Yesterday we received an email from a reader asking what we considered to be the main factor for the success we now have today. I initially had trouble answering this question because there was no one main factor…there were actually quite a number of them and each factor helped move us to the next level.

I often think back to the early days and wonder how much quicker we would have made it if we had done things differently, but you can’t dwell on the past…you can only learn from it. And believe me everything we have done has been a learning experience…you might even call it an apprenticeship of sorts, although we were probably the longest serving apprentices in existence. It took us around 5 years to start seeing some real success. But just what does the word ‘success’ actually mean in this business? Well, mostly it relates to money which is understandable but it’s all relative really as one person may see success as making $100 a day and another won’t feel successful until they are making $1000 or more a day.

Either way, I’d like to think we have been successful at this…we worked hard to get here, probably harder than we needed to in retrospect but as I said, you can’t dwell on the past. We know that even our mistakes have helped us get to where we are today so it has all been worthwhile.  And though we have had our fair share of ups and downs, at no point do I ever remember either of us saying that it was time to give up. We might have focused on other things for a while like our online wholesale jewellery business (which we have now closed) or our main 9 to 5 jobs but we always came back to this business because we knew that we wanted the lifestyle that it could give us.

And man, is this one fantastic lifestyle. Just imagine going to sleep and waking up to find you have made a few hundred dollars overnight. Or doing a meditation and when you get back to your computer you see that you have made an affiliate sale…or going to see your child perform in a play at school and checking your phone to see that a couple of sales have come through while you have been sitting watching.

Please don’t look at this post as if I am gloating here…I still have to pinch myself on occasion to make sure this is real. What I am trying to do is impress upon you that everything you are doing to move upward in your business is soooo worth the effort although you may not think so now particularly if you are still struggling to get there. If you want the freedom that this business can give you then you have to do the work.

Okay, I can see I am getting sidetracked yet again, so I will get back to the original question which was ‘what was the main factor in our success?’

As I said there wasn’t just one so I have put together the main ones below. Without each one of these I doubt we would be where we are today.

1. Never giving up – I mentioned this briefly above but I think it was obviously a critical one because if at any point we had decided to give up, it would have meant that we would both be still back at our regular jobs. Not that there was anything wrong with those jobs. As 9 to 5 jobs go, they were a pretty good organization to work for, the people were great and we both had highly paid jobs, but both of us just wanted more freedom. We didn’t want to continue having to get up at 6am everyday and trudge off to work for someone else, or to have to work around work schedules  and other peoples time tables before we could take days off to travel. We knew there was something better and keeping that uppermost in our minds made us determined to succeed.
2. Changing to Amazon links – I am pretty certain that if we had continued linking to other merchants and not changed to Amazon that we wouldn’t be making a quarter of what we make now. Linking to Amazon products was a real turning point for us.
3. Writing better quality reviews – We’ve mentioned this numerous times on our blog but when we moved over to writing better quality reviews our conversion rates soared.  We have written hundreds if not thousands of reviews over time and most are short 300 word articles. One day we decided to change one of those reviews to a lengthy well written review of over 1000 words and the results were phenomenal. We are still reworking the older poor quality reviews to this day.
4. Focusing on one site instead of many – This one was absolutely critical. When we were working on all of our sites at once we had no time in the day and nothing really worked. We were spreading ourselves too thin, and we weren’t enjoying what we were doing. When we finally started focusing on only one website things started to happen. It was actually quite hard to leave the other websites alone (Wanda still tends to tinker with them if I don’t keep an eye on her) but we did our best to just focus on the one and it made a massive difference.
5. Guest articles – Another critical factor was our method of backlinking. We  were originally  told about this method by James Martell and it is to this day our main method of backlinking. Why?…because the backlinks that you get using this method are super strong and much better than any other type of backlinking method we have tried and believe me we have tried a lot of them. It basically involves submitting articles (containing links back to your website) to other websites and we don’t mean article directories.
6. Reading and listening to self improvement information – This one may not be for everyone but I do believe that this made a major difference to our success. We spend at least an hour a day of our working time listening to people like Harv Eker, Bob Proctor, Paul Scheele,  Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins and so on. What they do is give us a bit of motivational boost for the beginning of the day. They have also changed our mindsets for the better so that we are focusing on more positive aspects of our lives and our business.