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- Free Games Site = $13K/Month 🎰
Free Games Site = $13K/Month 🎰
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Free Games Site = $13K/Month
Starting Monday: Free 5 Day VA Challenge
Acquired Product: From $0 to $8K/Month in 6 Months
Jay-Z’s Unpaid Internship
Accidental Entrepreneur Now Earns $100K+ Per Year
My Big TV Appearance Last Week
From VA to $600K In Only 2 Years
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Free Games Site = $13K/Month
Nigel Hall is the founder of DemoSlot, a site that lets you play 100s of free demo casino games 🎰
Nigel kindly shared his latest numbers with us via email…
I recently had a 12k euro ($13K USD) month…
I started the site in 2021 and I would say it took around 6 months to start making 1k consistently a month.
🚀 How it started…
I got into the niche as I had worked in land based amusements in the UK for over 20 years so was well versed in slot machines and gambling.
I played online myself so trying to find a way into the niche was always something I had in mind, and demoslot in the end seemed the best way to do it.
DemoSlot itself is free to use as all the games are just fun play, no payment required.
💰 The site earns money via affiliate programs to paid casino games, like the ones listed on this page.
Nigel tells us…
Yes, this is all affiliate revenue and SEO [Traffic].
Additionally, if you look at the site header, there are a few language options, which surely helps Nigel attract a bigger audience 📈
Nigel's advice for others…
Concentrate purely on personal development and focus on the things you can change rather than those you can’t...
… and no matter how many times you feel like giving up, dig in, persevere and never give up.
My top takeaway here: Nigel leveraged knowledge he gained from previous work experience to build a successful website.
What niches or industries have you worked in before? 🤔
Could you leverage your knowledge and/or connections there to build an online business?
Starting Monday: Free 5 Day VA Challenge
Today's email is brought to you by The 5 Day VA Challenge.
This is a free challenge by Hannah Dixon to help you get started as a virtual assistant 🚀
You'll learn…
What skills to focus on
How to find clients
How to sharpen your entrepreneurial mindset
It starts Monday, April 1st (no joke).
One person who went through it before wrote…
I met super cool people and got a client by the end of the challenge!
Acquired Product: From $0 to $8K/Month in 6 Months
Tibo Louis-Lucas recently tweeted…
6 months ago, I acquired Typeframes - I thought I’d lose it all.
The tool had an awfully high churn rate (around 30%).
And the space is one of the most competitive I've ever seen 😱
Fast forward to last month, Typeframes reached $5K [Monthly Recurring Revenue] and just crossed $8K MRR 🤯
Tibo explains what Typeframes does in another tweet…
✅ create videos from text-only
✅ auto-sync with music beats
✅ generate a voice and talking avatars
✅ generate custom AI video footage
✅ access tons of video footage and animations
The goal: to make it so easy to create videos that you actually start creating some, and grow your business much more
Tibo acquired the business back in September 🤝
Unclear how much he paid, but it sounds like it was about to be abandoned by the founder so he likely got a good deal…
I wanted the tool to stay alive!
So, I made a proposal for it.
Typeframes didn't have any recurring revenue when Tibo bought it.
But just a couple of weeks later he tweeted that it was earning $377/month…
Typeframes growing slowly! 🎉
You may wonder why it was at 0 2 weeks ago?
Because it was not a subscription model and I quickly changed that.
Current challenge: justify the subscription model and find people who constantly need to build new videos.
Typeframes was a fairly simple text-to-video tool when acquired. Then Tibo started adding AI features like talking avatars, AI video and stock footage.
He's shared his progress via X, see all his tweets about Typeframes here 👈
To grow the business, it surely helps that Tibo has a big audience on X (114k followers).
But methinks his November launch on Product Hunt was a big turning point…
1700+ upvotes
#1 product of the day
#4 product of the month
Of course, that wasn't Tibo's first rodeo.
As you can see here, over the years he's gained a ton of experience building products and launching them on Product Hunt 💪
One of those "overnight success" stories that was several years in the making.
Anyway, here's an idea for you 👇
Start a service business with tools like Typeframes and Slant it.
Use them to create nice demo and promo videos for businesses.
Practice for a few weeks and get good enough to charge $500+ per video 🤑
To find your first clients: pick some businesses you admire and make some free videos for them, then reach out and ask for testimonials.
