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Earning A Million Dollars In One MONTH – Can It Be Done? – Graphic © WealthPowerBoost. Photo © Shutterstock (under license)
Note – this post is theoretical but is not a scam or a joke: It’s based on real research. I have not achieved this level of income (my best month so far was over $90,000 revenue), however I do believe $1,000,000 per month is TOTALLY possible. We are in fact seeing a small but growing number of individuals actually doing it. This post shares my insights on how I think it might be done.
It’s all there for the taking now. It really is.
❤️ If you haven’t seen it yet, check out my list of 45 Of The World’s Most Successful Blogs – which lists numerous six-figure-per-month blogs and some that have reached “the magic seven”.
This 8,000+ word post lays out a roadmap for how $1,000,000 per month might be done – through a mix of digital content publishing, social media, email marketing, blogging and SEO – together with examples of individuals who are ‘pushing the envelope’ and who have either achieved this figure or have it “in their crosshairs”. I will “show my working” with as many real-life examples and as much realistic analysis as I can.
I’ve now earned over $1.95 million total gross revenue online (before expenses & tax deductions). Over $1.4 million of this has been via Adsense ads on my blogs / websites:
This is a genuine screenshot. My best month on Adsense so far brought in $90,693 in revenue, with around $3000 of expenses. I jumped around the room when that Adsense payment hit my bank account; What a feeling, after being literally flat broke 12 months earlier – and after many previous years of living below the official poverty threshold!
But I now truly feel that even with this kind of a payday, I have just scratched the surface of what is possible. At the time I received that payment, I did not even have an email list, or a Youtube channel!
I’m going to lay it all out on the table for you to examine, to get inspired by and so that you can make your own strategy to attack the big money mountain. Let’s do this! 🙂
This Is Your Roadmap
Now this kind of goal is of course a Herculean challenge (and possibly slightly bonkers), but life ought to be a grand adventure and an epic quest… don’t you think? Who has really lived who hasn’t attempted something wild, exciting and extraordinary? Dare to fly with the eagles, or go back to the safe and the mundane? Your choice.
The first thing to understand is that there is almost no theoretical limit to what could be earned online now.
You will run out of time way before you run out of opportunity: In this game, the greatest limits you will face in the end, are those of expertise, focus, health, and what you are physically able to accomplish within the constraints of the 168 hours of a week that everybody gets.
Yes, you have the same number of hours available to you in one week as Elon Musk does…
You also have a global workforce poised and ready to be hired, plus numerous automation tools that can increase your output and streamline your workflow.
How incredible, to live in such a time – where “moon shot” opportunities like this even exist! This kind of opportunity simply wasn’t there in the old days.
Of course, the modern world has its shadows and its problems – but the internet brings the chance for aspiring entrepreneurs to literally “come up from the streets”; starting with nothing and building their own fortune.
I’m living proof of it – and there are countless other examples including some that have had success on a level that has blown mine out of the water.
How Big Can You Scale?
If you are a blogger, Youtuber or other content creator, who creates decent content and monetizes it correctly, you will almost certainly make some money – typically through ad revenue, affiliate revenue, sponsored placements and so on.
So do more!
I quickly learned that one reliable way to increase my income was simply to create and post more good content. If x blog posts brings in y dollars per day, then it’s logical to estimate that 10x blog posts of similar quality will bring in approximately 10y dollars. The same applies with Youtube channels, digital products being sold online and so on. The bigger your portfolio, the greater your income potential.
There are also further compounding effects when you scale – for example “size creates authority” and “shopping cart upsells” – but my main point is that on the internet, all you have to do is to hit a certain bar of quality and you will start making money. Do something that works – and then do lots of it. You want to earn more? Create and publish more!
How much can you create?
It will rapidly become clear that one of the main challenges in creating such a big income is simply that of scaling. There are of course various ways to increase revenue but simply “being bigger” and having more stuff on the go is a viable path towards growth. How many blogs, Youtube channels, infographics, articles etc. can you realistically create, publish and maintain? And how will you optimize this process in order to scale up a) without loss of quality b) without burning out, c) without spreading yourself so thinly that you lose traction in any one area (or worse, have things fall apart without you even noticing) and d) while being able to manage the sheer volume of logistics involved in juggling the numerous balls you now have in the air?
I’ve spent the last 8 years wrestling with this challenge and learning, often the hard way, how to (and how not to) scale an online business.
Here’s the road map that has been forged from that process! 🙂
The Grand Million-Dollars-Per-Month Income Plan
I’ve divided our million-per-month goal into 5 different carefully chosen income systems; assigning each of them the target of $200,000 revenue per month.
There are 3 good reasons for this: Reason #1 is that $200,000 from each system is definitely do-able and I will give real-life examples of people who have done it.
