any traffic. Focus on getting traffic (by writing a quality content) then optimize the money making.

Be careful on putting too much affiliate link. Sometimes, affiliate program changes their rules. Using them on 20 articles, we need to change all of them. Learn to use Pretty Link plugin.

Maintaining our relationship with affiliate program. Nathaniell said that he lost about $2000 from one affiliate program just because he was being a jerk to them. The company didn’t inform him about their recent change and he sent them a not so nice letter to the manager. He got cut out losing the money he made with the program.

Think before making such a decision. The same rules can also be applied on other business partner, like our referrals. Be patient and be nice, give them a chance.

Display ad or contextual ad. This is another option to monetize our website, usually for anybody not doing the online marketing, just want to make some money from their website. The concept is simple, we use some space from our website to display image or text from any advertising network and we get paid if somebody click it.

Displaying ad program might not be the best choice but it can still make a lot of money and it might be the only way to monetize certain niche. Nathaniell said that there is another (bigger) website with the same niche as his, can get 2 million visitors per month which has a potential to get $120k per month.

Google Adsense is an example of the display ad program. Most people use this because it’s Google’s. They have strict rules and we can easily get banned permanently. We need to try other alternative programs.

Nathaniell suggests Ezoic to start, after we get like 500 visitors per day. They offer detail analysis from every ad we placed on our website. If we can generate more traffic maybe try MediaVine, the one he is currently using on his website.

The downside of using this program is that nobody likes to see ad, especially the annoying one. People nowadays can use ad blocker on their browser. We should minimize the number of ad, add more content instead of ad.

Longer content can give us a chance to place ad in between. If I’m not mistaken, there is a program that can tell us the optimum number of ad we can use on our website.

Other monetizing option. There are still some other ways to make money from our website.

• Sell ad space. Instead of using Google service to find any company to place their ad, we could sell our ad space ourselves, we could decide the fee and duration.
• Youtube revenue. Most people prefer a visual information to reading them as text. If we create both writing and make video, we could double the traffic from the same topic or content for more income.
• Create and sell our digital product. Anything we write on our website, we can publish them as an ebook and sell them. Instead of accessing our website, opening a lot of tabs, we could place our content in a better order as a book. Other idea is if we write tutorial of how to do things.
• Sell physical product. Maybe we can sell some apparel related to our niche, or find some local businesses and use our website as an e-commerce, help them promote their product online.
• Sponsored content. We can find any sponsor, advertise their product and service in our content. We can do it as a written article, or using podcast media to talk about it.
• Leverage yourself to our employer. Consider our website as our curriculum vitae or portfolio, especially if we already work in a field we love but in the job we hate. Keep adding our knowledge and write them down on the internet can be a positive input for any employer.
• Sell your website. If we already have enough content and generate a lot of traffic to our website, we can sell them and let the other figure out how to monetize. Of course if we already monetize them, the price would be higher.
  ——————————————————–

ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY

We are going to learn a lot of things ahead, especially if we are just getting started. If we feel like getting overwhelmed, just forget with the big picture for now. Choose one of them, the smallest task that we think we can do. After that, try the next one.

How much do we need to write everyday? Nathaniell suggests that we should write like 500 to 1000 words article everyday for each website. If we can’t do that, at least we should try three times a week with 500 to 1000 words each.
Maybe on Monday, Wednesday and Friday or two on Saturday and one on Sunday. Don’t forget to plan for the next week.

This is based on a low competition keyword. If we don’t do keyword research and try to use the high competition keyword, we should write more than that. He said that he has one article with 30000 words.

We don’t need to be able to do that right away. We just need to start and eventually we can do it. Start with small steps.

The numbers should not be the target but we need to create a quality content. To write a good content, we need to do research, learn from various website and eventually our knowledge will grow. Then we could write a lot more. Once again, results and learning adds up over time.

There will be times when we got very tired and occupied with other things in life. Try to keep connected to our business, even just doing 10 minutes a day.
Write and posting something is still better than nothing. We can still get money from it but doing nothing won’t get us anything. We can also fix them later.

