My journey: starting again, learning as I go

I enjoyed creating websites and affiliate marketing back in the early 00s. Created sites for SAHM (stay at home moms), lifestyle brands (pushed a lot of traffic to PacSun), and adult (anyone remember Toms Newbie Boost?).

Then life kicked me in the head and I had to go get a job.

I'm old and settled now, corporate career running pretty much on autopilot, but I miss the chase and want to see if I can make money doing this again.

I've been faffing around for about a year getting my feet wet again, and I think building in public here will be productive. I've got a host with about 10 websites currently (they're not really doing anything)

Step 1: find evergreen non YMYL niche and pare it down

• Need to find a focused niche with year round traffic, that people will spend a little (or a lot!) of money on
• Start big and narrow down:
  • Cooking / diets
    • Keto
    • Intermittent fasting (too narrow?)
    • Budget recipes
    • Vegetarian
  • Fitness
  • Finance (YMYL territory)
    • Personal finance
    • Budgeting
    • Crypto
    • Side hustles
  • Fashion / beauty
  • Meditation / mindfulness
  • ??

• I can use Google trends to see search consistency, then see if those search terms are also showing up on Amazon & Reddit
  • How do I measure search volume?
  • How do I sort and rank and decide? I often chase squirrels….

Step 2: build community and traffic

• Pick a platform to start with and master before branching out into multiple traffic sources
  • Website / Blog
  • Reddit
  • Pinterest
  • YouTube
  • Tiktok
  • Insta
  • Facebook
• Pinterest intrigues me…
• I like the idea of automating faceless vids, need to figure that out
• Blogs / websites appear to be much harder to capture traffic than they used to be!!

Step 3: Find products to market to my traffic

• Affiliate links
• Create my own product?
• Buy hard products wholesale and sell through Shopify/woocommerce
• Create digital products and sell on gumroad

Step 4: profit

• Sub sub niche first, traffic second, products third.

• How much do I share here? A lot of motivated hungry people here (that's a compliment!) - can I be open about niche and traffic sources without worrying that someone will slide in and take my $$? I’m by nature private and cautious, don’t like to overshare, but the web is a great big world and there’s lots of traffic/money to go around. And it’s not like I’m breaking new ground here….

More to come - I appreciate and value your insights and comments, I've obviously a lot to learn still!

Lot of changed compared to 2000. But the psychology of making money online is same. As you have done it in past, it should not be hard this time aa well.

I've been enjoying digging into this! The biggest problem I face is that I get distracted by new and shiny things - I start chasing squirrels instead of focusing on one method. So many methods! I ultimately envision one large ecosystem, with a blog, Pinterest links, TikTok vids, online community, digital products for sale, ebooks, selling Amazon and Commission Junction products via affiliate links, etc etc etc. But I have to start somewhere. I need to choose a niche, narrow it down, and focus in.

But just spent the last 3 hours jumping down the rabbit hole of clipping content and getting paid! LOL!!

I'm hoping this Journey thread will force me to be accountable and get things done.

Welcome back!
Pick a niche, grow traffic, monetize, and share cautiously.

LinkZenith said:

Welcome back!
Pick a niche, grow traffic, monetize, and share cautiously.

Click to expand...

Thank you

I've settled on a niche - I had to weed out several that were too broad, and several that are interesting to me personally but I couldn't see the traffic volume or a way to monetize.

I'm mapping out the first week / 30 days of content. I'll find a domain and get it registered, but I'm starting with TikTok and a linktree page first. I'll find some good affiliates to send traffic to.

I need to / want to learn TikTok, and that's a quicker way to get eyeballs. I'll post my first TikTok today, and build the structure and workflow out.

I'm enjoying the challenge - this is fun!

Faceless automation content is so fun to experiment with, especially when it starts pulling views.