Reason #2 is that each of these income systems is independent; in other words if one breaks, you will still have the others – which is hugely important for income security. One thing about internet income is that sometimes, things break. It happens. Big websites change their algorithms, macroeconomic factors (hello 2020) play a hand, sometimes accounts can get banned, or other things can change, sometimes unexpectedly and dramatically. I once saw a business with 89 employees but only one major traffic source get bankrupted and literally wiped out overnight by an algorithm change. Don’t be them.
Having diverse digital assets / income streams gives you greater resilience against these outside forces, as well as a greater chance of something breaking through. Which leads us neatly to the next reason:
Reason #3 for this diversification is that even though the income streams are independent, any one can be used to promote and “bootstrap” another. For example, a Youtube channel can be used to promote and drive traffic to a blog, a Facebook page can be used to grow an email list, and so on. Not only this; but if you are able to get anywhere near the target with just one of these five methods, you would have financial resources to invest into seriously accelerating the growth of the other systems.
I have tested and discarded various other income models, distilling the focus down to those that a) I prefer b) which I think have the greatest potential and c) have an innate ability to “play nicely” together and create a “force multiplier” – with the success of one system helping to drag the others along with it.
I’ve given this road map very serious consideration. It’s the culmination of over 8 years of work – a “master plan” that has been developed and refined though time into a resilient, scalable income model that is a kind of “profit ecosystem”, with the various elements supporting and boosting each other.
Here are the five systems, together with a) actual income examples, b) mentors that you can learn from, and c) a “nutshell” tutorial for each one, with links to more in-depth information.
INCOME STREAM #1: “FACELESS” YOUTUBE CHANNELS (200k / month)
Youtube has fully come of age and now has absolutely huge income potential. My mentor example here is Make Money Matt. Matt has 9 Youtube channels (8 of which are “faceless” – he never shows his face) and he consistently earns over $100,000 per month. He’s also hit $200,000 revenue in one month once so far. It’s do-able!
This is not unique: There are numerous examples of homegrown Youtube businesses that generate this kind of revenue and sometimes even way more! Google “income of top Youtubers” if you don’t believe me!
Matt recently stated that he now thinks that a million per month is totally possible for him just from Youtube alone – and it’s in fact his own personal goal to achieve this! He also stated that he personally knows several other entrepreneurs who earn over a million per month online.
I totally believe him.
Matt started “properly” on Youtube in 2014 and his first ‘successful’ channel was a “Top 10 list video” channel – a perennially popular content format that still generates big traffic for those who do it well.
He started hitting $100k/month consistently in 2020 – but I think our target income can be achieved much more rapidly than this now that there is a tried-and-tested roadmap. At the beginning he was ‘just a kid’ having fun making videos – without serious business research, with no mentor and with no clear plan of how to make money from it. He learned a lot of things by trial and error, which means that what he did can be learned and replicated more quickly through study of both his methods and those of others who have had big success. He also didn’t start outsourcing content creation and running multiple channels until 2018, which is when things really started to take off in a big way.
Let’s just say that his model of earning $100k per month from 9 channels is replicable. To scale to $200k you would realistically need to “double up” on one of the factorials of Matt’s Youtube empire. So you would need to either run 18 channels of equal success, 9 channels with twice as many videos, the same volume of content but double the click through rate, or perhaps just modeling his system but continuing to grow the channels until they reach double the audience size.
Theoretically, all of this is absolutely possible. Youtube allows you to create as many channels as you want and there are many areas of optimization in which marginal or even great gains can be achieved.
However the workload could bury you alive if you were not smart about it. There simply are not enough hours in the day to create and upload content to 10 channels at the required rate. You need systems in place to help you scale, you are going to need a team and to approach this goal in stages. Here’s a potential game plan:
STAGE 1 – starting with “just you” working on the business, create about 4 “faceless” channels and start creating content. I use DaVinci Resolve video editor which is a full professional video editing platform that, astonishingly, is absolutely free.
For your niche choices – refer to Matt’s excellent tutorial which gives a list and analysis of 100 “Faceless” Niches – and just get it cracking:
Faceless channels are useful to the entrepreneur who is looking to scale because they permit the outsourcing of content creation; whereas if you are the presenter, then “the brand is you” and you can’t outsource this, limiting your potential to automate and scale the growth of the business.
You will need to create some brands – and I have a full free tutorial on how to do this [link coming very soon].
A critical aspect of success here is to not get stuck in “analysis paralysis” but to begin it now – creating, finishing and uploading content. There is of course an initial learning curve (and the rules of the platform that should not be ignored), but waiting until you think you can hit the perfect shot is not advised; instead, take the best shot you can right now, then continue taking shots, improving as you go. Use the data to observe what works best, then optimize and double down on what is working: Matt recommends creating 30 to 35 videos per channel to begin with as he has observed that this is the number that it typically takes before something starts to take off, upon which you can learn from the data and “double down” on what is working best.