How many hours per day should I spend? Once again, if we really new to this. Start with the plan we can commit. Nathaniell said that we could start like 15 minutes. Add more everyday.

As a reference, Nathaniell now spends like 3 hours for research, 1 hour to write and another one for video, image, spellcheck and link. He started from one hour a day only, 30 minutes of learning and 30 minutes of action.

Learning is important part of the business but don’t let ourselves get stuck with it and not doing the action. Taking action is the one making the result.

Do we need to work everyday? The thing is that the more we do it the sooner we can get the result. At least, at the start.

The problem is that, as beginner, we usually getting impatient. Even by writing everyday, the system is going to need time for getting indexed, getting traffic, getting sales or even regular sales. Most people eventually give up before 6 months.

It’s harder to start over after taking day off. That’s why we should at least, spend even just 10 minutes a day to keep our mind connected to our business.
I’ve seen other member still doing only one or two hours a day after two years and getting good result. Not because they are lazy but that’s the only time they have.

Everybody has different situation but it can still work even with longer result. We just need to keep coming back and get the work done. Know our limit and set a plan we can commit.

Is there no chance at all for vacation?

If we already become expert in writing, we can write a good content with less time. Then we can write several article ahead of time and set on schedule to post them. Other option is to use outsource for our article, you can read about it in this article.

Writing can be done in advance but there are still things we need to do even on vacation. It’s responding through the comment section.

People asking on the comment section could be our potential client. They need our support right away.

The good thing about online business is that it can run our business non stop, like getting an autopilot. But, at the same time, competitors might be taking over because they are just on the next list of the search result.
\Learn and prepare to maintain our website before taking a long term vacation. At least to respond the comment section, set on a place with internet connection.

Multiple websites?

For starters, don’t try to make more than one website, let alone more than one niche. Do one until we can make money from it. After that we have a choice to expand our website or build the new one.

If we can plan our niche right, we can make money as much as we want from one website. So, instead of starting our website right away, we can make a better plan with our niche.

Of course we can also make one small niche website, make money from it and redo it for another one. Make sure we can make money from the first one before moving to the next.

What should we do to be more productive?

First of all, follow any training in Wealthy Affiliate. Remember that aside from the official training and classroom, other more experienced members could also write blogs and trainings that we can learn and follow.

Also learn from other members problem through their live chats and comment section. Do more than what the training tells us to do. Doing bare minimum will only get us bare minimum results.

For content, use our time for product research. Remember that product review is one of the best to convert to sale. Unlike a low competition keyword post, it’s easier to gather the information.

Also use our time to do a blog post brainstorm. Analyze for any traffic that comes into our website and how to convert them to sales. Find possible topic we could add to drive the existing traffic to another post that convert to sales.

Try to do some research from any similar websites or competitor. We can learn about their side bar idea, most commented post, social media aspect, picture they use and follow their email list.

Don’t forget that we can improve our content performance by editing the content, adding picture or links, etc.
——————————————————–

ABOUT KEYWORD AND BLOG POST TOPIC

It is said that there are three types of blog post that effectively convert to traffic or even sales. They are keyword based post, product review post and the top ranked post. The first one doesn’t necessarily convert to sales but it could generate a lot of traffic from a lot of topics.

The other two are more effective to convert to sales but they are limited for certain niche that less selling. Once again if we build our website with a sole intent of making sales only, we would get stuck for adding more posts to maintain our rank.

if we write a product review only, then we have to wait for new product to come and hopefully it is better than the existing products. Not to mention if our niche are too narrow and exclusively trying to sell product from one brand.
So, once again we need to plan carefully while choosing our niche. It’s better to pick niche that we can write more than the product we sell.

Keyword Based Article

Keyword is a word or phrases that people use on search engine to find some information. The idea of keyword based post is that the keyword is the question and if we could provide the answer, people will come to our website as a traffic.

Writing anything relevant to our niche without proper keyword research could still become a traffic. The problem is that any search engine will provide millions of blog post from every search. Our post could be one of them but probably not on the first page, which people tend to ignore.

