I Make $1M/Year With One Website

this is Alex and he makes over a million dollars a year with a business model that nobody's talking about anymore a affiliate marketing he invited us into his house in California to show us his exact websites and how he built them on just a few hours a day while working a full-time job yeah the aha moment for me in terms of unlocking my side hustling and and my ability to build a business was but Alex's website made $0 for months until one day he covered something about the Google algorithm that changed everything if you're building a business that relies on SEO you want to go after in this video we'll dive into how to build a business while you have a full-time job niches that make $100,000 a month and the secret strategy that Alex used to grow to a million dollars a year the smart kind of innovative moment for us was the idea of just directly I'm Pat walls and this is starter story well Alex nice to meet you thank you for having me in your lovely home yeah tell me about who you are and what you built I'm Alex I am the founder of fin versus.com it's a popular product review site that helps visitors on the web compare different health and wellness options it's now a seven fig Revenue business started the business as a side hustle in 2018 and and never looked back yeah what is the actual business model how does it work we drive Shoppers to Brands I make Partnerships with those Brands and every time somebody buys something referred from our site on one of those partner sites we make a a commission of some kind yeah so you're essentially a middleman between Shoppers and these Brands that's right y totally so you started Finn versus Finn while you had a full-time job can you tell me that story both of my parents were entrepreneurs I kind of knew from day one that that was always my dream my idea right out of college was hey why don't I go work with some early stage Founders and eventually have an idea and meet meet enough people and build enough skills to to be successful as an entrepreneur but what I found in my life as a marketer at early stage companies is that it's not a 90 to five it's it's really that you're sort of having a Founder mentality in order to be successful a big aha moment for me was this idea that hey I I need a true 9 to5 I need to be able to close my work laptop at 5 so that I can side hustle and and and you know find a path for my own entrepreneurship really the key to that was working at a larger company now you got this more chill work life balance tell me how you get the idea for Finn versus Finn and what does the journey look like from there I was working at a fin tech company at the time the first iteration of a of a product review product comparison site was just that stupid like fintech fin versus Fin and so we were going to compare fintech companies quickly saw $100 million series A's Venture funding going to a wide range of tele medicine companies and thinking huh there's there's no content online about that and that's a pretty considered purchase you know if you're going to buy a medical product how are you going to make that decision by yourself how do I know which one to go trust so it's sort of like scratching our own itch there in terms of what kind of content to write but yeah I wrote the first 60 articles myself I didn't hire anyone learning WordPress at the same time that's where the the site is was built typically in the beginning we would drive traffic through organic SEO kind of anticipating the series of products or queries that Shoppers might be making online you know what are Shoppers searching for essentially is the first question and you can meet that Demand with content the the smart kind of innovative moment for us was the idea of just partnering with Brands directly I'd say it took us about 6 months before we saw a significant amount of organic traffic where I felt comfortable starting to reach out to the brands that we were driving traffic to and had enough confidence to say I'm pretty sure we're driving you sales I don't see those numbers on my end but there could be more um if if we work together it's a pretty compelling pitch and they name their price in terms of the customers that you're willing to drive so at this point uh the the numbers the revenue is starting to seem shockingly good unbelievable yeah when you when you first have that aha moment like this this could be a business and um imagine what could happen when you step on the gas yeah you're starting to make some money you're starting to balance do I still work my full-time job do I not what does that look like what does that Journey look like for you so at some point um you know maybe a full year in I felt like my income was being replaced it could be replaced at the same time I think there's a fear or there was a fear for me around is this legitimate and will this last and how foolish if you quit your day job and it doesn't really last for very long and and then where are you you know so I think at that point I just said okay one year we'll see and if the lights are still on in a year um then this is super fun and and I could see myself doing this full-time yeah how much were you making from Finn versus Finn at the time that you're working a full-time job I guess I didn't feel comfortable making that switch until my income was replaced so I was making 150k in salary so that's kind of my own personal earnings from the site when I felt comfortable making the switch Yeah my favorite part about Alex's story is that he didn't quit his full-time job until he was making $150,000 with this new side project and just like Alex I actually did this same thing I started a million-dollar business while I had a full-time job but it wasn't easy it required having the right idea in a solid execution plan in place if you're curious about doing something similar and you have a full-time job well we're running a free workshop on how to build a million-dollar business on Just 2 hours a day we'll talk about how to overcome self-doubt how to find a million-dollar business idea and exactly how to execute on that idea on Just 2 hours a day head to the first link in the description to save your seat we have just a limited number of spots see you there back to the video peace you guys really weren't making money for months can you tell me about the Breakthrough moment where you started to realize that this could be a business we identified the opportunity for health and wellness and that was like a a bullseye right we were amongst the first in the world to to review some of these tele health and tele medicine platforms which are now public and household names and and super common so I feel like you know in some sense that is the secret sauce figuring out a niche that is not super Crow cred you can't win in a crowded space when you're when you're young and and new and your site isn't authoritative on any level but you can win queries that nobody has ever written something for so generally if you're huning for ideas that meet that criteria I would say it has to be new and there has to be sort of high margin in that product category and there has to be kind of a lot of activity or momentum that will keep it going a space where no one has talked about those things but it has a lot of potential because it's tried and true at the end of the day it's not going to just be here and an end what does your keyword research process look like from starting to research the keywords and then writing the articles in the early days if you're going to if you're building an SEO a business that relies on SEO you want to go after low competition longtail keywords if you're in the audience that you're trying to serve you they might be just super intuitive to you there's query patterns as well that you start to recognize um that are high intent if you have the pattern it's just about fitting in the product or the brand or best this for that in the early days it was mostly focusing on the brands that we wanted to cover so okay this is a space we want to be in or maybe we've already written about and we have some