STAGE 2 Whichever one of these channels “pops” first, gets monetized and starts to earn money, focus on it and build the income up to the point where you can afford to hire and train someone (typically outsourced) to manage your Youtube empire and help you begin the work of building out the rest of your channels. (Note that you need 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time in order to be accepted into the Youtube Partner Program (this link is to the official page listing the program requirements) – however there are other ways to start generating revenue before you hit the magic 1000 subs – including promoting affiliate products and driving traffic to an email list with a free offer.)
STAGE 3 Create the roadmap and workflow for how you are going to scale up to 18 channels – and build out your Brands – name, logo, profile graphics etc. Dial in your project manager to get this scaled out, building your team as resources permit. Funnel back in a portion of the revenue as it grows and start to ramp up the “production machine” of all the channels, refining and improving your processes as you go along.
Here is a sample workflow for a Youtube channel – this is the one I share with my team. This is a bit of a ‘skeleton’ but check back as I plan to develop it into a full tutorial:
CHANNEL SETUP:
1. Research channel name [full branding tutorial coming soon]
2. Build new channel – tutorial here
3. Channel graphics and logo – tutorial here
4. Intro / outro sections to drop in to all videos
VIDEO CREATION:
1. Data mine to research topics and titles of videos. These will go into a database.
2. Choose the winning ones to actually work on.
3. If it is a top 10 video, make the list of the 10 items that will be in the list
4. Find / create images
5. Write script and get it approved.
6. Create Voice Over if there will be one
7. Assemble the video in Davinci
8. Add music.
9. Make thumbnail image 1920 x 1080
10. Create the text for the “about” box.
11. Check everything is looking good and get approved
12. Upload to YT
13. “First comment” / pinned comment that has a link.
PROMOTION:
1. Link the channel from our websites and social media
2. Comment on popular videos as our channel [tutorial coming soon]
3. Create keyword-themed playlists of interesting videos in your niche to draw in some traffic [tutorial coming soon]
4. Make WordPress Blog Post and embed video + script.
5. Make Facebook post text file, place thumbnail using Yoast and do debugger step
6. Make tall image for pinterest (600×900).
7. Post on pinterest
8. Post on FB fan page
9. Send email to our list about the new video
10. Post on Telegram.
11. Post on Instagram?
12. Add link from the video to the written version of the tutorial on our website
A standardized workflow enables the creative process to be streamlined and outsourced so that you can crank up your content “machine” to full power.
STAGE 4 Create tutorials for everything – so that you don’t have to keep training people one-on-one, but so that they can refer to “the operations manual” and keep moving forward with minimal intervention. A tutorial-based system gives you the potential to automate the whole system to a greater extent, which will be needed if you are going to free up your time to take on the other methods!
STAGE 5 You will certainly find that some of your channels perform much better than others. It’s generally advised to put your focus on the best performers because this gives the most “bang for your buck”. From here on in, it’s a case of rinse and repeat, combined with learning and implementing artful ways to generate further revenue streams from your channels.
INCOME STREAM #2: EBOOKS (200k / month)
Ty Cohen is an amazing example of an entrepreneur who is making six figures per month from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing – publishing ebooks on the platform. He started several years ago, observed the average earnings of each ebook and quickly realized that all he needed was enough ebooks – so he committed to scaling up by simply grinding until he broke through… gradually creating a big portfolio of ebooks. Once he hit a certain revenue point, he started outsourcing the content creation (using Fiverr). Now he has the process pretty much fully automated and his content empire is making bank.
Cohen now claims to have over 1000 ebooks live on Amazon Kindle and the beauty of this system is that once the books are published, the work is essentially done. This sounds extraordinary but bear in mind that many of the books are “shorts” – perhaps 15,000 words – and there are many KDP publishers who publish books with under 10,000 words. Cohen claims he has achieved the dream lifestyle – and I believe him. He’s earning well into six figures and reports that he has plenty of time to spend with his family, traveling and enjoying life. So you can see how although it seems daunting at first, if you apply yourself consistently, there can be a big payoff in the end. Build a system like this and you could be free to dive into one of the other systems with full focus and get those going too!
Your eBooks could be on any topic but it’s often advised to research and learn which topics are in high demand (you can see some sales statistics on Amazon) and to create content on these subjects, rather than “trying to be unique”. If nobody is doing something, it’s probably for a reason. Do what works and trust that there is room for you, too. My thing is “evergreen tutorials” (evergreen content means content that will still have value in several years time). Another topic that is very popular with eBook entrepreneurs is “cliffhanger series” short stories with well developed, interesting characters and an open ending to the ebook which leads the reader to buy the next installment!
Amazon is of course not the only possible venue for your ebooks. There are numerous marketplaces and with non-exclusive distribution arrangements you can sell through multiple venues simultaneously.