So, in order to ensure on getting some traffic, we need to do a low competition keyword research. With low competition means that we have a better chance on getting at least the first page.

Based on WA training of using Jaaxy for keyword research, the ideal keyword to use would have more than 30 searches per month and under 100 competitors. Nathaniell said that we shouldn’t be worry too much about the average search. One traffic per article but we are going to write hundreds of them.

One more quality picking a good keyword is that we need to use that exact keyword as part of our post. It means, that the keyword must be correct in grammatical sense.

The problem is that people don’t usually type with the right grammar on search engine but the competitors might be using the right one. The QSR (Quoted Search Result) number is based on other competitors using the exact keyword with the right grammar.

By doing this keyword research for every article on our website, hopefully we can get more accurate number of traffic per month. Don’t forget that the training also suggests to write every article with 1000 words at minimum to ensure the traffic and rank.

Another way of looking for keyword based post.

Nathaniell said that, he already meet with a lot of successful online marketers without knowing how to do keyword research. The training works but there is still another way around.

The key is that this business is based on consistency on adding articles. Writing a lot of articles that we love is better than writing one keyword based article and do nothing after.

The keyword is just a guidelines, to generate some ideas for topics for getting some traffic. There will be times when we know what to write because it can be interesting or because we love to add them on our website, not because people are actually looking at it.

Keyword is not the most important. When we are passionate about something and write them long enough, our article would get rank by search engine not only based on the keyword we targeted.

We might not get first rank because we didn’t do any research but our article could have more keywords and generate its own rank and traffic. We just need more time before we get some results but in the meantime, we still need to write a lot of articles.

Publishing and taking more action are more important than trying to make one perfect post to generate traffic. Our target should be traffic to our entire website not just for one article.

So is the research useless? No, it means that there are at least two possible scenario on writing an article. One, is that we totally don’t know any topic to write about and we can generate them by doing keyword research.

The second one, is that we already know what we want to write but we want them to generate more traffic. We could then optimize them by doing the keyword research, find any keyword similar to our post and readjust our article. Edit the title, the opening paragraph with the new keyword, and add a little bit of content.

Nathaniell also said that if we can’t use the keyword tool because it’s not free, we could still do the Google Instant or the alphabet soup method to generate some topic. From those topic we could start writing basic articles.

By writing a basic article which might not be able to compete with big websites, we could at least build our library, vocabulary for our website and grow our knowledge. Although these articles won’t give us results at first but we could get a diversed content that linked internally and for the long run a better authority website. After that we can start writing with high competition keyword.

Tips on using keyword.

As a rule of thumb, Nathaniell suggest that keyword must be used on the title and the first paragraph of every article. Optionally we can add one more in content, on the H3 tag headings, and alt tag.

Do not waste our time writing articles with similar keywords. For example, “How to train a Dog” and “Dog Training Guide” are essentially the same content just with a different keyword. We can only get rank for one of them. If not different enough Google might only consider one of them.

What we need to do is to use the second scenario, optimize them. Pick one of them which has better result, usually the one with lower competition or QSR. Then we adjust the content.

Then, we use the other similar keyword to generate other topic using the alphabet soup method. For example, we can now have “how to train a dog to play dead”. We can write a different content than the first one, even though the monthly search number is very low.

Don’t forget that the keyword optimization method can also be used for the other two types of article. Instead of “product’s name” review as a title, maybe we can come up with another title but similar content to get a better rank.

Product Review Article

The reason that product review article converts to sale is probably that whoever looking for the review, already set their mind to spend their money. What they want is just to make a better decision.

There are two types of product review article. The first one is that we just want to promote them and the second one is we just one to compare them with the best product we offer. Generally, since we need to write a thorough article for both type, the only difference is that on the second one we suggest a better option.

The problem is that if we barely know our niche, we usually don’t know which product should we sell, even more as the best product. The solution for this would be either we find out first, or we should just write and promote everything.

There’s a chance that a better product than the one we promote is already out there, or even a new one is coming out. If we already set our mind to promote one product only that we thought it is the best, then set it like the center of our website, our work will eventually become useless.

