About 3 years ago, when I was going through extreme financial difficulties, l heard about making money through blogging via affiliate marketing. It seemed to me to be a win-win situation since I’ve always had a passion for writing.
So I took a course and got set up with blue host and word press. I followed all the instructions and every thing was set up through a large popular company to begin affiliate marketing. I set my blog up to get many clicks. No results. Time lapsed and there were no conversions, not a single one. So I tried again but had to use a different email to be eligible. This time I had my daughter-in law click through an ad in my blog, who was a frequent shopper with this company. This was a test to see if there was something wrong. Still no conversions. (A conversion is when someone clicks on an ad in your blog which results in you getting a certain percentage of anything they buy.)
I tried asking for assistance as to why my conversions weren’t happening. I had learned different things throughout the course, such as using plugs ins. I had the recommended plug ins but I was never told how to put them to use. I observed that through out the course and/or asking for assistance from others, I was always told what to do but not how to do it. I would attempt to follow instructions laid out in videos, but would find it frustrating trying to apply the steps on my own sites, but would not see the same examples shown. My blue press would be different from their example, therefore, I was unable to find the place they wanted me to click on to complete the needed task. After months of discouragement, I gave up.
My financial woes increased. The house that we rented an apartment in, that we had rented for 7 years, went up for sale and we had to move in order for it to be sold. We temporarily had to move in with family and as years past, we rented a room, trying to save to either rent or buy, in order to have our own place. In the meantime, I changed jobs and started earning more than double what I made before, assuming that now we would be able to afford our own place.
I was dead wrong. We live in the northeastern part of the U.S.A., in New England and the cost of living in this area is brutal. The area I was born into and raised in was no longer attainable for me to buy or rent in. The shocker was that I was making pretty good money but just not enough. My husband had worked hard all of his life but he wore his body out with hard manual labor. So now he was disabled and unfortunately the government would take away his SSI check every time I worked, forcing us to live on one check. I decided to plan our future with my income only, In case they decided to do the same thing again.
It seemed to take forever to save enough for a down payment on a home. If we rented, even with my increased income, our expenses would be too tight. It was evident that my income was not enough. I thought of the blogging again, still wondering what went wrong. I am a woman of prayer. When I am perplexed or not sure what to do, I take it to God. I looked over the past several years since we got dislocated and saw how deep of a rut we were in and how it took so much longer than anticipated to have our own place with no end in sight. In speaking with my pastor, it became even more evident that I needed to have supplemental income since I may be the sole income provider and to confirm it, my husband was told by the government that he was going to lose his check, again. My husband tried many times to go back to work but his medical conditions kept stopping him.
My pastor suggested a couple of people in our church whom may know how to help me figure out why I never received any conversions. One of them sent me a link, to hook up my blog site with Adsense, a company that sets you up to get conversions. I watched the video with instructions to set up my blog with Adsense. The second step stopped me cold. In filling out the application, I was to supply a code that I needed from the back side of my site, so they could know for certain that the site belonged to me. I couldn’t find a code anywhere. Had no clue how to get it. Again, the same problem of telling you what to do but not how to do it. I couldn’t seem to find the answer anywhere.
Then I spotted an advertisement about a 30 day blogging challenge that stated they would give us a small assignment daily for the next 30 days that would get my blog site up and running and would enable me to start bringing some income in. I figured I must have the beginning steps done because my site is up but it was really not running. Tech support from the challenge requested me to do two steps, one to have my blue host set up and a blog posted explaining what’s been going on to see if the challenge would be useful to me. That’s when I discovered I suddenly could not get on my bluehost site. I had to get assistance from tech support who couldn’t help me at the moment, which turned to several days later when the problem was finally fixed. With anticipation, I looked at the instructions for setting up my blue host that the challenge had, just to see if I hadn’t missed anything. Again, the video showed a blue host that didn’t look like mine, so I couldn’t find the button that they requested me to click on, permalink, which caused more frustration. It shouldn’t be this difficult. Many people write blogs and successfully make income from it. I should be able to as well.
In the meantime, another curveball was thrown at us. My vehicle started making clanging noises and started stalling out. To make a long story short, I got the bad news that the engine was going and it wasn’t worth fixing. So now I was going to need to buy another car. So needless to say, I definitely need to make some supplemental income and what better way than to do something I have a passion for. So now that everything is set to start the 30 day blog challenge, I will have a part 2 article to report on the results to see if I was able to get my blogs running. Stay tuned. I hope I will have good news to report.
Part 2.
It turns out after following instructions so I could get started on the 30 day blog challenge, it wasn’t working to get set up for it. It sounded like a good opportunity however, it is for people who are starting from scratch. I already had my bluehost and WordPress started. So it looked like another dead end for me.
A friend from church set me up with a digital marketing course through Udemy, which is an app that offers different courses. As I went through it, so far it didn’t seem to be of much use, until I came to the section on WordPress. It became an eye opener which I am going to share with you, so you do not lose precious time like I did or give up all together, like I almost did.
Apparently, there are two wordpress’. There is WordPress.com and WordPress.org. One allows you to monetize your blog site, the other one does not. I discovered I had the one that did not- WordPress.com. So all the efforts I’d done following instructions on plugging in the ads on my pages as an affiliate marketer were done in vain. All this time, even though I’d followed the instructions to a tee, I thought I’d done something wrong. Instead, I was on the wrong WordPress, not having any idea there were two of them. So, do yourself a favor and don’t make the same mistake I did, if you’re planning to start a blog site and want to monetize it. DO NOT set a blog site up on WordPress.com if you want to make money through it. Use WordPress.org. I lost 3 valuable years not knowing this.
So the next thing to do was to migrate everything on .com to .org.. When you don’t know something, a good source to check for the answer is YouTube. I checked out a handful of videos that instructed me on how to do this , chose the one that matched my needs and even though the instructions didn’t match to a tee, I was able to migrate my blogs to WordPress.org. The next step was to design it. I decided my best bet was to check out You Tube and learn more on how to use the .org site. It was very tedious and sometimes frustrating, but I kept in my head, “Don’t give up! Press on!” and when I got too overwhelmed, I prayed.
As I went along, I continued the digital marketing course on Udemy and kept learning more very useful tools. I highly recommend it to learn many additional helpful tools in using your site with Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter as well as using google analytics and more.
I am an Amazon affiliate marketer at no extra charge to you.