For years I’ve thought that the best way to create my own little piece of the world was to create something online that I could earn money from and to help others with.
Since I can’t talk with people in my life about this goal and process, I figured I’d share it with you 🙂
After helping businesses rank their sites on Google for the past few years, I decided to create a site myself and see how I could start making money with it.
There are so many ways you can legitimately make money online, but for me, creating an authority or affiliate site is my sweet spot. I enjoy the technical process of doing keyword research, search engine optimization (SEO), and project management of the whole process.
I recently read that if you’re not sharing your knowledge with others, then you’re doing you and them a disservice.
So that’s what I want to do with this site. I want to share what I’m learning along the way and how things are going for me. Hopefully in the process, you’ll learn how to setup your own site.
Note: The site I’m talking about isn’t this one. It’s a different site that I work on. For now I won’t be sharing the site name because people like to copy and cause harm. Maybe later I’ll share.
My Current Goal
By the time I created this goal, my site had passed the exciting $1,000/month goal. When it hit that mark, I felt like I needed to setup a bonafide process to get to the next level. I wanted the next level to be:
$3,000/month by December 20, 2017
Why?
It feels like a pretty big goal to hit in 3 months and I do better with short term challenges.
On September 20th, I started a 90 day challenge for my site.
- Hit 9,000 visitors/month
- Make $3k/month
All by Dec 20th.
I started the challenge with 6,400 visitors and $1k/month. $1,007.68 to be exact
As of October 30th, we broke $1505 for last 30 days and hit 8,063 users on site (with 12,161 pageviews) Super excited about the progress so far.
Progress Goals to Get There
Have you ever set a goal and just hoped to get there? That’s how I’ve been setting my goals. This time I decided to do thing a little differently. By setting up progress goals or strategic goals that you can measure.
There’s a whole process you want to work through when creating any website.
- Do keyword research to make sure that you’re writing about something that people are searching for.
- Write detailed posts that are helpful and informative
- Link out to products or services that you can earn a commission on if someone buys from your link.
With that, here are my current progress goals to hit this milestone:
Progress Goals to get there:
1. Double conversion rates on Amazon Associate to 9%
2. Increase traffic by 50% (6,400–>9,000)
3. Hit 1,000 email subscribers (from 746 )
Then I had Actions/Tasks for each goal:
Action/Tasks for Progress Goal #1: Create separate tracking ide for each money page and A/B test the pages
I’ve have separate tracking IDs, but no split testing yet.
Action/Tasks for Progress Goal #2:
- Publish 2 keyword researched articles a week
- Create Pinterest plan of action.
Probably the biggest results have come from publishing 2 posts a week. I’m a huge SEO geek so I’m focusing on lower competitive keywords in my niche that are also “money” keywords.
I don’t understand Pinterest so I’m lagging in that area so far 
Action/Tasks for Progress Goal #3: Create email follow up sequence (haven’t done yet)
2. Create content upgrades on popular posts.
I’ve not done much here. The most that I’ve done with this has been to setup the RSS email that goes out to them when a blog post goes live.
I’m using the Self Journal that takes you through the whole process for this and it’s been very helpful for me.
I also like using this site as a way to keep me accountable and to share what I learn. If you have something you’d like me to cover, just let me know and thanks for reading 🙂
Leave a Reply