washand
Regular Member
- Jun 19, 2016
- 306
- 32
Hi BHW,
Since a few months I am active on BHW. Well, not that active, I actually read a lot topics and journeys. They inspire me so much and give me a clear guidance in the proces of IM. So I decided it was time for my own journey. My journey has two goals.
1) Seeing progress in the whole proces.
2) Keeping me motivated. Sometimes when I am busy I tend to only read topics instead of taking action.
Something about me
I am 21 year old student from the Netherlands. When I was younger I had a very noobish website on Weebly together with a friend of mine. We made 'humor' videos and decided to upload them on our own site. One day we where looking for a script or something to track the number of visitors to our site. Apperantly, we used the wrong search term in Google because we came to an Affiliate Network. We didn't really understand the concept then but there where a few PPC campaigns out there. We understood that when someone clicked the banners, we would receive few cents for it. So, we placed all the advertsements on our website and clicked them ourselves. We made 15-25 euro's a day with this. In the end we made roughly 400 euro's each. It was then we knew whe where actually stealing money from companies and decided to quit this.
Altough we tried it again a few years lated (and the security was better: we were banned in a week) this experience stucked in my head. I knew there was money on the internet. I started learning html and made slightly better websites. But after a few months I gave up. I did not have the persistance to actually learn programming languages and always used sites like weebly. Because I never wanted to spent any money I also didn't have any good hosting. All in all I forgot about it completely.
Still I knew there was money out there to be made. So I've spent more than a year on several GPT/PTC sites and made a few dollars there. But after all I realised that these websites where not worth spending my time on.
In the beginning of 2016 I came across a new forum. A guy learned me the basics of Affiliate marketing and told me he had his information from Wealthy Affiliate. I joined that site and realised quickly that Wordpress was my solution for making a good looking website without any real know-how of programming knowledge: it was indeed possible to make a decent website myself! But this website charged a monthly fee of 47 dollars for more knowledge. I thought this was ridiculous to pay that much money and decided that there had to be other forums where people shared their knowledge. Eventually I came here.
Journey - Affiliate
What Wealthy Affiliate learned me, however, was that there where tons of niches out there and I just had to pick a niche I am interested in myself. Second thing I learned was to make a selection in your niche based on keywords in Google. In a few days I came up with a niche I am passionate about and realised that Amazon and other sites where selling products related to that niche.
My Idea was this: create a website that offers an overview in my niche products. Some sites have a affiliate progrom, some don't. Actually the ones that don't have more authority. So I decided to import them and also a few products from the sites with an affiliate program. This way I am unique and people will recognize my site for this.
I Also made an Instagram page related to my niche. I grew this account manually in the first weeks and instantly got DM's from authority sites and also minor sites. After receiving permission from the autority sites and doing a shoutout for a minor site I realised my plan had potential: to be recognised and to make money.
But after gaining more followers and also some minor organic traffic I realised that the affiliate programs where all crap: the commission was just to low. My products are in the 20-30 euro's range. 4% per sale is like 0.80 cents? This wasn't going to give me real money. Besides that I recognised that most of my sales where not registered.
Other methods
Now, I know that there is potential in my website I plan to monetize it on a different way.
I don't want to lose my original plan because that is what makes my website unique. But I also want to earn money with it.
I contacted a person who can help me making my own product. As I don't have any experience in this, this will be something for the long term.
Other thing is: dropshipping items from AliExpress. I got inspired by Yarosss and know that my niche has some unique products on AliExpress. Ones that other sites in my niche don't have. I could relatively easy sell these items.
Added two items in my store on the website and got an order for both products. First product throught instagram promotion and other one because of organic traffic. Total profit: 19 euro's. If I can scale this up....
But there is one problem. The most wanted products in Ali are Chinese versions of official products, owned by the autorithy sites. So I am still figuring out if I can promote chinese versions without triggerint the alarm of the authority sites in my niche.
Future plans
Since I only spend money on my domain name till now, I don't really want to invest my own money into this. Only my initial profits.
Thing to buy in the future:
- Better hosting (now it's crap)
- FollowLiker (for growing my instagram page automaticly)
- Hire a VPS to run FL
- AliExpress dropship plugin (to automate the process of adding products to my store. But, this depends on if I really want to continue in the long run with AliExpress products)
Expenses:
- Hosting and domain: €3,99 (from a GoDaddy coupon)
Profits:
- Shoutouts: €5
- Dropshipping: €19
Total: €24
I will post my progress in this thread.
