Waiting Really is the Hardest Part

One of the most difficult things about getting started with affiliate marketing is that the sledding is very slow and rough at first. If you’re completely starting from scratch (and not simply adding links to an existing site you have with traffic), you’ll very likely go months without any visible fruits from your labors. And even when the first fruits do appear, they are usually very, very tiny and far from ripe.

There are several reasons for that, but the most prominent is that it simply takes time for your site to be fully indexed in search engines, especially with Google. It’s frustrating, but it’s just the way things go. Most search engines are moving towards using a sandbox filter, first pioneered by Google, that takes into account how old your site is when indexing and ranking your pages. All that means is that there is usually a waiting period where you new site is treated differently and not fully indexed, even if it would normally rank highly for certain terms. When your site has been around for awhile, you get the green light and are indexed fully. In some ways this sucks, but in others it’s a good thing, as it’s purpose is to protect you in the long run from people spamming content on sites, automatically generating millions of pages overnight on new, throwaway domains and endlessly repeating the process.

This is one reason I recommend immediately jumping in and getting the ball rolling, even if your site isn’t polished and completely done. Get the main pages up, even if you know you will tweak the content, design, and layout later. It’s very natural to want your first baby to be perfect and beautiful when you reveal it to the outside world, but the reality is that no one is going to be looking at the beginning anyway, so it really doesn’t matter what it looks like.

If you stretch a bit, you can turn the waiting game to your advantage. Instead of getting impatient and expecting immediate results, try to see it as a savings or IRA account. Each page you create has the potential to earn you money for years. While you may not see any returns from that work in the short term, it will eventually kick in, and it will continue to work for you, long after you’ve created it.

Waiting Really is the Hardest Part and related information can be found in Getting Started, Search Engines