My journey to make $5,000 per month online

Yes that’s right, in September 2018 I set myself a target of making $5,000 per month online.

I’d hear people regularly make the claim that it could be done, but I was always skeptical. Well, maybe I should test it?

However, after starting the training at Wealthy Affiliate, and reading a lot of stories from there documenting how people have done it already, I rapidly began to realise that my target wasn’t at all unrealistic. It was quite possible, because ordinary people just like me had done it. All I had to do was to get started right?

These were normal people, all over the World, fulfilling their dreams of quitting their jobs (not recommending that) and having more of their life to do what they wanted. They decided to repurpose their lives, either because they’d left their jobs (or their jobs had left them) and had grabbed the opportunity to learn something new.

What I did realise was that it ain’t gonna be just a pleasure cruise, but a lot of hard work is going to be needed to get to that golden $5,000 mark. I’m under no illusions about that, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I realise that building a good business online is not a get-rich-quick exercise. Dedication and long term effort are required.

As I said, I signed up for the Wealthy Affiliate platform on September 14th 2018. I didn’t really know what it was, but took the plunge anyway. I started the training there, some of which I found very easy as it involved WordPress, and I was already creating my own websites, so I breezed through that bit of the instruction without too much of a hitch.

The great thing is that, for people who know absolutely nothing about finding a profitable niche, building websites, structuring them and adding keywords to allow Google and the search engines to find the damn thing, the Wealthy Affiliate training handles it all.

You’ll be an internet sensation in no time (well, maybe a few months).

The basic Wealthy Affiliate training only took me a month

It took me almost exactly a month to finish the basic Wealthy Affiliate training. This earned me a little badge for my trouble on the platform. You can still see it on my profile there. This is awarded to basically pat me on the head to say ‘well done Dave’, but it’s also for the other members of the Wealthy Affiliate community to see what progress I’ve made.

There was lots of encouragement right at the start, which was exactly what I needed.

I’d cut my teeth on my first Wealthy Affiliate powered website.

The Wealthy Affiliate program lets you have a couple of free websites to start with, hosted for  free, but with their own suffixed web address. This is obviously ok to start off any practice with, but any permanent website would need a more professional url. I quickly realised I needed to buy a domain name to make things look more professional, but found out I could do all that at Wealthy Affiliate too.

They host the site and I also got a free SSL layer thrown in for the membership price (hosting and SSL are normally add ons for webmasters costs). SSL is the security system that encrypts traffic on the site and makes it secure. This allows you to use the https:// prefix in the url, and displays a little padlock in your browser.

The only other place i’ve seen that gives free SSL is BlueHost as part of their web hosting package.

I started to invite comments for my posts from within the Wealthy Affiliate community, and I soon built up good gravitas on my posts.

Google looks favourably on websites that have engagement, so that was a plus for me. This was it, I was on my way!

October 2018 brought the first Wealthy Affiliate Income.

I was less than a month in when I got an email from Wealthy Affiliate telling me I’d made my first commission within the system. I’d set up a LinkedIn account, a Twitter account and a page at Facebook to help drag traffic into my blog, and it seemed to work.

I’ll say it again – I’d made my first income!

Excited, I logged in and found that someone had signed up for a Wealthy Affiliate Premium account through a link of mine and I was now $8 richer. Only $4,992 to go. 🙂

Before the end of November 2018, that first person had upgraded their membership to Annual Premium. I had another $175 in my account. I was beginning to think that my target wasn’t so silly after all!

I continued to train within Wealthy Affiliate and I was learning new tools and techniques every day. Black Friday was coming up in November 2018. I had to prepare myself for that.

Another fellow entrepreneur signed up, another $8 hit my account. I started to promote Black Friday furiously on social media, then three days later on Cyber Monday I had another membership taker. I had a further $130.

Here is a screenshot of my earnings at 26th November

The train was starting to roll. I had also now started Bootcamp training (only available in full to Wealthy Affiliate Premium Members) and I realised I was making mistakes in the way I was implementing affiliate links and how I should have been funnelling everything through one page on my website.

This was to stop Google getting upset, so I set about creating internal links in my website, all pointing at my Wealthy Affiliate Review Page and then sending them onto my Wealthy Affiliate link that way.

On the last day of November 2018, I had $321 to my name from Wealthy Affiliate commissions. I also made a small Amazon commission from one of my other sites ($18) for a weather station I sold.

Also, I sold four training courses at Udemy as an affiliate of theirs for $5.99 in dues. That’s pretty good going, approaching $350 in a couple of months since the start.

I’ll keep you all posted of my progress (stay tuned for this in future posts). It’s going to be an interesting ride. Anyone want to come along with me?

Latest posts by Dave (see all)
(Visited 44 times, 1 visits today)

Leave a comment