On the other hand, promoting everything can get us burn out with small number of sales. But, with a diverse and wider content, we can still make something for the long run.

We also need to remember that the best product can be very subjective to us. For us because we know all the product’s features and willing to learn about them but the buyer might only need a couple of features.

For example, a smartphone can offer us any latest technology we could get but sometimes people just need gadget to take a selfie, or to browse or even just one social media platform, not everything.

Another thing is that the best product usually comes with a higher price which not everybody can afford. If they can’t find another deal, we are losing a potential buyer. Offering another product could open the possibility for sale.

With that in mind, we need to do some research first before deciding what we are going to sell. It’s best not to rely on a single product or a single affiliate program and find some alternatives. This should also be done while choosing a niche.

Finding product to review and sell.

According to Nathaniell, there are some ways to find out which product to sell.

• Google Trend. We can find out which product still has an upward trend.
  Any e-commerce top selling. Don’t forget that we need one with affiliate program.
• Google Alert. Sign up for topics or phrase, so when someone write a blog about it, we get a notification right away, no need to look for them.
• Forum and social media. Do research on what people had been asking. Interact with the people directly if we need.
• Look at competitors. Find another websites with the same niche and what product they promote or talk about. Write a better review, preferably to add more information they missed.

Choosing a product

We need to consider a few things before choosing a product.

• Choose a variety of products. As mentioned above, one best product can be very subjective. Choose a product that has some alternatives.
• Problem solving product. it is easier to sell something that people need and not just because they like. We are going to write a long article in which we write how one product can help people’s daily task. Choose the product with problem solving feature.
• High ticket item. Consider how much can we make per sale. Some product only gives us pennies. For long term, we could promote hundreds of products selling pennies. But sometimes, we need encouragement by getting paid for our work. Choose a product with higher commission.
• Long term sales. Consider how many sales people are going to buy for a product. Selling one cooking appliance and they don’t need that anymore.
• Consumable products like supplements can make recurring sales. Or try to sell a tutorial, DIY guide where we can offer a set of products to use.

Nathaniell’s tips on writing product review that converts to sale.

• Summary at the top. Some people might have done their own research before reading our review. Sometimes they just need somebody to make a decision for them. Put a summary on the top alongside affiliate link.
• Rating system. Create our own rating system. This could send a message that we’ve already done this to other products and can be compared with our rating system.
• Sufficient number of affiliate links. Once again that some people might only need for some parts of the product, not all of them. Therefore, creating an exit points after making point with links could help get the sales immediately.
• Limited number of internal/external links. We need to limit any option we could provide for the reader. If we offer them a lot of alternative products, it’s harder for them to make a decision. We need to write a variety of products but it doesn’t mean we should show them all. But when they are still not satisfied with the display we are ready with other options.
• Include multiple high quality images. A good affiliate program should provide us with good quality images for the product that we need to use. We could also add some relevant images to make some points as long as they have great quality.
• Organize points to carry reader to conclusion. Instead of just pointing out the facts in general terms, consider to engage the targeted audiences. Tell them that the product is good/bad exactly for them. Tell them a story that we understand the problem for our target.
• Make use of H3 and H4 tags. As we are writing a very long and thorough content, people can be very lazy or get bored to read all of them. Using these tags will help them skim the entire article so they could easily find out which part of the article they want.
• Pros and Cons. One of the most powerful feature in a review. Can be use as a summary both at top and bottom. The cons part can be very discouraging but without them people might become skeptical with our content. Find a way how the pros can outweigh the cons.
• Summary at the end. Link near the top usually get more clicks but links near the bottom converts the best. We still need the summary at the end even though we already provide on top.
• Comparison chart. Another form of summary but with another similar product. Use it for several top product only to make it easier to read.
• Links to similar vs focused review. Some niches can’t really pick a winner product to promote so we should promote several similar products. If somehow we can, we should compare other products to the best one, suggest the audience a better option than the one they’ve been searching.
• Links convert better than images. Use colored text link, converts way better than using image link, assuming we use black text in general. Images are more attractive but also distracting. Not to mention it could be not so mobile friendly. Use image that look like a button.
• Custom image for focal points of review. Another way of telling your audience how professional we are with our review. Use “Reviewed” stamp in products logo or image.
• Use your own image. At least it would tell the audience that we have and use the product. Other thing is that our website doesn’t just copying the other.
• Set a template. For any reader it would be easier for them to understand the structure of our writing. For us, the template will make us more efficient and productive. We can always start a review by filling the template with just simple facts like product’s name or price.
• Set a target on how many reviews per week and be consistent. As mentioned on this article that the concept of this business is consistency on adding our website’s content. Don’t wait until we get the feeling. Remember that something is still better than nothing.
• Add supplementary contents. We can add another articles as related topics to a review about other things we can do with the product. Give them some idea so they can see that the product has more value than it looks.
• Long tail keyword title. Don’t use the same title used on the Amazon or other e-commerce because we won’t be able to outrank their article. Put a specific feature from the product that differentiate with similar product.
  Comparing almost similar products. Sometimes we can find two similar product in which one of them has lower popularity but higher sales than the other. We need to find out the difference between the two.
• Buyer’s perspective vs product’s. Some products like smartphone will offer the best and latest features on their phone. Some people would love that but some others just don’t really care to have everything. They just want to make sure that the phone has the feature they need. So, instead of highlighting the special feature but non essential, maybe we can come up with an essential standard feature that people need.
• Products that we don’t own. Since there is no way we could buy and try everything, we are going to look for review from other people experience, probably another website. We need to add our own opinion so we don’t just copy them from other website. We still could talk about the sales marketing, their customer service, or general business concept. For digital product we could still write about how far we can use the free product, or how far we can access the website with free membership.

