Congrats on being a WA member for 3 months! This is a very important time for you because it's about this time that you exit the honeymoon phase, and start asking yourself, “What am I doing wrong?”.
If you have already made a sale or two, that's awesome. You are in the minority. The majority of folks that start internet marketing with little or no previous experience take longer to “get it”. If that's you, don't stress. It took me just over 3 months to make my first $5 sale, and I had already built/failed 3 websites.
So I want to take the time to day and double check your work, to see if you are on the right track. Then, I want to send you off in the right direction.
I'm not the only one that sees the “three month wall” as a big challenge! Jay did an excellent webinar on the topic called Pushing Through The Three Month Wall. He's got a ton of ideas to beat the blues and keep building your business!
How far are you in the training?
Some folks burn through it in a few weeks. Others take their time and do more work than learning. Whatever strategy works for you, my suggestion is to work towards finishing the training at least once.
Then do it again.
No doubt the first time you went through there were things you didn't understand 100%, or didn't understand why you were doing them. Maybe you thought you did them right, but didn't. Check your work, and redo the training with a critical eye.
Find something you don't understand or want to know more about? Ask the WA community.
==> How To Get Help In Wealthy Affiliates
How often are you creating content?
You NEED to be creating content (writing blog posts) at least twice a week. Yes, 2x per week is a MINIMUM. 3-4 times per week would be ideal.
I wouldn't burn yourself out and go for 5-7 times or more per week at this point. You are still learning, and I think you should be spending at least some time every day learning new internet marketing skills. This could be in the regular training (or Bootcamp training), or it could be exploring the classroom training, or just finding out how to do random things you see other people doing for their websites.
But always remember that none will find your site if you are not creating content for it. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but regular blog posting not only means that there is a great statistical chance of your website getting viewed, but search engines will also be forced to crawl your site more often, and will probably give you higher rankings due to frequent blog posting.
How do you feel about keyword research?
You should be doing keyword research on a regular basis. If you don't know what it is, learn it. You have a 100% free keyword tool within WA called Jaaxy. I use Jaaxy Enterprise (the best version) for fast keyword research.
Here are two awesome webinars to improve your keyword research skills
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/the-4-seasons-of-keyword-research
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/using-jaaxy-like-a-keyword-research-ninja
Another concept that is foreign when you get started is the idea of “low hanging fruit”. Though normally we want to find keywords with high traffic stats to get more visitors on our blog, sometimes, any keyword will work so long as it's low competition.
For example, if we use a keyword that has only 5 visits per month, that might seem pretty low. But If you write 100 posts and rank #1 for every single one, that's 500 visits per month! You will dominate your niche with that kind of traffic!
Plus, if you write that much content, you will be ranking for other keywords that you didn't even try for. Remember that Google is smart. It can figure out what you are writing about. When someone searches for something in your blog post, even if it's not your “main keyword”, your post will turn up.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/hot-to-get-keywords-ranked-with-low-hanging-fruit
Another thing that's super easy to do and can turn up THOUSANDS of post ideas for your blog is the “alphabet soup technique”. This can expose real searches, from real people. When using this one, it doesn't really matter what the traffic is. If you can find good question or topic ideas that people are searching for, then it's a guarantee that at least a few people will land on your blog each day.
The alphabet soup technique: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/alphabet-soup-technique-using-google-instant-to-find-keywords
What Now?
Here is a success plan for the next month: You need to make a content plan, then stick to it. Do some keyword research, write down some ideas, plan to post a few times per week…then stick to the plan! Even if you are not 100% sure you're doing it right, doing SOMETHING is better than doing nothing.
- Spend one or two days doing keyword research. Go crazy and get at least 20 post topics. If you post 2x per week, that's 10 weeks (2 months) of posting you'll have planned out. If you post 3x per week, then that's 7 weeks you will have planned out in just one day!
- Set a posting schedule. Do you want to post every Tuesday and Thursday? Or Monday, Wednesday, Friday? Plan on sticking to the plan for at least 6-8 weeks, then re-evaluate.
- Set a training schedule. When I got started I committed myself to 1 hour of training per day. That might be a bit much for some folks, especially if you have a family and jobs, plus you have to be posting to your blog and doing research for those posts. Whatever you plan is, put it in writing, and don't deviate from the plan.
It's a numbers game now. We want more posts. More traffic. More products. More Visitors.
And in case you forgot about all those money making strategies I sent you last month, here they are https://onemorecupof-coffee.com/my-money-making-strategies/
Mike
Thank you sir! You’ve talked me down off the ledge yet again.
Nathaniell
Haha. It’s common. I’ve been there!
Connie
Thank you so much for the encouragement and added tidbits of information. I feel good about my website. Now it’s time to get it noticed, get it out there.
For me, I need to start disciplining myself with the continued training and added content for my website. My brain needs to switch on the idea that this is my future business and it needs daily monitoring in some form or fashion.
I would never have guessed that I would learn so much about affiliate marketing/website building in 3 months. I’m already considering another niche idea and I’m not even done with the first round of training yet! Wow!
Thanks again from you and all the others at WA.
Nathaniell
So happy to hear you’re learning a lot in Wealthy Affiliate, and ready to keep your axe to the grindstone!
Olivia
Thanks Nathaniell, All great info. I’ve been struggling with coming up with enough things to write posts about in my niche. Now i wish i had chosen straight forward ‘product reviews’ like phones or whatever, where you can easily get all the info on them, and quickly put together a post using that ‘product template’. It can take me days to even figure out what to write about next, and days to research it, and write what i consider to be a decent post. I’m stuck right now, feeling there’s no way i’m going to be able to crank out 2-4 posts a week, plus do all the other stuff you need to do in relation to each post. i haven’t even begun to deal with the social media part of it yet. This many take me longer, i just don’t know how i’m going to ‘blast ahead’ in the manner you are describing.
Nathaniell
Everyone works at a different pace. If you can do research one day, then writing one day, getting out 3 posts a week is manageable. However, some niches do require more research! In the beginning, one post every week or two weeks may be all you can manage, but with better time management, and the compounding action of building skills and knowledge, you’ll be able to do more and more, with less and less time. The same is true of any skill!
Sarae
Awesome post Nathaniell!! I’ve been majorly struggling with getting more than one post done per week the last few weeks, but after reading this, I’m going to get a schedule together and make a plan to try and get two done per week again! It’s so hard with kids trying to squeeze everything in, especially when they get sick!! But I want this SO bad!
Thanks for the encouragement. The 3 month hurdle is definitely hard, and I’m feeling it. But I’m pressing on!
-Sarae
Nathaniell
Hope to see you push through it Sarae!