An Interview With Meggy Harley

Today I've got another Interview/Testimonial for you. Meghan Harley has been involved in the Internet Marketing business for about 2 years, running a couple of websites. She had a pretty good 2013, and plans to fully replace her offline income within the next couple of years.

For those of you wondering what sort of things you could achieve, and wondering if this is something anyone can do, you'll likely find some insight in this post.

Meggy is a 51 year old teacher in a busy high school, but still manages to grow her online business in her free time. It's never too late for anybody to get started online.

Tell me a little bit about your path to Internet Marketing. How did you hear about it, what made you interested in it, and how did you get started?

A. I want and need to work from home – I think I read an article on affiliate marketing and went looking online to find out more. Having the site building and graphic skills I grossly underestimated the extra skills I’d need, but it did give me the confidence to give it a go. I bought Pot Pie Girls One Week Marketing which gave me the basics of this, then I found Wealthy Affiliate.

What excited you the most? What scared you the most?

A. The potential excited me and does so even more now I've banked a few cheques! What scared me was the potential to spend or lose money very fast on scams.

What did you struggle with the most?

A. Keyword research and understanding how to find low competition markets I could get a toe into, then to be honest fitting all the bits together – writing that converts, social icons that actually work, which plugins to use, just fitting all the bits together to make it function. Possibly the biggest challenge is not knowing whether what you've done is okay or not, sometimes for weeks.

You must have had some challenges working a hectic full-time job that takes up a lot of time and causes stress, all while working on your IM business in your spare time, how did you cope?

A. More how do I cope! I get up at 4.00am and work on IM till 6.00am then take the dog out etc, get ready and go to school. I run a computer coding club at lunchtime every day but get chance to do reports and marking once I’ve got them going, basically I try to clear all teaching commitments when I’m there and work on IM at home – too tired in the evenings usually.

You need a big level of determination to make this work – I really decided almost a year ago to the day that I was going to make it work, no pay rise for 5 years, pension increased contributions with a lower pay-out and several classes of 38 kids this year gave me the kick I needed to knuckle down.

2 years later, you've obviously achieved a good level of success. What’s been the most successful and rewarding part of your journey?

A. Earning the first $100 – just an awesome bubbly feeling. And second being able to pay for one day a week from IM earnings – I now take Wednesdays off and work on my business, do the creative stuff with a clear head.

Tell me a little bit about your site(s)? What are you working on right now?

A. CSS! No seriously, Studiopress takes a bit of tweaking as I’m sure you know.

I currently have the one profitable site which is intended to be an authority site on kitchen accessories. Because page rank is so sensitive to bounce rate I’m not going to reveal the domain name and newbie Internet marketers should keep that in mind with their own sites – be careful.

I also have a skin care site I started about two years ago when I knew nothing – only had about 20 posts and got no traffic! Having rushed in and failed, I’ve gone back and had another look at keyword and market potential – it’s there, so I’ve revamped the site, added posts and will just keep posting and see what happens. Time is very tight and it may not be possible to do much with a second site until I can do this full time – it really is better to focus on one until you’ve got it working for you.

What I’m aiming to do is work on the gadgets site intensively until it is making close to enough to replace my salary, then I’ll quit – the goal is this summer 2014 so watch this space.

How long did it take you to start earning something online? Could you have done it faster? (How?)

The gadgets site went up on May 8th 2013 and earned $7 at the end of June, since then as posts have been added, traffic and sales have gradually grown and it made a little over $1000 in December which has dropped right back now Christmas is done. A lot of the products are seasonal so posts with more evergreen products which sell all year round is what’s needed now.

I couldn’t have got this site going faster. I could have been successful way faster by being full on – you can’t do this with one foot in the water, you have to jump in and take action, lots of action.

How much of your success is down to having a community to lean on and clear training and paths to follow?

I would still be waiting to make my first dollar without Wealthy Affiliate membership and that’s the plain truth of it. Because computers are my specialism is computing and software, I cherry picked the training, focusing on keywords and SEO. The training is second to none as are the weekly Wabinars with Jay, they’ve really helped hugely – the Q&A sessions mean you get help one to one with a very successful marketer – who is very funny too.

Having the community to help out if you are stuck , is magic. IM is a lonely world and WA is a contact network of like minded people. It also helps as you progress, there’s always someone who knows the answer, someone who’ll take a look at your site and critique it. You also get a great feeling being able to help other as they start their journey.

The funny thing is a lot of people are like me, very wary, and I’ve seen plenty of posts claiming WA doesn’t work. In fact if you follow the training you will succeed, I can only imagine those who don’t make progress are basically too lazy to work at it.

If you could change anything you did before to make things work more smoothly, what would they be?

Just do it – all the training in the world won’t get you anywhere unless you take action and accept that for a year, this is going to be hard graft. Watching T.V? Not if you want to do this full time and you still have a job you don’t! I’ve given up just about everything hobby wise to get this started, and it is paying off.

What are your long term goals, and what are you looking forward to?

To go full time working from home this summer so I can stop getting up at 4.00am!

I’m looking forward to not having to drag out with my dog at 6.00am in January in a driving icy cold rain storm and being able to work all night if I want and sleep when I want, just freedom to choose I guess. Money isn’t my driver other than to have enough.