I Turned One Website Into $1M/Year

this guy makes over $1 million a year with one website and the crazy part is he built it while he was working at his 9 to-5 job until he got fired my boss found out about that and fired me I was like oh okay I'm going to put everything I have into making this work and then from there it just kept going up yeah yeah he invited us into his house in Colorado to show us exactly how we got started how he made his first dollar and the Timeless marketing strategy he uses to make over $100,000 a month it's the same exact thing I've been doing since day one it's just for the first few years of running his business Matt barely made any money then he cracked the code and created one product that would change his business forever the majority of like how we make money is through in this video Matt will share his Niche finding distribution and monetization blueprints he used to build a million-dollar business with just one skill I'm Pat walls and this is starter story thank you for having me man oh thanks for coming yeah I appreciate it tell me about who you are in the business that you built my name is Matt I run a a site called Swim university.com we teach people how to take care of their Pools and Hot Tubs via online education so we hit a Million last year in the business and then going forward we may do some changes so it may be fluctuating but my wife and I teamed up and then my brother is our editor is our video editor so it's my family business yeah nice and it's just just the three of us now yep let's break down your business a little bit more can you explain it to me in simple terms how it works simple terms we're a media company focused on education in pool care that's what we do we teach homeowners how to take care of their pool we do that through content so we have blog post a lot of it's through SEO a YouTube channel with about 225,000 subscribers a newsletter with 100,000 Pool owners that we send out two to three times a week depending on the season to make money from that we have advertising from YouTube through AdSense or whatever then we have the blog which makes money through affiliate marketing so we have affiliate links products that we recommend you know mostly Amazon then we have courses where we make a bulk of our money so we sell three different courses for pools one course for hot tub and last year we came out with a physical book and that's about it yeah can you tell me about your backstory and how how do you become an entrepreneur so I just had a job like every other kid had a summer job I stayed at that company for a while I got went to another Pool Company I went to another Pool Company I moved up in marketing and then in that moment I'm like okay so they're coming in I'm testing their water they're asking me for advice I'm handing them chemicals I'm like you need to buy this you need to buy this you need to buy this and here's the steps in which you need to add those things I thought I could do this at scale if I just wrote this as a blog post or or made a video about this and then say hey if you want to you know get rid of algae you want to clear up your pool or whatever here are the four products we recommend to do what I just told you to do but I know I'm not good at English I knew I knew I was like my grammar was terrible so I worked so hard to get good at it I was working at this company as a marketing director is a pool company I would go home I would work on the site at home my boss found out about that and fired me and so I was like oh okay I'm going to put everything I have into making this work and I made $20,000 that year on the site and I used the rest of that time to do website design to kind of supplement it the next year I made $40,000 and then I was like I have a real business and then from there I just kept going up yeah yeah just like Matt I also started a million-dollar business while I was working a 9 to-5 job I was fed up building things for other people and if I'm being honest I really wanted the freedom so I created a plan found an idea and executed on that idea every day for 2 hours that business that I started changed my life and if you're interested in doing something similar should check out my workshop it's 100% free and I'll share with you exactly how to find a million-dollar business idea how to build it on Just 2 hours a day without quitting your full-time job and the secret that took me years to learn that nobody's talking about just head to the first link in the description to save your seat spots are limited all right guys hope you enjoy the rest of the video with Matt all right so you're a terrible writer but you have the self-proclaimed but you have the confidence that you can put this blog out into the world and build a business out of it where does this come from I was confident in website building and design so like I could open up notepad and build a website in pure HTML and I you know I did graphic design I was you know as a kid I drew a lot so like I had that I could make something look like a legit website if you read it it was really bad like really really bad there was no periods nothing no commas like it was just poorly written from someone who like knows how to talk right but doesn't know how to stop it's kind of like written by a third grader but visually yeah I can make it look great and I knew how to get it online you know let's talk about monetization you you've built this blog now you need to mon it how do you make your first dollar made my first dollar with AdSense my goal was to get traffic to get eyeballs on the site so that I can make money from AdSense it was the easiest thing I could do going forward I