Top ranked article.

Top ranked article is basically comparing several similar products review in one article. It will be easier to write this one after we write each product review individually. If we try to write this from nothing, it’s like writing three articles or more at the same time. That would affect our productivity and publishing schedule.

We don’t copy everything into one article but we pick several points to compare or the main advantage of the products. It can be up to 10 products but Nathaniell suggests top three.

For every product compared we put the affiliate link and also link to complete review of the product. Impatient buyer can go directly to the vendor but those who want to know more can read the complete article.

Some keyword optimization method can be applied here. For example, instead of just top three smartphone, we can be more specific like top three smartphone under $100. Remember that we need to pick a specific feature based on every product that we already have written the review of, unless we are going to write another one. So we need to plan ahead.
——————————————————–

ABOUT TRAFFIC AND RESULT

Getting traffic and rank
We should be patient with the result but do not procrastinate. It means keep making great contents because the result might be appear on yearly basis.

We are working for organic traffic, delay is expected from finishing your work until getting the result. even with 5 years experience, cannot supercharge the result. Visitors need time to know our website, understand the information we offer, become regulars on our website and buying something.

Don’t judge results on daily basis but do it on yearly. Sometimes people buy things on certain days of the year like Christmas. Not to mention if our niche is seasonal. Black Friday and Cyber Monday can boost earnings from Amazon like 10 times.

Social media campaign
Still not ranking? We can still use social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram for our campaign. Social media is not essential but adding a share button can help the reader to spread the word.

The thing about using social media is that we have to be like an active salesman. We can get direct traffic because we tell people exactly our website.

The more we tweet more result we can get. But then, when we stop, we stop getting result as well.

Focusing on building the organic traffic means that the search engine will take over the salesman job. It works for 24/7 so we can finally rest or do other things.

It doesn’t mean that the social media campaign is bad. We can occasionally use them to boost some traffic. Just like any advertisement on TV, sometimes we see the same ad for days non stop and again few times later.

Keep in mind that some niches especially the money making niche are not very welcomed. Maybe we should put less effort on those. On the other hand, some visual niches can perform better in Pinterest or Instagram.

We need to learn more about our niche and the best social media to use. Facebok fan page is a more passive model compared to Twitter.

In the meantime we still need to add some contents. Content is the king for getting organic traffic and rank.