There is a further spin-off from eBook publishing – ebooks can be given away free to build an email list. You can also place links in the back of Kindle ebooks to promote your other stuff. Cohen claims that the income he achieves “on the back end” from his ebooks through funneling traffic from the actual ebooks to his email lists, is now greater than the income that comes from the direct sales! Big secret here.
Audiobooks are a further spin on Amazon Kindle that gives an additional revenue stream. The Mikkelsen Twins teach Amazon publishing and claim that audiobooks are a faster and easier route to building a strong monthly income than regular eBooks. Another option to grow the income is to have the work translated into other languages.
Launching your own Clickbank digital product is another ebook publishing option; but I would rate this as “highly advanced” – because not only do you have to create a slamming product in a very competitive marketplace, but you have to develop and optimize the entire sales funnel so that affiliates can pick it up and run with it. Whereas with Amazon Kindle, you pretty much have to create and format the ebook, design a cover and upload it – and let Amazon’s gigantic sales machine do the rest. I’ve never personally managed to crack creating my own Clickbank products and make significant money from them, so I am not in a position to teach it; although I know people who have made bank this way. The top Clickbank products do 5 figures per day.
INCOME STREAM #3: EMAIL MARKETING (200k / month)
This one dovetails beautifully with the model above because when you have a portfolio of ebooks, you can select certain of your ebooks to give away free in return for signups to your email list!
Email marketing is another system with no theoretical income limit. It has phenomenal potential and also, one of the beautiful things about email is that your email list is essentially YOURS until people decide to unsubscribe. It’s generally regarded as “safer” than building a social media following – because in the wonky world of social media, you could be getting server-melting viral traffic one month and then the next month could get an account ban out of the blue (been there done that!) The old school internet marketers used to say “the gold is in the email list” and this is still true in the 2020’s.
An email list is also highly versatile and can give a boost to all your other projects. It can be used to promote blog posts, Youtube videos, ebooks, courses, products, affiliate promotions… you get the picture. Even if you are “only a Youtuber” – you should be doing this! Email is gold.
There are really two ways to grow your list – one is through free traffic driven from Youtube, Facebook or other social media. The other is through paid traffic – perhaps from banner advertising, Youtube ads or Facebook ads. Either way, the visitors will typically land on a page offering a free, relevant ebook in return for signing up.
In a world where people’s “email signup freebie offer” is usually quite “thin”, if you go big, with the words FREE BOOK (I am doing this!) on a topic that people really love, then you are going to get a lot of signups. Some will grab the free book and unsubscribe, but if the ebook is decent quality, quite a lot will “stick”.
To monetize the list, the standard formula is to send a mix of “value content” (free + useful, not selling anything) and “promo content” (typically affiliate promotions or direct sales letters to promote your other products). I send a 50/50 mix to my lists.
So to earn 200k per month – you just need a big enough list! In my own experience, with a list of 100,000 active subscribers, a good affiliate promotion can sometimes earn over well $1000 just from one email. Others have achieved far more – depending on the quality of the leads and the sales process.
Here are some stats from a particularly good period in 2016 – this was income from daily Clickbank promotional emails to my list, which I think had around 85,000 subscribers at the time:
Based on these numbers, if you had a million subscribers, $200,000 per month revenue is not an unreasonable expectation.
An example of a mentor doing these kinds of numbers is Alex Becker. Now in truth I think he’s a bit of a smooth talker with an expensive training program to sell, but he’s had fantastic success with email marketing. I don’t know his income stats but I believe he has had 7-figure months. One of the important things to note is that Becker “knows his numbers” really well. He knows the “lifetime customer value” of an email subscriber – which is the quintessential metric that enables you to know how much you can spend to acquire that subscriber. He uses paid traffic to get his subscribers and is an absolute pro at generating income from his subscriber list that is many times the cost of acquisition.
Doing this well is an art form and a science in itself but once you crack it, there is incredible potential. I can help here too – I’ve earned six figures via email so far and again, I feel like I have just scratched the surface of what is possible. See my email marketing tutorial here [coming v soon].
INCOME STREAM #4: BLOGGING (the “Blog plus Social Media” method) (200k / month)
In a nutshell: Choose a niche (this is my tutorial on 26 of the best profitable blog niches), create your own brand [tutorial v soon], create a WordPress blog [tutorial v soon], link your branded social media profiles, then create social media-friendly blog posts by studying data to learn what is working well, then creating your own original content in a similar vein.
(And do lots of it!)
I made the vast majority of my $1.95M online through this method; predominantly using Facebook fan pages and Pinterest accounts to drive traffic to the blogs, which were “ad enabled” with Adsense and various other ad systems and affiliate promotions.