moved away from AdSense cuz I didn't like the way ads looked they were irrelevant to my content and I took that off and focused 100% on affiliate marketing for many many years in fact that was the only way I made money probably up until I started to develop products the first product I created was a PDF that I sold at first for 50 bucks no one bought it then I dropped it to 40 bucks no one bought that 30 bucks some people bought it 29 more people bought it 24 a lot of people bought it and I was like okay I found the price point it took me years the next product I created was the pool care handbook which did a lot better I had learned everything from the first one it was much bigger and I added courses to them so then it became like a video course and ebook combination and then I actually printed our book and that's been the majority of like how we make money is through the course material and the and the books yeah so you're building this thing you're making money how do you grow it how do you grow into a business that's making a million a year it's the same exact thing I've been doing since day one it's just content put out as much content as I possibly can create we start with the video the long form video The Script we take that we re-record little bits for short form so I do one long form video a week three three short form videos a week on YouTube Instagram Tik Tok Pinterest Twitter LinkedIn anybody that will take a short form video basically and then we take those scripts and format them and turn them into blog posts that rank on Google anybody that comes to us from there hopefully signs up for email list and then we have an entire email newsletter where we send two to three emails a week to those people and we run ads as well which helps supplement all of that but the same video that dominates every single year it's a PowerPoint there was no script I just you know developed this like here's what I how I think about pool care from start to finish we can't beat it what that tells me is doesn't matter how good your video is it just matters if the content is good yeah yeah so you built a business around pools yeah no offense it's a bit of a boring thing you wouldn't think there'd be a business there tell me about tell me about building a business in a boring Niche and why you did it because no one wants to get good at taking care of their pool or skimming a pool it's like oh I'm the absolute expert at skimming a pool like no they just want to swim in the pool so I just want to get them from all right your pool's disgusting to your pool's clear and safe in no time that's my entire goal because again like this is not a hobby business I can't do an hourlong podcast where we're just riffing and bullshitting about pool care because it's fun to listen to like no one's going to listen so I have to be short I have to be Punchy I have to be entertaining cuz I got to keep your attention that's the thing I've had to do this whole time in order for it to work yeah what are your thoughts for maybe someone who's watching this video picking the right Niche picking the right bus to work on it's always been based on what I am interested in so I have this like practice that someone gave me where was like walk around your house and just start writing down things in your room and then you can find a niche that way it's like if you just walk around this room there's so many things that I could write down and just be like oh wow yeah I guess I am interested in that I wonder if people are talking about that cuz I like that thing and I would say pick something that you know and that you least interested in because when the going gets tough when it's hard to like create content at least you like the topic a little bit like just even just a little bit cuz otherwise you're going be like why am I doing this what's the point of this yeah all right let's talk about tools and software what runs your business Asana it's my favorite everything's in it everything when I have to take out the trash when I have to pay my credit cards everything for swim University it's all in AA all of it the other one is is Google Drive all of our files are all in the cloud so that everyone has access to them obviously WordPress huge tool for us we use semrush for SEO we use rank math as a plugin we use lasso for our affiliate links we use chat GPT as a business partner I talk to it like a human and ask it questions to help make decisions on things that I don't think about it's really good at that it's really good to just talk to yeah I'm not lonely and for email list we are on clavio or clavio cloo the best it is the best you run this business it's a family business you can tell me a little bit more about that yeah there was a a moment where I was working with Steph my wife thinking about hiring more and more people but I was like let me see if my brother wants to do it he was like yeah I don't want to do that I was like oh okay cool um you're hired and so I thought let me use this business that I have this asset to take care of everybody so my wife she writes long form scripts for YouTube She also writes all of the short form content she also edits and lishes the long form content on YouTube my brother does short form edits and he does all of our customer service and then I do literally everything else so I read the scripts and into into camera do email marketing podcasts I do articles so all the stuff with the website any technical things that need to be taken care of any admin things that need to be taken care of pretty much yeah fill in all the gaps of like running a business I do all of it and we all get paid the same so that nobody feels super interior over