There are a lot of variable to consider about ranking. Some people can get it in days but some other get it after months. SEO is just an optimizer, not a guarantee of results. Sometimes we just need to publish something.

Sometimes our article got stuck on page 2 but as we add more contents, it can eventually get higher maybe in a year or two. Don’t let one result discourage us to continue. Our hard work will pay off eventually.

Comment section
Comment section is a way to boost our rank. The more people are talking on that article, it adds up as part of the content. We can have a not very long content but get a better rank by responding to people’s question.

It’s a comment section, not just for question. Sometimes they even give us feedback or new idea for us.

Of course there will be some people to respond negatively. The thing is we still have the chance either to ignore that, or even edit them.

The more established website doesn’t even need to engage that. They already have some loyal visitors that will create a long conversation between each other. They already become a community within the website. The loyal visitors become permanent daily traffic.

Remember that a small site can outrank the big one. Even though they already have loyal visitors but not for all of the articles.

They have a lot of contributors, some even just from outsource which the writer don’t have any access to respond or even care and probably the owner doesn’t even read.

We can also buy traffic using PPC like Google Adwords. Just make sure we understand how it works because it’s not free and can be a total lost. Do not buy anything that offers a fast traffic secret.
————————————————————

ABOUT OUTSOURCING AND SPENDING MONEY

Outsourcing can grow our income if it was done right but can be a total lost. The idea of using an outsource is that with one time payment, we can have an article that could generate our income for years.

Or, if we have problem we don’t understand, instead of trying to learn doing it ourselves for hours, we could just pay them and it can be done in one hour, and again with non stop benefit.

So, in this business, our job is not only to write an article but sometimes we have to deal with other things like a little modification to our website theme.

Website design is not essential for generating traffic or income, at least, not the most important. Learning to change one of them could take hours but we probably do it like once or twice for years, not everyday.

It’s not that it isn’t beneficial, we could even write an article about it, but we could also ended up ruining our website. One wrong coding could jeopardize the entire website. Not to mention how unproductive we become after that.

What about outsourcing the article, we could actually ask people to do our main work?

The fact is that outsourcing for an article is not as simple as outsourcing the others.

We can easily look on the quality of the image, infographics, video or coding that we outsourced, while writing is not just putting and collecting words. The cheap writing will only give us copies from other websites, let alone making them unique and getting rank.

Getting something like that would make you think that we could have done it ourselves and not wasted a few dollars, not mention the time. The time we spend from outsourcing includes from teaching/ instructing, waiting, reviewing their work, and if it goes bad, we have to write them again ourselves like not outsourcing at all.

So, what’s the point of outsourcing for article at all?

The idea is that it could be an investment. If we already know which person can do a good work, we could expect the same result with less work. By outsourcing, we could finally have a vacation while maintaining our website performance.

This would also be helpful if we have a big project with very limited time, like having a seasonal niche. Another thing is if we have more than one website to develop.

The chances are that if we succeed in this business, we are most likely to build several more. Remember that we still need to update our content in order to maintain our rank and traffic.

With that in mind, outsourcing is a skill that worth to learn for our business in long term. There are things we need to understand before we could use them.

We build our business, they do their work.

The good results won’t come if we just give them orders, taking our hands-off completely and just wait. We ourselves need to know what kind of work is a good work. Without knowing and setting our target, they could just give us anything even though it’s bad.

We are the one building our business. Not them. We need to know the content of our business. They can’t do more than what we told them.

It’s not that they don’t want to do a good work but at most what they do is based on our instruction. We still need to supervise from time to time in case they misunderstand the instruction. Nathaniell said that he can still get a bad work from a good writer and it usually because he gave a wrong instruction.

We set our project for them to follow, not the other way around.

We don’t let them pressuring us into handing the job immediately. It could be a sign of enthusiasm but we are doing this for our business not for them, so we need to be in control.

Maybe they could write 1000 words easily but we need to test them and set target. We can start from 200 word, then move on to 500 words, 1000, or even 1000 words within a week, then a whole month based on several keywords.

Start slowly, especially if we are on budget and we don’t know anything about the outsource. Test them one by one, keep track on results and price.