Which social media platforms should you focus on? It’s important to choose the right ones here! Many bloggers’ top pick is Pinterest (tutorial here) and will cite it as their #1 traffic source, with Google traffic as their #2 for traffic (provided that good basic SEO strategies are employed). Instagram is not well suited to driving traffic to a blog, though it is possible if you have a big following and ninja skills – and there are of course numerous other platforms you could dabble with. My suggestion for bloggers is to stick with Facebook and Pinterest as the main traffic generators and start building up a Telegram channel as a kind of backup. [tutorial on Telegram coming soon also]
Facebook has been my biggest traffic source overall by far and my FB fan pages still reliably generate thousands of visitors per day – yet FB is definitely much harder than it used to be, for various reasons and my current traffic is a small fraction of what it was in “the good old days”. Pinterest has been my #2 traffic source, my email list #3 and Google #4.
I think Pinterest is much easier to get something going with than Facebook, much “safer” and overall has less headaches associated with it – but on the other hand, the “high end” of traffic from Pinterest will never, in my opinion, be as big as the absolutely unbelievable, completely insane traffic deluge that you can get from Facebook if things go viral!
This is Facebook viral traffic on one of my blogs in 2019-2020 – over 330,000 pageviews in one day at the peak of this “viral traffic cascade”.
“Real time” traffic from Facebook – you won’t see this with Pinterest!
Pinterest traffic generally looks a bit more like this:
This was Pinterest traffic to a recipe website in 2020. The “sawtooth” peaks are always on the weekends.
Pinterest traffic is generally more consistent and long term (Facebook traffic from any given post is typically tailing off after an hour or 2, or in the case of a very strong viral post, after a few days – whereas a good “Pin” will typically generate a lower volume of traffic but continue to bring in visitors for many months or even years.)
[see my free tutorial on getting your first 1000 social media followers – link coming very soon]
Another advantage of Facebook and Pinterest is that your post schedule can now be fully automated using apps – Tailwind would be my choice for Pinterest, FPTraffic for Facebook. Once your schedule is fully uploaded to these, it’s hands off. I have 40-day cycles of Facebook posts uploaded to FPtraffic for each of my niches and when it gets to the end, I loop the entire thing again in 2 clicks. All I have to do is delete or improve the weak performing posts from the cycle and put in new ones as I create them.
There are numerous possible mentors you could choose here. There’s me, of course, the mysterious million dollar blogger. I’m a Facebook pro and built up over 5 million followers [down to just over 4M now after a few page bans], with top traffic days of over 300,000 visitors in one DAY multiple times. [tutorial on that coming very soon] I’m also not too shabby on Pinterest (check my full tutorial on How To Make Money On Pinterest here. ) But here I will also link you to numerous other super-successful bloggers that you can and should study and learn from. Here is my in depth free report on 45 Of The World’s Most Successful Blogs. The majority of these are bringing in 6 figures per month and at least 10 have hit the magic seven – and there are doubtless many more out there.
INCOME STREAM #5: FACEBOOK FAN PAGE EMPIRE. (200k / month)
I’ve done this one and so I can certainly vouch for it. There are others who have done even better, though. My best ever month was $90,000+ and this was predominantly from Facebook traffic from two big fan pages. When Facebook fan pages are in their accelerated growth phase, the amount of traffic they can send is monumental. It doesn’t last forever and so the key is to be building up new pages so that when the accelerated growth of one caps, you have another one already picking up.
The key skill here is making repeated viral content and having both consistently high quality and high quantity of content. The algorithm is a hungry beast and to kick it into top gear requires slam dunk content. It’s a skill set and an art form.
There’s a guy in India I came across who is consistently making $200,000+ (and has had months over $300,000) with a network of 10 Facebook pages. I’m confident in these stats because they were verified (and legally have to be) as part of a business sale proposal.
The crazy part about this is that he has most of the business outsourced and is only working part time on it! I think he reported he has 11 virtual assistants working on this biz. I would also imagine that he keeps them all separate from each other so that they can’t know the entire puzzle, steal the method and do it themselves!
There’s another guy I know of who has 50+ fan pages and over 7 million followers total. I don’t know his income but it must be decent 5 figures/month and possibly 6 depending on his funnel.
Expect a full training course in all this from me soon. Email if you want to get notified.
BONUS INCOME STREAM #6: SEO EMPIRE. (100k / month?)
Now this one is the real “rabbit hole”, highly theoretical and here’s where things get interesting and a bit edgy. Hey, you might be content with your $1M/M per month from the other methods 😉 or, if you are less of a crazed workaholic than me, you could pick any ONE of the above methods and do well with it if you give it your full focus (although I would caution to diversify your income). You have options. But if you are curious to go deeper, then welcome to the underground… the subterranean world of SEO.
That was a bit dramatic. 🙂 It’s just link building and ranking in Google, right? Yes and no.
For most bloggers, “simple” Search Engine Optimization is used to make sure the pages get indexed and gain some additional search visibility. They will do a bit of keyword research to choose topics that people are looking for, make sure their keywords are in the title and headings, choose a focus keyword with the Yoast plugin and build a couple of links to each new post from older blog posts on similar topics, plus maybe build a few external links (from other websites).
