In November 2018, I was looking for some type of home-based business that my husband and I could get into. I was looking for a “Plan B.| He and I had started talking more and more about retirement and there is not much there to retire on. I stumbled on Wealthy Affiliate one night while browsing home-based businesses. Could this be the one?
I started looking more into Wealthy Affiliate. It was exciting that there was a site devoted to helping people learn everything they possibly could about affiliate marketing and how to build their own website.
Several years ago, probably 8 to 10 years now, I had a health website. I was really into learning all about health and fitness and had a lot of health-related articles on my site. I had a home-based business with Take Shape for Life and Juice Plus and I was posting on that website. Circumstances changed and I went to work with my husband as a paralegal. I didn’t have time to keep doing the research and writing for my website so I let it go. Fast forward a few years and I wish I had kept that website.
I started looking into Wealthy Affiliate more. I began with the “starter plan” and did some of the training. Within just a few minutes I was building my first website. I quickly signed up to become a premium member. Becoming a member of Wealthy Affiliate meant that I would have hundreds of training sessions at my fingertips, I could build multiple websites at my own pace, and have all the support from the community and from the Wealthy Affiliate team that I needed.
So I began to build my first website which was helpsandhints.com. I wanted to focus on doing product reviews for all the many gadgets I have and love. I haven’t developed that website fully because I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do. I just held onto it. I started building another website but it was going slow at first.
I became impatient and decided to look for websites that were already built and came across a turnkey website and quickly learned about bookbastions.com. That was my most expensive website to date. It was already fully built, but I could do nothing with it because of the format it was built on. Years ago I had had experience with cPanel but it had been so long I couldn’t remember how to format and work on that platform. I was more familiar with WordPress. I contacted the website administrator and ask her if they could move my site over to a WordPress site, which they did, for a price. Once that site was redesigned on the WordPress platform I was actually able to do some things.
Bookbastions.com became my experiment. When I purchased the website there were over 90 links. It was what they call a “bridge page.” While training with Wealthy Affiliate, I learned what a bridge page was. This is not what I wanted for my website so I began implementing changes to the site and have slowly turned it into more of what I wanted. Even though that website is fully not what I want yet, I still work on it every week.
In February 2019, I purchased the book website, and then I started building another website which was called nomagicbuttons.com. This was the website that I had designated as my blogging and affiliate marketing website but it quickly became something totally different. I stop posting to it as often, in fact, I think my last post to that site was in December 2019. I just couldn’t decide how to develop it because it had taken on such a different tone. I may eventually get back to posting to that site but for now I’m focusing on others such as my book website, my journaling website, my Disney website, and my blogging venture website.
In August 2019 I got this wild hair to get into dropshipping. I did several pieces of training, researched dropshipping online, and visited many websites about the topic. I spent hours on Pinterest and other sites trying to learn about dropshipping and started a website called fireweedgifts.com. That website may eventually become something and I’m holding onto it right now but who knows.
I spent the next few months trying to develop my book website and my Disney website. We had gone the Disney in October and then again in December so I had a lot of ideas. In fact, I have several posts already written and several typed up but have not had time to polish them and get them posted to my Disney website. We love Disney, we usually go once or twice a year so naturally having a Disney website made sense to me.
The one thing about having multiple websites is that whenever I have ideas it doesn’t have to be about one topic. I can think about my love for reading and the books that I have read and I come up with ideas for my book website. I come up with ideas about how to journal and how to get started and post to my journaling website. I think I started my journaling website in May 2020 so I have worked on it a little over the summer when I could.
Even though I had my book website, my journaling website, my Disney website, and some of the other websites I just wasn’t feeling like I had the website I wanted for blogging. I wanted a site that I could develop and talk about blogging and affiliate marketing. I wanted a website that I could share with people and teach them how to get started in blogging and affiliate marketing if they wanted to. So here it is —mybloggingventure.com.
The difficulty in having multiple websites and working a full-time job is just not having enough time to develop them the way that you want them. But I try and I’m having fun.
I’m hoping with this website that I can start sharing more blogging tips, talk about blogging tools, about building your website if that’s what you decide you want to do, and sharing my ideas and basically sharing some of my mistakes too. I mentioned in my last post that I will start moving some of my posts from my nomagicbuttons.com website. Those will be my blogging posts and posts about affiliate marketing. That originally was the site that I was developing for those topics but it just wasn’t sitting well with me. The name was catchy when I first thought of it but the more I learned about keywords and SEO it just wasn’t making me happy so I just kept thinking about a name for a website where I could share all my blogging tips and ideas.
I guess the real reason for this post is to kinda give you a little bit of background. So if you start reading some of my posts and in the first couple of posts you are wondering what is going on you’ll realize what I have tried to do.
Let’s Blog!
Pamela