For Image, Logo, or Video. Nathaniell said that we can use service from Fiverr. The cheap one for $5-$10, we can get a “template” design. Infographic can be done in a week with some changes for $300.

From other places, for $30-$100, we can get several alternatives and redo them until we satisfied. Several hundreds dollars for professional logo.

For article. We can use outsource from Upwork or Freelance for the article but not from Fiverr. Don’t expect anything from the cheap one like $5 fro 500 word article. They probably come from non English writer and just copying from other website. Not going to get any rank.

For mediocre article, maybe from English writer. not an expert in their field but willing to do some research. Not very interesting article, $10-30 / 500 words.

Excellent article for $50-$100 / 500 words, we can use this for special project.
They can charge less if it’s their field of expertise. The fee is also depends on whether it’s an article or a complete blog post with image and link.

The cheap one could still do a good job but it will require time for sorting. Just be ready for the problem after. Find another with a decent rate if we have the budget.

Based on his experience, Nathaniell said that women is better at writing.

For coding. Do coding for premium themes not the free one we’ll change later. Maybe for special designed page, adding image on every post, change color, etc. It costs like $20 for 10 minutes work so make sure to enhance performance, result and productivity not just being perfectionist

Finding the outsource, writing the vacancy.

• Title, keep it brief but descriptive, make them interesting.
• Description, describe the job, not our website, in details but easy to understand, don’t confuse them. Require them to add a catchphrase to include in their application to find out which one is actually read.
• Payment, pay hourly for image, and fix price for article and coding but it depends on you and the applicant
• Time, the expected timeframe to finish the job. Set smaller timeframe for testing.

Finding the outsource, follow up.

Within 2 or 3 days max, we will get a lot of applicants. Make a short list from those entries to narrowed down the numbers. Once again, don’t let them pressure us to giving the job right away. It’s our money.

Do interview to know how good their English and how they understand the job. Use Skype for big project. Then, as mentioned above, test them, start with small project like 200 word article.

Plan for a checkpoint within the time frame. That way, we don’t have to wait before the expected completion time. If it turn out there are some misunderstanding, we could use the rest of the time to fix them, so it won’t be a total lost. They still need some guidance, critics and encouragement.

Forcing what we want with anger won’t make them do their job better. Remember that this could be an investment. We don’t want to lose any potential source.

Teaching them one by one could feel like a waste of time. Maybe so, but once again, if we could find the right one, that would make our job way easier.

Remember that homemade mistakes are free, but paying someone else to make mistakes can get super expensive.

Other spending.

Buy plugin that will enhance our work not the one automatically do our job. For example, plugin for content curation, plugin to take image or video from other website, plugin to build our Amazon Store or plugin that claim will boost our SEO.

Recommended plugins to buy are premium themes and comparison chart plugin for products review. Recommended theme was the one with white background, black text, simple menu and sidebar, no fancy homepage setup.

Don’t buy any program that promises a fast traffic. Buy from PPC or any paid advertisement after we understand the mechanism. It could still be a total lost.

Buy a pre made website. Maybe there is someone already started a website with a niche we like but they stop and sell the website. We could continue them but remember to check the content and traffic first before buying. It could be that we just like the web designs not the content.

Buy alternative program to Wealthy Affiliate could work. But consider that there are a lot of trainings, classrooms, or blogs from all of the members within WA that we could learn and try. Wealthy Affiliate might not be the only way, but sure is a way that works.

If we already build a lot of websites, we are going to need buy an accounting sofware. This will help us track our time, cash flows and investments. Try using Quickbooks or GoDaddy Bookkeeping.

For hardware, we can start with a laptop. It would be better with a desktop but most people will start this business as a side job and they need a mobile computer to work anywhere. If we already have a full time online marketing job, an ergonomic chair would help.

A decent camera would be great to have our own photo for our blog. That way we don’t need to find image from another website, dealing with some copyright issue and this will give us a unique touch to our website. We could start with phone’s camera if we are on a budget.
———————————————————————

ABOUT WEBSITE

Organizing
By default, people usually show their blogroll but we have the choice to hide it. People are accessing our website from the search engine directly to our post.