That’s the “shallow end”. In truth, SEO goes super deep. It’s the “red pill” of the internet world – a labyrinthine network of keyword-driven content creation, page optimization and multi-tier link building. It’s pretty technical and I would say probably the most challenging of the 5 business models outlined in this tutorial – but the potential rewards can be phenomenal if you can achieve consistent results and scale.
The downside of SEO is that algorithms change and traffic can go down as well as up. Again, being over-reliant on one traffic source is not recommended.
There is more than one way to do this… let’s dive in…
SEO Empire method a) Site flipping. If you can get a site ranked in Google and earning income, people will want to buy the site. I have had this happen: In the early days I created a one-page website giving away free iPhone ringtones and through some link building, managed to get it to the Google #5 position for the phrase “free iphone ringtones”. Suddenly I got an email from a ringtone company who offered me $1500 for the site on the spot. Not bad for a one page site… I took the money. That was 2010.
To be honest I was just dabbling, but there are people doing this on a big scale and closing 6 and even 7 figure acquisitions. Mentor example: Matt Diggity. This young entrepreneur is whip smart and a real SEO pro. He approaches the entire subject of SEO in a very methodical, empirical, testing-based way – sometimes creating special websites strictly for testing purposes. This is a good idea because it means you can test out various strategies without risking your main websites.
From what I have observed, his model is based on acquiring expired domains / underperforming websites, performing multiple SEO optimizations on them, building them up to being authority sites with decent traffic, monetizing them with affiliate offers and then “flipping” them using a marketplace such as Empire Flippers or Flippa. He has found this to be a quicker way to earn money than to simply wait for the sites to bring in the revenue. A site typically can be sold for around 36X its monthly profit. Looking at this equation another way, if you can create another site that reaches this same income level in less than 36 months, then you are better off selling the first and creating the second! I don’t know Matt’s exact income but in a poll in his private “Affiliate Lab” members group 16 members self-reported to be over $100k per month, including him. (That also illustrates that the kind of numbers we are talking about here are really not as outrageous as some would believe). He has also diversified into SEO training (I think he would make a great mentor), SEO-based affiliate marketing and no doubt other revenue streams.
SEO Empire method b) Private Blog Network. I know someone (who wishes to remain anonymous) who co-owns (together with a small team) a “private blog network”. This is nothing shady, honestly; but they own 120+ websites, some self-built and some acquired. They run various SEO techniques and site optimizations to build each site’s domain authority to over DA20 – a very reachable target when you know what you are doing.
Most of the revenue comes from “guest posts” – where others pay a fee to post an article (which contains their desired link) on one of the blogs in the network. They also have their own guest post brokering platform, which allows other SEOs who want to build links via guest blogging, to submit their articles and pay the fee. Other websites can also open up to receiving guest posts on the platform and the platform takes a cut. The websites also, unsurprisingly, feature display ads which add to the revenue. They have a core team of 3 and they are scaling hard. It’s a lot of work to manage this many websites – even if you outsource all the article writing, as they do, there is still a mountain of quality control, posting, updating, link building and so on. But the potential is there for ongoing and residual income that has potential to scale as big as you can scale the network.
SEO Empire method c) Database Sites. (Note – this method is highly theoretical and should be considered as “unproven”.) This is my baby and I’m starting to work this one up on the down-low. The amount I am currently earning from it is small – hundreds per month – but it has absolutely massive potential – perhaps the biggest potential of all the methods here if you can crack it. It’s a crap-ton of work and so in essence I have laid out the “skeleton”, but am holding off on going really big until I have the funds from the other sources to invest on a large scale. I have also developed some interesting automated systems which can be used to scale up.
This system needs a full, in depth tutorial to explain but in a nutshell the goal is to create massive websites in a database format. An example would be a “catalogue style” website about a certain category of consumer product, with a page for each product, together with a review, technical and other useful information – and then doing various techniques to get these pages ranked. The challenge here is not the complexity of building the pages, which are fairly simple information pages, but the challenge of creating enough of them that their sheer numbers will create an authority site that will start to pick up links of its own accord because of its usefulness as a reference source.
A website like this, built to sufficient scale, has the potential to generate a big ongoing revenue through the overall traffic volume to the site. You also have the possibility to run banners and links that drive traffic to your other properties.
So the real question here is how many of these sites can you realistically build and how big can you grow them? This method is serious work to get going and is something of a “slow burn” in terms of income – but with evergreen content and good SEO practices, has the potential for years or even possibly decades of fairly automated income.
Building massive websites as a way to generate big income is not a new concept. It is in fact the method that “the big boys” have been using since the early days of the www. Size matters – and they know it! You could even go so far as to state that their goal is to figure out how to create a multi-million page website! How would you go about this? It’s too many pages for one person to create manually – although a data entry team could put a big dent in it. Youtube and Wikipedia did it through crowdsourcing. Google and other search engines did it through scraping and publishing snippets of pages in a searchable format. Amazon did it by uploading the world’s biggest online catalogue of books for sale (remember that?)
