In this article I am letting Owain from TheGenealogyGuide.com take the floor and talk us through his journey through his first 9 months or so with Wealthy Affiliate. By using the training course at WA, Owain, was able to create a brand new blog from scratch and chase his passion.

After a lot of hard work and determination he is finally seeing positive results and is in a position where making money from his blog is becoming a reality!

Let’s hand it over to Owain!

Hi, my name is Owain, a husband to a wonderful wife and father to two beautiful little girls. A family man in his late 30s working a full time job but wanting to make my dream a reality.

I want to tell you why I joined Wealthy Affiliate and what has happened since making this important decision in my life.

My goal when I joined WA was to become self employed. I didn’t want to work for anyone else, I wanted to work for me. I knew though that this would take time and a lot of effort on my behalf. I am smart enough to know that you don’t get anything for free in this world, you have to work for it.

Getting advice from WA I decided to turn my passion of genealogy/family history into my niche. My website gives beginners, as well as seasoned genealogists, guides and tips to help them trace their ancestry. Besides that I review products and services that will help people with their research.

My end goal when joining WA was to make my niche website my full-time job, although I knew that this would mean hard work. I do hope that in time I can make my site even more profitable for me. But I do not want to get ahead of myself.

Initial Challenge

The first week when I joined WA I was learning the first part of the course for beginners. I knew a little bit about creating websites before I joined so it was easy for me to understand and to set up my website. I really wanted to make a go of this so I decided to join WA before my trial period ended, (and not be a free member).

I went through the course steadily. It did take some time though towards the end of the course due to work and family commitments. But whose life isn’t like that hey? At times I was unhappy that I wasn’t flying through the course. In the end I thought to myself well it will just take longer than I expected that’s all.

It didn’t take too long to get to grips with WordPress if I am honest. It was new to me of course but it is a pretty intuitive and easy interface to learn. Besides that I watched the video where Kyle explains all the features of WordPress anyway.

My real daunting task was writing my posts. Sure I am pretty good at English, but writing from the heart was something new to me. As I developed my style I became more personal with my posts. That is what Kyle has taught me and what I have learned to do.

As I learned more from the course and by writing my posts I went back to earlier posts to improve on them. To make them more readable and appealing. I wanted my site to have a consistent feel and appearance to it. So this did take a lot of my time away from writing new posts.

I felt though writing new posts easier to do over time. But it did depend though on whether I needed to research a little on a topic that I was writing.

6 Months Later

You can imagine how I felt when I was putting in all this hard work only for 20 to 30 people to visit my site each day. I had requested comments on my posts and built up a social following for my site but nothing much was happening for me. I had worked hard to get to where I was by now.

But I thought to myself I have only just started. Who is going to visit a site that has barely gotten off the ground? Google doesn’t quite trust me yet. I had by this stage written between 60 to 70 posts by now. Half of these were guides and the other were product reviews. So I knew I needed to write more to become a profitable site.

I knew that more posts meant more visitors and more sales.

Sure I could have gotten more visitors by this stage if I had posted every day. But that was not possible for me as I have already said. And this is the same for many others I can imagine who have joined WA.

Times when I did feel down I thought to myself why am I doing this? What are my goals? Thinking about them helped me to push on with my site.

Sometimes I would get the odd payment here and there. But when I didn’t I felt down. At those times I just concentrated on learning about my niche and writing informative post.

I would become pleased how my posts appeared and knew that they would be helpful to somebody. And that helped me through the tough times.

Hard Work Pays Off

As my site became older and my site trust increased I experienced a rise in visitors. Initially this climbed to between 60 to 80 hits a day. But lately it has been getting 100+ hits, one day even past 200. Google is starting to trust me and my site.

I know that I have a long way to go, but looking back at my site I can see just how far it has come. It surprises me how much nearly 9 months of hard work I have done and where I am now. It only seems like yesterday that I first started on my website.

I see regular clicks coming through on Amazon, rarely do I get days where I do not get clicks. The sales though are far and few between at the moment, but I know that as my site visitors increase then it is only a matter of time before I get consistent sales. I will just keeping on writing more lengthy and informative posts.

My other revenue streams are performing the same as well. Getting sales now and again is inspiring to me that I am on the right path. I just need to keep doing what I am doing.

Conclusion

When it comes to it I am not a quitter. I know that it will come in time. I am not going to quit on my dream. I like to see things through and I have worked so hard for this that I don’t want to see all this time wasted.

I have worked so hard on learning about affiliate marketing, building a website, getting comments and a following. I know that I do have a long way to go but I have come so far.

I just look to the future and imagine what my life will be like when I am working on this full time.

Owain Couch

thegenealogyguide.com