Journey Progress Report – Day 15

It’s time for a quick update on the progress of my Healthy Online Marketer Journey I started on May 30th. 

I began the journey as a way to join my financial / business goals with my health / fitness goals by creating nine milestones along the path towards my ultimate goal of making $30,000 in 30 days from my online business and losing 25.0lbs of fat (or weighing 185lbs).

My first milestone in the journey is:

• Income of $10,000 in 30 days, plus 5.0 lbs of Fat Loss ( or weigh 205.0 lbs )

Weight Loss Goal

I’ll start off with my weight loss goal.  When I started this journey on May 30th, I weighed 210lbs with a body fat % of 26%.  I just weighed myself a minute ago and I’m now at 206.4lbs which means I’ve lost 3.6lbs.

So what have I been doing to promote my weight loss?  Well, to be honest the only real thing I’ve done different in the last 15 days has been walking my new puppy Zoe several times a day, and more regularly drinking my antioxidant juice (I won’t mention the name, contact me if you’re interested).  Besides that I’ve been eating my regular crappy diet which isn’t really healthy and includes foods like pizza, McDonald’s, Chinese food, sushi and of course I’ve been drinking Coke which is my biggest addiction.  Well, in reality the addiction I have is to white sugar, and Coke just happens to have plenty of it.

Considering I haven’t changed a thing and just increased the amount of walking I do per day, I’m quite pleasantly surprised that I actually lost 3.6lbs that easily.  I only need to lose another 1.4 lbs and I’ll hit my first weight milestone.

Income Goal

My income goal milestone hasn’t been coming along as well.  Firstly, shortly after announcing my first milestone I started to notice that some of my affiliate campaigns started to lose traffic.  It wasn’t much at first but slowly the traffic began to dwindle.  At first I thought it may be due to the lack of time I’ve devoted to my campaigns since I’ve been so busy housetraining Zoe, but that didn’t really make sense since I hadn’t changed anything to warrant the loss in traffic.

I went through my campaigns and adjusted some of my bids and tweaked some of the campaigns to see if I could bring my stats back up to the momentum I was having before and things started to look like they were starting to come back on track.

However, looking at my stats I also realized that I had to launch some more campaigns if I was to reach my ultimate goal of $30,000 in 30 days, so I worked on and launched some new campaigns in a new niche.

Then, yesterday morning I woke up to check on my new campaigns and I noticed that some of my older campaigns stopped getting traffic.  I wasn’t sure what was going on so I looked deeper and was horrified with what I saw.

The Dreaded Google Slap

After looking at my campaigns I realized that I’ve been Google slapped so hard my head was spinning.  Some of my best campaigns got hit really hard and basically went into cardiac arrest after Google’s slap.  I wanted to roll up in fetal position and cry.

But, there’s no point in crying about stuff like that.  Instead I began doing some extensive research on the Google slap and learned a lot about what Google likes and what they don’t like.  I then made a whole new plan for my campaigns and went to work on re-launching a totally new set of campaigns on different sites, with a much more long-term strategy in mind.

After reading up a bit on what the Google slap is all about and how Google’s quality score works, I feel a lot better about it and I think it’s actually very beneficial to the affiliate marketing industry as a whole.  It’s going to force affiliates to create much higher levels of content quality which I have no problem doing.  It will help those affiliates who are trying to provide value to the general public to make more money, and those that just want to slap together a quick page for a quick buck are going to be filtered out by the system.

Sadly, the slap has hit some of my most profitable campaigns so my 30 day income total has actually dropped instead of growing in the last 15 days.  I haven’t had time to account for my numbers yet, but I would venture a guess they are somewhere in the $5k-$6k range for the last 30 days.

What You Fear, You Draw Near

One of the reasons I have been hesitant to talk about my affiliate income and campaigns in the past is due to the fear that if I talk about my income online I may attract competitors or people who want to hurt my financial progress due to jealousy.  Most affiliate marketers out there at one point or another have said that if you find a way to make money online as an affiliate, you should shut the hell up and keep it a secret from other people.

One of my fears of even revealing that I’m making over $5k/m in affiliate marketing is that I may draw in people who try to copy my campaigns or cause problems for me such as complaining to Google about some of my pages etc., which could result in getting Google slapped or losing some of my traffic.  Well, within a couple of weeks of starting my journey, sure enough I attracted the exact event that I feared – losing traffic to competitors and getting Google slapped.  There’s law of attraction at it’s best for you.

The thing is though, that I really don’t care anymore.  I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hiding in the bushes, pretending I’m not doing well just so that other people don’t get jealous or just so that I don’t draw in any competition.

Running this Blog, and talking about affiliate marketing, sharing what I learn on my journey and even what I’m making as an affiliate will definitely create some challenges for me in the future I’m sure, but I think there are also benefits to it that will help to support my journey just as much.  It actually may have been an easier path to just keep quiet about everything, but I’ve never been much about taking the easier path.

I’m hoping that by sharing my journey with you guys, I may inspire some of you to pursue your dreams and the benefits of that far outweigh any challenges that I may encounter by sharing this journey.

Just for fun, I also just registered GooglSlap.com.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet.  Maybe I’ll create a fun little support group for those who have been kicked in the nuts GooglSlapped.

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