It’s been a few months since I started this blog. I haven’t been able to do weekly updates, unfortunately. However, after observing the traffic to my first few posts and the reactions to my affiliate program requests, I do have a few lessons learned:

• Search engines take a relatively long time to find a new site. In this particular case, it took a few weeks before all the popular search engines had found the 7 Holiday Gifts post.
• You need some kind of funnel to drive traffic to your site. Just waiting for the search engines to find you takes too long (see previous bullet). Next we will try other platforms such as Pinterest or Instagram to drive traffic to both this site and affiliate links.
• Not all potential affiliate partners will let you simply sign up for their program. Some are more reluctant or picky than others. In our case, we were able to join 2/7 of the programs we registered for.

For now the first few conclusions seem to be that if you want to do affiliate marketing, you need to attract people with a clear value proposition. Furthermore, you need to do it from a platform that people are likely to find you on.

I guess all that makes sense to me. So one of the next things I’ll probably try out is creating a few pins on Pinterest that showcase a few products and send readers to the seller. Maybe I’ll even create a few Instagram reels. I’m sure that will be fun.