They don’t have to see everything and probably don’t want to see everything.
There are people really just looking for information that we could provide, but the selling and making money part might scared them off. Our website can be a big storage with small display instead of big storage and big display as well.

Updating our website with new content is usually for the sake of maintaining the rank and for the people who already know about our website. For organic traffic where people might not know or even care about our website, they just following the search engine result.

We could also remove the date of every blog post and repost as if it’s a new one.

Use jump links and bullet points for better rank, especially for a long content. It helps reader to directly access the part of the information they are looking for.

Domain name
Picking the right websites name can also help for getting traffic. Having an Exact Match Domain, which means the domain name is exactly the same with the keyword many people use. It helps people to understand the website.

While we might want to use EMD, but the chances are it’s probably taken already. Try to personalize them by adding some words without losing the keyword. For example instead of baseballtickets, try using mrbaseballtickets.
if you can, do not use domain name with a hyphen, it hurts a little. Also don’t use number and avoid misspelling. While this could help but it doesn’t mean the end when we use them. Even Nathaniell’s website uses all of them on its domain, number, hyphen and long phrase.

Use dot com, dot net and dot org (top 3 ranking domain extensions) for our website. Dot info is the least. It’s better to use another domain name instead of forcing what we want but with the least extensions.
Do not use any trademark on domain, there is a chance we will get some warning from the owner to take it down. We can still use them on blog post title.

Other aspect.
Do not focus on website’s display like image spacing, using rainbow or perfect font size. The purpose is to improve the user experience so any reader can find the information better. Do not make a complicated menu or theme.

If we use certain media like image, video or quoting from other websites content, make sure we give credit to the owner. It could be link to the original content or to the owner’s personal contact.
——————————————-

Conclusion

As we can see, Nathaniell is just like any other member. He didn’t know anything at first, wasn’t an expert to begin with.

When he started this, he was in China, with bad internet connection and a broken laptop. It wasn’t a full time job, but he did constantly.

If we look into his blogs from early days, we can see that he asked a lot of questions. As the time went by he begin sharing his success and failures.

The good thing is that he is willing to try a lot of things even to spend some money. Not all of them were useful, even after a few years doing this, there were still sometimes when he lost some money for trying new things.

As he said, his lost was not a complete lost. At least he learnt what not to do again.

His success didn’t come instantly. He had to wait for months before he got something. Feelings like doubt and disappointment already become part of his life. The key is to keep going. Look for results in years not months.

He suggests that we should start right away, don’t wait until we are already in a financial problem. Spending money could be minimize, but spending the right way could help get the result faster.

Three years before he could make a stable income. Three 500 word articles per week for low competition keyword. Three hours research, one hour writing and another one for adding link, video or image.

Now, for almost a decade, he’s still very active in the community. With a lot of referrals he helped, he still said that Wealthy Affiliate training still works, even better. For him, it’s even getting easier to make money now. All we have to do is follow the training and do it.

Final Words

I personally suggest that anyone should follow him and learn from him. Even though now he can only spend his time on helping his referrals and updating his business, we can read and learn by ourselves from his articles.

His explanation is very practical and easy to understand. Anything I missed or didn’t understand from the Wealthy Affiliate training, I could get some answers from his articles.

I tried to cover everything I could learn from him by writing it down here but I could have missed something. Hopefully I could find his other websites to learn as well. If I missed anything or if you want to share more about him, you can use the comment section below.

If you’ve already become a Wealthy Affiliate member and want to know more from him, you could follow him by searching his username “Nathaniell”. For non member, you could join for free here or read more about Wealthy Affiliate from my review.

You can also get in touch with him by accessing his website onemorecupof-coffee.com. This is his bootcamp website as a result from WA training.

This is my first review of a successful WA member. My second one is about a guy started his online business in his fifties.

I would love to learn from others as well. If you have any recommendation of other successful member that I could learn from, please use the form below as well.

Thank you for reading my post. Hope it helps.

 

Mark M.