Traction in okay so who are the players in that space who do we actually think is going to be here in 3 years and then strive to write the very best thing online about that brand sometimes that means going more in depth than the article that's number one on Google sometimes it means being more concise and and more to the point it's just what is the true intent behind the query that somebody typed in and how well does that piece of content that you're creating meet that intent that's how you wi be there first write the first thing online about it and write the best thing so everything's going great you're gaining traction you're building this business what happens next I decide to go full-time at the business after about 2 years my business partner who I started the business with didn't want to forego his career and sort of always wanted this to be a side hustle which at the time I very much respected it's where we started it was our agreement the solution to that really was me buying him out now on the second run I think I'll have more confidence to do it myself but I still very much value the contributions of a partner but I think I also would be just more choosy and and um more long-term oriented when I think about the skills that we each bring to the table Yeah tell me more a little bit more about what you'd be looking for in a partner you just want somebody who who who matches your intensity and shares your vision and hopefully also has some skills that are uh not just pure overlap with yours yeah if you were to meet someone a potential partner and you have some alignment on Vision The Next Step would be hey maybe we just see how we work together on some small projects feel it out and if it's right then Double Down double down and pretty soon you you will either see traction or need to formalize or both yeah Finn versus Finn is not your only uh website you built you decided to uh build actually a portfolio of affiliate marketing websites when did you decide to do that and what does that look like so we have about six sites in the portfolio total and they tend to focus on more Niche or more narrow Focus than just general health and wellness and all things tele medicine the reason I did that is because you have economies of scale when it comes to your Partnerships if you have one partner you can put them on five sites that was the idea there in terms of adding sites to the portfolio affiliate marketing might be one of the most competitive side hustles you can start in terms of anyone can start it how do you differentiate and how do you think about competition the expectation that you're going to be able to stay at top of Google forever I think is is wildly not true you're going to be competing with other people in your Niche other experts and authoritative websites as well as big Publishers that go after everything under the Sun so I think Forbes in Myspace health line but you can always serve your partners with net new content even as your past Money Maker content starts to erode as as your rankings start to erode stale content at the end of the day will will not win on Google so it needs to be fresh and it needs to be within your area of expertise that from Google's perspective not going too far outside of your lane topical Authority or kind of Niche what I think is really cool about your business is that you're not just doing organic search you actually have dabbled a bit in paid advertising can you tell me about that trying to diversify the the traffic is definitely something that every online entrepreneur should be thinking about realizing that you could go to your partners and say hey I know you want more growth I have an idea for more growth it's outside of the realm of what we normally do and it will cost you know a test spend of a few a few thousand do something like that and it very well may fail and fall on its face but we will be stronger and we'll have learn something for it and the upside is is that if it works it's extremely scalable it's actually scalable to the moon and [Music] pushed out further cuzz no one else is going to do that work running an affiliate business what does the team look like and what were some of like the first hires you made or some of the big hires you made for the business the first thing that we outsourced was writing after that was hiring a virtual assistant to sort of um take on a lot of the publishing tasks from there one of the biggest decisions was hiring an editor full-time taking the editing off my plate and then additionally we've added a designer to the team and a web developer that gives me enough space to just really focus on the part parterships which is where I feel my interest is as well as the ability to have the most leverage from from a revenue perspective what is a typical day in a life look like for an affiliate marketer in 2024 so I really start my work day probably around um 8:30 or 9 maybe I might have a weekly meeting um with some of my team members sort of set the agenda for for the week I likely have a few meetings on my calendar with with Brands themselves um to discuss how we're continuing to expand their partnership and and the the customers that we're driving to them I likely you know stop for lunch and and you know head out out of my little dark office in my H in my home hop back on my computer to either review content tweak some ad campaigns of some kind you know we do have a paid media strategy it's a big part of the business I typically stop working around 4 which is when our our the help for my son leaves and I don't do a lot of of work on the weekends anymore but I do have a nice window after sort of evening family time when I after I put my son to sleep where I I can have a few interrupted hours to respond to emails and make sure that folks on my team who are distributed across the world have their next steps for the next day essentially yeah you built this awesome business what's next I'm actually uh working on selling the business and finding it a new home so I think it's important to understand your purpose for the business is it just about the lifestyle and you actually don't care about how much money you make is it something that I see myself working in or yourself working in for the remainder of your life or is it something that you know has a short period of time that you want to be running it but you ultimately want to have an exit so thinking through those and and then um which corporate structure which functions you take on yourself and what you Outsource I think is are key considerations yeah if you could stand on Alex's shoulder and give him some advice on some of those things what would you say one of the key things that I've learned in this process is you can try and engineer the outcome as much as possible from the gecko but the reality of the situation is that you can't see around very many corners and you're going to have to Pivot a bunch so my key piece of advice to anyone who wants to own a business one day and start it and be the entrepreneur is to just get started um because where you start is not going to be where you end by by any means just pick a broad-based audience and start trying to figure out what their problems are and how you can help them but it doesn't need to be more engineered than that you don't need to be thinking about this being um a business that's going to be multi-generational or IPO or it doesn't even have to be business necessarily that you're hoping to sell one day it's important just to get started and figure out the pieces once you have a bit of momentum thank you man yeah follow this advice and you will be a million dollar affiliate marketer peace that was great

Channel: Starter Story

Views: 295,282

Keywords: starterstory, starters story, starter story, starter stories, starter story ideas, alex goldberg, affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing business ideas, $1M affiliate marketing business, how to make money with affiliate marketing, make millions with one website, $1M one website

Id: 7LZ0MTkNr34

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024