Blogger uses AI to earn $76,000 in year 1 🚀

I started a brand new blog in January 2023 ($0). Using heavily edited AI content, I grew this site to $22,000+ in December 2023.

The site earned a little over $76,000 which is a lot. I don't know many sites that do that in their first year without using an expired domain or merging a bunch of domains or redirecting or whatever

To be clear, it is a mixture of me generating AI-generated content and then going back and editing it myself… I primarily use Koala AI… [but] you could totally do this all using ChatGPT…

I would generally, at the beginning, spend 3-4 hours per article, which, when people hear that, they immediately say, "Well, couldn't you write the article in that length of time?”…

The point of editing the article is to add value to content that's being produced at scale. That's how this site is going to grow fast and how you increase the content velocity…

I got that time down to one to two hours, maybe even just under one hour.

This is not a get-rich-quick scheme; it takes a lot of time and effort no matter how you do it. It's just about doing it a little better than someone else and being able to scale it much quicker.

Niche site selection is everything.

If you pick an overly competitive niche, you, as a new site without any backlinks or any sort of brand mentions, have almost no chance of surviving.

So, you need to find something that's fundamentally underserved, and that's the content that Google wants to index.

Things that haven't been covered before. If you're just regurgitating the same type of content, that's probably not going to be a site that will grow very quickly, and it's definitely more susceptible to algorithm updates.

I've actually launched four new sites in 2024… I'm very confident that this works, not just because [the first] site is still working, but because these new sites are already ranking…

I come across lots of sites that are successfully doing this today when I'm just looking around at sites on Ahrefs.

So, people are doing it today. So, I would definitely encourage you to give it a shot.

960 test subjects used a specific approach pioneered by two small town Kentucky boys to generate just a hair over one BILLION dollars in sales on Amazon - simply by taking already existing Amazon best-selling products and updating the presence of those products to better conform with what Amazon wants.

And if you make Amazon happy, what do you think happens?

I had so many years of trying and failing, trying and failing that I eventually accepted that I was just going to try and fail forever.

I started uploading videos at 11 and I was 19 when things started to hit. 

8 years of trying.

Compare that to most people's overall lack of persistence and their attitude towards failure.

– Most people have idea, never act
– If they act but fail, they give up very quickly
– Few people maybe on Earth would continue to stick with something after 8 years of failure 

If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity, but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!

Angad makes $100K as side income running a one-man content agency

Our user base is now over 200 paying brands who actively use SARAL to run their influencer campaigns. They work with over 13,000 influencers!

[It] began with my work with clients when I used to run a marketing agency.

After dropping out of engineering college, I started freelancing and eventually landed some sales jobs at early-stage startups.

That’s where I was exposed to the cold world of cold calling and closing 1:1 sales. It gave me the foundation needed to eventually get into marketing.

We managed programs with over 10,000 influencers, but the process was entirely manual, which became overwhelming for me and my team.

We searched the market for tools to streamline our influencer marketing efforts but we found out that existing options were both expensive and too old.

This frustration led to my "aha" moment, realizing there had to be a simpler, more affordable, and user-friendly alternative. That's when I decided to create Saral.

we conducted market research by reaching out to potential users through email and LinkedIn. I cold-emailed close to 2500 people in my target customer segment during this time. I got on ~35 calls with founders and marketers in the ecommerce space to simply talk about their problems and frustrations around the influencer marketing space (no selling here).

Additionally, I pre-sold the product to five early adopters who paid $99 each, demonstrating that there was a genuine demand for such a solution before we even began building it.

A lot of founders mess up because they don't know their marketing and don't interact with customers. I’m on calls with customers almost every day.

Learn to understand people’s problems intimately so you can solve them with your business.

Sell pickaxes in a gold rush.

I'm pretty happy to have hit $100k ARR ~4 months after launching Keyword Metrics and URL Monitor.

This will prob be the last MRR/ARR update on these but if you're a first time founder wondering if you can build something meaningful just learning as you go - you can!

Find high-traffic keywords you already rank for and improve your content to increase traffic, rank higher, and double down on what's already working.

Track your URLs in Google, monitor potential issues and index new pages in bulk.

It’s all from Twitter really!

one example where building an audience then a product works!

I also started with a programmatic SEO course to teach how to build large sites powered by data.

What do large sites need? An indexing strategy!

I’m basically working about 4 days a week now with my full-time job… 40 hours [per week]… and then I have Fridays typically is my day to focus on Amazon and then [also] weekends and evenings.

Literally my sales went back down to zero

I had a really good month in January but now I’ve leveled back down to about $12,000 in sales a month.

I would say more is done online but I also do go into stores…

I’ll take pictures of what’s on the shelves and then come home and I just go through it and see if it’s something that is profitable, something that will sell.

Sales flyers too when they come in… sometimes I’ll send that to my VA, “Hey, this place is running a sale today, if you want to go through it and let me know if you find anything”

ride your highs a little lower and your lows a little higher