A final method is through automation – using AI, macros, self-executing scripts and page generation softwares and I built a 30,000+ page website using these. It took a few weeks to code up the macros and clean up the content database but then the entire site was compiled in a few clicks, which was fun. Watch out for a full tutorial on this soon.
GOING BEYOND:
Now all of the above might seem like a big enough plan – but to a high flying entrepreneur it’s just a rung of the ladder. There’s nothing stopping you branching out into cryptocurrencies, real estate and numerous other business ventures.
What will you do when you hit your income targets? Do you have a ten year plan? 🙂
WRAP-UP and Additional Strategy Tips
1. Have a grand vision. You have to have a goal that really motivates you, otherwise you will not be sufficiently driven to go the distance. If you don’t have a clear, realistic goal, with a roadmap, actual steps worked out, a deadline and a clearly defined, precise target, you will meander. When a pleasing distraction comes along, you will drift into it. You might think “screw it, I will just recalibrate to a different target”. This is not the way. Set the target you actually want to aim for and commit 100%. All in!
2. Work like hell. Look no further than Elon Musk for inspiration here. Elon is well known for his workaholism – regularly putting in 100 hour weeks. He openly states that “working like hell” is one of the key factors behind his success.
If you have an online business and double the amount of good hours you put in per week, you will not only double your output but will gain further benefits such as the various compounding growth effects of consistent posting of new content, which is known to be rewarded by Google, Youtube, Pinterest and others.
If you are going to hit the kind of numbers we are talking about here, you cannot be half-assed. You can’t be going to the pub in the evenings and taking weekends off. I’m not in the “4 hour work week” mentality. I’m in the “100 hour work week” mentality.
However there is more to this than just determination and a work ethic. You need to be strategic…
3. Optimize yourself. The first step of self-optimization is to take care of your health. Doing nothing but sit in an office chair for 14 hours per day, 7 days per week will wreck your health. Take my word for it. Not sleeping will wreck your health. Eating fast food so that you can keep blogging will wreck your health. The machine here is you and you need to maintain that racing car beautifully so that it can run at full power. Self care, exercise and deep sleep are vital and you need to schedule these things in.
Trust me on this one. I’m a workaholic. I push the edge of burnout continually because it’s just who I am. It’s a Sunday evening. I’ve banged out this entire blog post – over 6,000 words – in one shift! [Finished up the following day, it was around a day’s work in total]. I’ve been known to write over 10,000 words per day when I really get going. But I am getting older, and everything is starting to hurt. Don’t destroy yourself to get where you are going! There’s absolutely no point in having wealth if you are too unwell to enjoy it. You would be better off with less money and less physical suffering…
The next step of self-optimization is time management. You have to “work all the time you work”. How many of the 3600 seconds in a working hour do you actually spend working? 50 good, focused, driven hours aiming right at the target are a lot better than 50 semi-distracted lazy hours or 50 hours of “busy work” and paperwork shuffling that makes you feel like you are working but in fact does not get you much closer to your goals. Quantity of work is one thing, but quality of work is another.
You also have to start cutting non-essentials from your life. Hardcore. Quoting Dan Pena again – “An Eagle Flies Alone”. Cut loose from distractions, time wasters and everything else that does not directly support your path towards your goals. Ten minutes on the phone chit chatting about whatever, with your pals? You don’t have time for that if you are playing this game. That time you wasted you will NEVER get back and I can assure you, I look back and one of my biggest regrets in life is the amount of time I wasted. By God, I could have a 9 figure stack by now… if only I had known. Get your act together now and your future self will thank you!
4. You need good mentors. The examples I have given above all have training programs, as well as much free material available. You could choose them, or study my work, or pick someone else to learn from – it’s your call; but your choice of mentor(s) is very important. One thing I would advise is that very often, those selling the “two thousand dollar courses” don’t give the best info. I know because I’ve bought those courses and been completely underwhelmed by them. Look instead for the young, whip-smart entrepreneur who is not quite so smooth but has had great success and is excitedly sharing their model.
5. You need good data. Success online is very much data driven. First of all – you can create a successful business simply by modeling success (legally – don’t steal content). You can see what the winning headlines are, the topics that get the clicks, the types of thumbnail images and content styles people go for. You can also see which of your tactics are working and by comparison, refine your skills. Optimization is important, but data will continue to surprise you. When you get your first viral post, it will come out of the blue; but after it happens you will start to see why it happened, and will be more likely to be able to replicate that success.
Use whatever tools are available to you. There is tons of free stuff! Check out my full list of 50+ Apps And Tools (Free And Paid) That Helped Me Build A Million Dollar Internet Business.