Cheers!
Washand
Since a few months I am active on BHW. Well, not that active, I actually read a lot topics and journeys. They inspire me so much and give me a clear guidance in the proces of IM. So I decided it was time for my own journey. My journey has two goals.
1) Seeing progress in the whole proces.
2) Keeping me motivated. Sometimes when I am busy I tend to only read topics instead of taking action.
Something about me
I am 21 year old student from the Netherlands. When I was younger I had a very noobish website on Weebly together with a friend of mine. We made 'humor' videos and decided to upload them on our own site. One day we where looking for a script or something to track the number of visitors to our site. Apperantly, we used the wrong search term in Google because we came to an Affiliate Network. We didn't really understand the concept then but there where a few PPC campaigns out there. We understood that when someone clicked the banners, we would receive few cents for it. So, we placed all the advertsements on our website and clicked them ourselves. We made 15-25 euro's a day with this. In the end we made roughly 400 euro's each. It was then we knew whe where actually stealing money from companies and decided to quit this.
Altough we tried it again a few years lated (and the security was better: we were banned in a week) this experience stucked in my head. I knew there was money on the internet. I started learning html and made slightly better websites. But after a few months I gave up. I did not have the persistance to actually learn programming languages and always used sites like weebly. Because I never wanted to spent any money I also didn't have any good hosting. All in all I forgot about it completely.
Still I knew there was money out there to be made. So I've spent more than a year on several GPT/PTC sites and made a few dollars there. But after all I realised that these websites where not worth spending my time on.
In the beginning of 2016 I came across a new forum. A guy learned me the basics of Affiliate marketing and told me he had his information from Wealthy Affiliate. I joined that site and realised quickly that Wordpress was my solution for making a good looking website without any real know-how of programming knowledge: it was indeed possible to make a decent website myself! But this website charged a monthly fee of 47 dollars for more knowledge. I thought this was ridiculous to pay that much money and decided that there had to be other forums where people shared their knowledge. Eventually I came here.
Journey - Affiliate
What Wealthy Affiliate learned me, however, was that there where tons of niches out there and I just had to pick a niche I am interested in myself. Second thing I learned was to make a selection in your niche based on keywords in Google. In a few days I came up with a niche I am passionate about and realised that Amazon and other sites where selling products related to that niche.
My Idea was this: create a website that offers an overview in my niche products. Some sites have a affiliate progrom, some don't. Actually the ones that don't have more authority. So I decided to import them and also a few products from the sites with an affiliate program. This way I am unique and people will recognize my site for this.
I Also made an Instagram page related to my niche. I grew this account manually in the first weeks and instantly got DM's from authority sites and also minor sites. After receiving permission from the autority sites and doing a shoutout for a minor site I realised my plan had potential: to be recognised and to make money.
But after gaining more followers and also some minor organic traffic I realised that the affiliate programs where all crap: the commission was just to low. My products are in the 20-30 euro's range. 4% per sale is like 0.80 cents? This wasn't going to give me real money. Besides that I recognised that most of my sales where not registered.
Other methods
Now, I know that there is potential in my website I plan to monetize it on a different way.
I don't want to lose my original plan because that is what makes my website unique. But I also want to earn money with it.
I contacted a person who can help me making my own product. As I don't have any experience in this, this will be something for the long term.
Other thing is: dropshipping items from AliExpress. I got inspired by Yarosss and know that my niche has some unique products on AliExpress. Ones that other sites in my niche don't have. I could relatively easy sell these items.
Added two items in my store on the website and got an order for both products. First product throught instagram promotion and other one because of organic traffic. Total profit: 19 euro's. If I can scale this up....
But there is one problem. The most wanted products in Ali are Chinese versions of official products, owned by the autorithy sites. So I am still figuring out if I can promote chinese versions without triggerint the alarm of the authority sites in my niche.
Future plans
Since I only spend money on my domain name till now, I don't really want to invest my own money into this. Only my initial profits.
Thing to buy in the future:
- Better hosting (now it's crap)
- FollowLiker (for growing my instagram page automaticly)
- Hire a VPS to run FL
- AliExpress dropship plugin (to automate the process of adding products to my store. But, this depends on if I really want to continue in the long run with AliExpress products)
Expenses:
- Hosting and domain: €3,99 (from a GoDaddy coupon)
Profits:
- Shoutouts: €5
- Dropshipping: €19
Total: €24
I will post my progress in this thread.
Cheers!
Washand
