My search on ways to make money online began in 2010. Through research and trying various programs, I decided then that affiliate marketing is the way to go for me and having a website would enable me to promote the affiliate products I chose.

Back then, it was easier to fill your website with articles and see them get ranked on first pages of Google just couple of months after (with use of relevant keywords).

My two websites were generating income but as years passed, I realize that I needed to learn more about sustaining and scaling an online business.

The Impetus to Scale Up

After finishing her International Baccalaureate in 2013, my daughter, Syaza, decided to do Pharmaceutical Science in Monash University, Melbourne (Australia). She’s our only daughter and so this presented an opportunity for me to be the ‘study mama’. So for few times in a year, I’d leave Singapore to spend more time with her in Melbourne.

While she’s away in campus, I have more time to research on platforms that provide resources and tools which would increase my knowledge on online business.

The awesome thing in having an online business is that it doesn’t matter if I’m in Singapore or Australia. I am not tied to meeting clients or suppliers in the country that I reside. So I can still do what I have always been doing (affiliate marketing), only that I felt it was time for me to up the ante.

Affiliate Marketing? Aren’t There Other Streams of Income?

I learnt about affiliate marketing since I first started online in 2010 and promote various products from several affiliate networks like Amazon, Clickbank and Peerfly. I can create a website and fill it with content, but I also want to learn more about marketing my websites to improve sales.

A big reason why affiliate marketing still appeals to me is because I’m not one who is creative nor artistic. I can’t make things with my hands unlike some of my friends who are into flower arrangement or costume jewellery design. To these people, having a website enables them to directly promote their products. Unlike what I’m doing – promoting other people’s products.

Perhaps in future, I could create my own (digital) products … not in the pipeline yet but a plan anyways.

OR …

I could order items from China, like what a neighbor is doing, and sell them online. But it felt like too much to handle – for instance, storage issues.

Not having my own products, affiliate marketing is ideal for me. No headaches on product creation or inventory.

As I reflect on my experience, the key elements in starting affiliate marketing as an online business, whether then or now, remain quite the same :

• Choosing a niche
• Finding products in that niche to promote
• Creating a website and filling it with relevant content
• Getting the right people to visit the website and see the offers
• Scaling up traffic generation strategies

For my older websites, I was generating traffic mainly through SEO. I didn’t open my websites to comments and yet I was getting traffic and making sales. As I said, things were easier back then.

But things changed. I believe many are familiar with the multiple changes in Google’s algorithms that whack many websites … mine included.

 

As the ‘Internet works differently now’, I realize I needed to make changes too.

So I went ahead and searched for some platform that could give me everything I need to run an online business – under one roof. I came across Affilorama, Empower Network, My Lead System Pro and many more but I settled for Wealthy Affiliate.

Wealthy Affiliate – Why I Choose It?

I had heard about Wealthy Affiliate for sometime but procrastinated in joining because I didn’t know how it could benefit me.

After much thought however, I went for the 7-day trial, at no expense, of course – just to poke around and check out what it has to offer.

I wasn’t disappointed because a few things set WA apart from those other programs I came across :

• Provision of hosting
• Training on various aspects of online business from creating a website to getting traffic such as by using social media, video marketing
• Supportive community that I can rely on for any queries that I may have as I work to expand my business

Why Premium?

Of all the goodies offered in Premium, I would say it’s the ability to create multiple websites that appeals to me. I figured that if I’m serious about making money online in affiliate marketing (from anywhere in the world) and using websites for promotion, then I would have to create and work on multiple websites.

Having many websites takes quite a bit of energy and … money of course. But paying just $47 monthly and being able to create multiple sites can save me considerably.

I would rather spend extra money that I have on airline tickets (SIN-MEL, MEL-SIN) or on a more serious note …  generating traffic for the sites.

In fact, joining the Premium membership was a ‘no-brainer’ as besides hosting, I could always go back and refer to the various unlimited training resources all under one roof.

Q&A

Q : How has my experience in WA been? 
A : Well frankly, it has been and still is nothing short of amazing, particularly in terms of training resources.

Q : Did joining WA instantly make me money with the website that I create?
A : No, of course not. If anyone were to look for an instant reward with little to no work, WA is not the place to be. It was only after a few months that I began to see traffic and sales. I think some people are oblivious that creating websites takes time in the first place, particularly if you are just getting into it. The importance of adding posts/pages regularly cannot be undermined (I’m guilty of this to certain extent). You also can’t expect your post/articles to pop up in the search engines overnight. If you do the indexing correctly, your posts/articles would appear in the search engines after some time, based on the keywords you use.

Q : How can people really optimize WA?
A : Online marketers have been making money online through affiliate marketing for years. I think that in order to see success, the choice of niche and affiliate products are really important. Next is the choice of domain names and finding keywords. The more specific the niche and keywords are, the better. For instance, in weight loss niche, one can focus on ‘how to reduce stubborn fat in women’ rather than just ‘lose weight’.

Q : How about the community ?
A : Having a community of like-minded individuals is certainly helpful. My encounter with most is great as we help each other out in providing comments/feedback or promoting the websites. There are of course a handful with, I would call a ‘negative mindset’. But we choose who our friends are and if you are like me, you would bump into wonderful people such as those who own these websites :

• Academic Investing Strategy
• The Engine Care Geek
• Things To Do In …