Started an IT career and even won an award from Amazon!

(Previous stories↓)

By the time my children were able to go to and from school on their own, I started wanting to begin some kind of work.

Thinking, "If I'm going to do it, I want to do work I enjoy," I decided to start working in the IT field.

At first, I mostly had short-term contract jobs lasting three to five months. Wanting to work more seriously, I looked for a place where I could work while studying.

After researching various options, I found a freelance job explaining and promoting software.

It was software that allowed you to send emails and create and print postcards or calendars using your favorite photos. My job was to give demonstrations saying, "It's this easy to use," and to conduct surveys.

I was also told by that company, "We want to renew our site, so study SEO." I studied SEO and became involved in the site renewal project. I live in Tokyo, but since other project members lived in different regions, we held meetings using Skype, which had just appeared at the time.

When I was told to "study affiliate marketing," I even went to Amazon's Japanese subsidiary to hear an explanation.

As a result of my studies, I wanted to conduct a practical experiment. I thought affiliate marketing was perfect in terms of attracting customers through SEO and actually getting conversions from the site. I was initially building sites with HTML, but at one point I bought software called Homepage Builder. I thought it would be easy to use, but the layout would break and not turn out as I wanted, and the source code wasn't very clean either.

Thinking, "This won't do," I studied Movable Type, which was starting to become popular at the time, and built a site for Amazon affiliate marketing.

Even though I was doing affiliate marketing exactly as written in books, I couldn't find the reason why I wasn't getting results, even after searching online.

So, I bought an information product, and since it came with a free consultation bonus, I decided to apply for it.

When I showed it to a super affiliate marketer and asked, "Why aren't I getting results with this?" they said, "Wow, this is no good."

I had been posting affiliate links for all sorts of daily goods like soap and aroma oils on my blog, thinking, "If I just stick them on there, they'll sell." I decided to rebuild my blog according to the super affiliate marketer's advice.

Wouldn't it be boring to just post links? Since I'm a geek, I'm good at catching information on what's trending. At that time, I thought character bento (charaben) were interesting.

I couldn't make character bento every day, but I was particular about bento boxes. Thinking, "There might be other people who are just as particular," I created a blog introducing bento boxes along with photos of character bento.

There are things like Tomica bento boxes, belts to hold the bento boxes, and bento bags. I also created an article that only collected wooden bento boxes.

There was a call for entries for an Amazon affiliate award, so I applied with this blog, and to my surprise, I won! I think it was probably because it matched the perspective of Amazon at the time.

(Continue here↓)

(List of all stories↓)

Inquiries for Satoko Masaki