I don't feel like a boss no one feels like a boss I don't you know need to make more than everybody else just because I own the company I want everyone to be taken care of that's the point it's kind of a rising tide lifts all boats scenario yeah all right well let's talk about shiny object syndrome you you started a lot of things and you have a lot of cool side projects tell me a little bit more about that yeah I started a side business the first one oh my God I tried to build a social network for dogs that was bad that was in 2008 and it was like to learn code also I started business called roasty coffee which was a basically taking the Su diversity Playbook and thinking to myself okay it took me all these years to get where I am because it was all trial and error now that I know everything can I do it in like half the time or or faster it got pretty big I was getting like 100,000 uniques a month by the end of it took two years to get there and end up selling that business which then took off and then I have money lab which is a where I get to talk about this kind of stuff which is still kind of going it's mainly just a podcast now more for documentation and then I have Brew Cab in which it's something I'm so interested in and so passionate about that I don't want to turn it into a business and ruin my love of it if that makes sense so I need to have something for me the thing that I'm really actually passionate about should just be kind of my thing for me as soon as you turn it into a business as soon as uh the financials bleed in starts to become a little bit that solay it a little bit yeah all right let's talk about day in the life we are out here in the beautiful summer of Denver col that's right what does the day in the life look like for you I get up at like 7 to 8: and stay in bed until 9:00 watching Tik toks uh if I'm being super honest then I get up and make breakfast every morning a breakfast head coffee coffee head as well and then I get to work around 10 11 and I'm usually done by like 5 or 600 depending on if I have anything to watch at night or do anything at night sometimes I'll come out here into the brewery which is behind you do some work there any sort of like soft work that doesn't require me being on a computer yeah I don't work weekends so I try not to at least unless I'm super pumped about an idea but otherwise yeah it's it yeah Co kind of 9 to five a little bit what have been any challenges or struggles you've had while building this business oh just the slowness I think of it it doesn't want to Skyrocket it's just like a huge Boulder that I've been slowly pushing up a mountain for 20 years or almost 20 years and I feel like I always want to push really hard on it I always want to like get really aggressive with it and every time I I end up like burning myself out and then having to like basically go okay this business just needs what it needs and it does what it does and I've struggled with like making the right decisions you know and again talk to chat gpts sometimes come out here talk to myself sometimes all right final question that we ask to all of our Founders is if you could sit on the shoulder of Matt when he was just getting started out what advice would you give to him what advice would you give to Founders just getting started out I definitely know what I would say to myself keep making content just keep making content get better writing keep making videos cuz I keep stopping I keep shifting and I keep thinking oh this will solve the problem or this will do this will be better but no every time I make content whether that's a blog post or a video or a short form or an email business moves business is good when I don't that's when it suffers because that is the entire business model it is a Content business and there's just a lot of times I don't want to write about pools or I don't want to talk about pools but that is the business that is what I have to do that is my job y so as far as what I would tell other people to do think about lifestyle over business I don't think about money as the outcome cuz it's like there's a million things I could have done to make way more money than I'm making now and that would have been like oh I would have had a team of people and it would have been a nightmare to manage and I would have hated my life so I constantly think about whether or not the decision I'm about to make will have a negative effect on just my the life that I want which is essentially super freaking easy yeah I love it yeah thanks for having no thank you for coming awesome follow this advice and you will have a multi-million dollar pool cleaning content company good luck hey guys I really hope Matt's story inspires you and maybe motivates you to start your own thing but if you're feeling a bit lost and not sure where to start go click that first link in the description we're hosting a free workshop for all of our subscribers where I will share how I built a million-dollar business on Just 2 hours of deep work every day we'll cover exactly how I found the idea how I executed on on it and how I was able to quit my job just a few months after starting it just head to the first link in the description to save your seat hope to see you guys in there much love and I'll see you in the next video peace [Music]

Channel: Starter Story

Views: 92,506

Keywords: starterstory, starters story, starter story, starter stories, starter story ideas, matt giovanisci, swim university, moneylab, one website business, $1M website, million dollar website, I make $1M with one website, boring niche business, content business

Id: 7pCgbhUWW54

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024