Years ago, I started a blog, got traction and made affiliate sales, but I didn’t realize until it was far too late.

This is a lesson in why you must setup automatic feedback loops with notifications, and also to auto-renew your domains!

Background

In my freshman year of college, back around 2008, I got big into online marketing and into fitness.

I had gained ‘the freshman 15’ and then some, so I was getting back into the gym. I also badly needed a source of income. I was a broke college student.

Thus, I decided I would combine my interests of online marketing & fitness into an blog for college students interested in weight-loss and fitness.

The Energy of Starting Something New

I got a domain. It would be named: StudentFitness.org (note: I don’t own it currently, I don’t know who does).

I wrote articles furiously. Doing an article a day at times.

I would write about things I was wondering, things my friends were talking about, things I read online. What I didn’t know I would research, and then document my findings in my articles. Sometimes it was things I was learning myself during my fitness journey.

After some time, the blog was filling up and beginning to become a useful resource for other students.

Time to Monetize

I did my research into monetization and ended up being a big fan of an ebook out at the time called ‘Burn The Fat’ which had an affiliate program. I signed up and became an affiliate. I actually exchanged emails with the creator, Tom Venuto, a couple of times.

I implemented the affiliate program, and tried to monetize. I made and utilized various banners, and mentioned the ebook in links in articles when appropriate, etc.

Things Slow Down

Life became busy for me. I was less focused on the gym, and I was unhappy with the college I was at. I was looking into transferring to a school with an Entrepreneurship program.

I kept writing from time to time, but my articles became less common.

I just couldn’t must the interest or motivation to keep working hard on the articles. I had other business ventures at the time, some of my time and attention shifted to them. Also, a big part was I didn’t get engagement from my audience, and I hadn’t gotten any sales through any of my monetization efforts.

What was one-a-day articles, turned into 2-a-week. Then I stopped writing entirely for the blog.

I recruited a couple of writers who were interested in writing for the blog. They helped a little bit with adding more content.

I transferred schools. I focused on other things.

Catastrophe

One day I check my website, and It’s not going to my site anymore. Somehow, I had lost the domain. I had failed to auto-renew (That’s the FIRST time I learned to always auto-renew).

The domain got swooped in on by some kind of Chinese spammer. They just gobbled up whatever organic traffic I had established with some garbage spam.

It was demoralizing, but I moved on.

I told the story during my early job interviews, and I think it helped, people could understand that I’m a scrappy entrepreneurial guy.

Ghost Affiliate Sales

The worst part of this whole story didn’t come till a few years had passed.

I was working on a new project and wanted to investigate affiliate marketing options, so I hopped back into the very well-known and popular affiliate platform many still use today — and to my shock and amazement, there in the records of my account activity I could see that I actually had made MULTIPLE affiliate sales.

I had earned close to $50 worth of affiliate commissions.

However, I had not hit exactly the $50 threshold. No check was ever sent out.

From what I recall, they also had some kind of nasty bank-like fee system where your total earnings gets slowly eaten up if you don’t take it out. So literally, they had taken the full account value as well. There was nothing to build on or claim. I had both earned, and lost, the money.

Broken Feedback Loops Kill Projects

Somehow, I had never gotten that feedback that I had made sales. Something went terribly wrong and I never found out, until years later, that this blog business of mine was actually starting to be productive. I would’ve thought there would’ve been emails, but I never saw them. I should’ve been checking on the affiliate platform more often but I just lost track.

Maybe if I had known about these sales at the time it would have motivated me and rejuvenated my energy. Maybe I wouldn’t have slowed down writing. Maybe I would’ve been more attentive to my domain name renewals.

Alot of maybes.

From this episode I learned that it’s critically important to set up tracking, and notifications, and to try to continually ‘take the pulse’ of whatever you are working on. Don’t end up like I did, flying blind, with no idea how close you were to where you wanted to be.

Set up tracking, set up analytics, set up notifications. Create feedback loops early and often.