6. Learn the legal aspects of what you are doing and do NOT skimp on this part. Yes, it’s boring and complicated but if you don’t know the rules (or deliberately flaunt them) you will very likely come a cropper. Check out the NOLO legal guides to copyright and trademark. Learn about Privacy Policies (this link is a great website for that) and the legal aspects of running a blog. Read and fully understand the FTC’s guidelines on “Dot Com Disclosures” – and so on.
7. Automate, Outsource, Optimize. You cannot possibly do all this yourself. Or maybe you can, I don’t want to limit you 😉 But seriously – take the words of legendary entrepreneur Felix Dennis (RIP), who made hundreds of millions of dollars, who stated in his book How To Get Rich that your #1 task as a business owner is locating, securing, motivating and training top talent – because they are the ones who are going to build your business for you.
To do all of the above by yourself is beyond a superhuman workload. I do not think it would be possible. However you can observe that with all the above methods, there is a similar pattern. Start on it yourself; then once it is generating enough revenue to hire outsource workers, start building and training a team, delegate the work efficiently and scale up.
Efficient systems are paramount. When you have an outsource team, with different workers producing articles, infographics, uploading to WordPress, doing quality control and so on… if you are not careful things can turn into an insane type of “air traffic control”. Files are flying around in all directions and it becomes crazy keeping on top of it all. You will need procedures – efficient file sharing systems, protocols, backup schedules and so on. There are also only so many people that you can manage effectively, in addition to doing your own work. You can’t just hire 50 virtual assistants. Who is going to check all their work? Who is going to train them, do payroll, assign tasks etc. You have to start with you, then when you learn the system you can teach it to someone and together with them, build and manage a team.
8. And finally… “If You Aim For The Stars, You Might Hit The Moon”
I love this saying, but not just for the “feels”. I think it’s important. You need to set a big goal.
A million dollars in one month is a GREAT goal to aim for – and even if you only get to 5% of this goal, you are going to pull in $50,000 per month, which is pretty sweet…… would you complain about that? I doubt it!
When you set a huge, clear, precise goal, something shifts. A part of your unconscious mind recalibrates and helps you to become that person. It requires total “all in” commitment, but when you make that commitment, magic happens.
Another version of this statement you might have heard is from Dan Pena, who has himself earned hundreds of millions of dollars and now lives in his own castle, complete with personal butler, Aston Martin and all the rest. Dan often states that “You will never exceed your wildest expectations”. He encourages people to dream really, really big – but not imprecisely! Many wealth coaches in fact advise to choose a specific, exact amount of money to aim for. Select the target, focus like a laser, make the commitment, take aim and PULL THE TRIGGER!
When I started my first proper WordPress blog, which went on to make $233,472 from Adsense in its first year, I placed one of those “not real money” million dollar bills on my desk and wrote on it so that it said “I make one million dollars per month. Non negotiable!” I still have this on my desk!
Within 12 months of making this affirmation, I hit $90,000 in one month, $233,472 in total for the year… and my total revenue for the following year was over $480,000.
My first year as a blogger… Adsense revenue
Now is this just fluff or is it more than a coincidence? I know, it sounds “pseudo mystical” but I am NOT interested in trying to sell you a mystical world view! 🙂 I don’t think this is mere superstition. I think it’s there’s a scientific principle at work here. Your subconscious has tremendous power to shape your world.
1. Set a clear, exact goal.
2. Affirm that this IS your reality (note that I wrote “I MAKE $1,000,000 per month”, not “I want to make”)
3. Commit to it! Repeat your affirmation out loud every morning when you wake up and every night before you go to bed.
The first step happens within!
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That’s it folks! What? Am I not now going to pitch you some two-thousand-dollar business course? Nope. Sorry. 🙂
Hope you enjoyed this mega free tutorial as much as I did, and feel super-motivated to get it cracking. I am absolutely psyched! Let’s go!! Last one to $1M / M is a turkey!
Please check out the rest of this blog, which has lots more in-depth tutorials… good luck with your adventure and I’ll see you at the top. 🙂
Check out my Full List Of Apps And Tools That Helped Me Build A Million Dollar Internet Business
NOTE 1 – of course, there are numerous other ways to earn this much money (or more) online; for example with a “unicorn startup” – however that’s not my field of expertise. Other examples of course include e-commerce – selling physical products – through Amazon FBA, Shopify, eBay but again, it’s not my thing. If you feel drawn to those arenas, there are plenty of mentors out there.
NOTE 2 – if you get anywhere near these kinds of numbers, invest in a trustworthy accountant, legal advice, personal security… and don’t brag about your achievements. Keep your business affairs as private as possible. Being wealthy carries risks; you need to be prepared, and to stay safe. One of the great shocks to me when I achieved my first flush of wealth was that I thought people would be thrilled for me. I was surprised to learn that quite often, they were not. Put simply, it can cause resentment and you would be surprised, so please be careful! <3
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