Leverage those samples and testimonials to find more clients.
🗂 Jay-Z’s Unpaid Internship
From the archive, published April 2022…
Here’s a story about the world’s first billionaire rapper 😎
From the book Empire State of Mind, describing a then-19-year-old Jay-Z…
Upon returning to the United States, Jay-Z talked his way onto the tour bus of Big Daddy Kane, a successful rapper from hip-hop’s golden age in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A host of hip-hop luminaries joined Kane on tour, including Queen Latifah, MC Serch, Shock G, and a young Tupac Shakur.
As a member of Kane’s posse, Jay-Z would sometimes go onstage during intermissions to entertain crowds with his spitfire freestyle delivery. Though Jay-Z today grosses millions per show, he spent four months in 1989 working the hip-hop equivalent of an unpaid internship—rapping for room and board, which consisted of a spot on the tour bus floor and a free pass at the buffet.
Gotta start somewhere, right?
Accidental Entrepreneur Now Earns $100K+ Per Year
Jake Ross is the founder of Build You Marketing, a full service marketing agency.
Per a recent interview, Jake has grown the agency to $100K/year revenue in only 2 years 🚀
As a child, Jake was diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson syndrome and had stitches in his eyes to prevent blindness…
One day, my Mom brought in a box of sports cards. I’d open up the packs, and she’d read off the player’s name since I was unable to see.
As soon as I could see again, I would sort these pieces of cardboard every which way. I fell in love with the hobby.
👉 That led to his first online venture…
I started a YouTube channel to show off my collection and grew to over 11,500 subscribers. Through this process, I observed the power of community first hand.
Jake adds…
I am an ‘accidental’ entrepreneur.
I had already built my sports trading card community, wrote a newsletter for an organization and had a year of experience where I learned the agency business model… so I said, “I should try freelance marketing.”
Which led to him starting a marketing agency.
How he got that off the ground…
I approached my first customer and offered to write his newsletter for him. That sales call turned into me also helping him establish a presence on YouTube…
Sounds like Jake knew the newsletter well and felt confident he could do a good job taking over the writing.
I like this approach to finding client work: identify people doing work you admire, figure out a way to help them, then pitch your services 💬
Although even with that approach, don't expect it to be easy.
As Jake writes…
As in any business, acquiring your first 5-10 customers is a difficult process. And, as a college student, you really do not have much credibility yet.
I was lucky that I found those companies and founders that were willing to take a shot on me. After that, it was a lot easier to grow.
So Jake's gone from near blindness to building a sports card community to growing a $100K/year marketing business.
And best I can tell, he's still in his 20's 💪
My Big TV Appearance Last Week
Ever heard of the Today Show?
It's a daily show on NBC in the US, with apparently 2.5 million tuning in per episode 👀
They reached out a couple of months back, inviting me to contribute to a story they were doing on affiliate marketing scams.
The 6-minute segment aired last week – watch it on YouTube 👈
I'm on screen for about 20 seconds starting at the 2:45 mark.
They reached out after finding my review of Legendary Marketer, one of the more questionable affiliate marketing courses.
Affiliates of that course can earn $1000 per sale – about as good as it gets – but our approach is to review each course honestly and fairly, even if that means lower commissions.
So in the review we write about several downsides of Legendary Marketer, and share critiques from students 😡
Because of that, I exchanged a bunch of emails with a producer from the Today Show and ended up on a call with him.
About a month later, we did a 30-minute recorded interview, a small piece of which ended up in the final segment.
I tracked the time I devoted to the whole thing and it added up to more than 8 hours.
8 hours for 20 seconds of air time 😜
I still see it as a good trade-off though; a nice feather in my cap, and a good credibility indicator for my website (I've added the Today logo to my site header).
One thing I said in the segment…
If you work hard at building up an affiliate marketing business for a year, not just a side hustle, the best-case scenario is that you’d be earning $1,000 a month after 12 months.
To elaborate: you can definitely be earning more than that after 12 months.
But if you get into affiliate marketing with that expectation – that $1000/month is the best-case scenario after a year – you're far more likely to succeed, IMO.
Because most people get into it thinking they'll be earning $1000's in no time, work hard for a few weeks, then grow disillusioned and give up when they don't see fast results 😩
But if you can stick with it for the long run, keep experimenting and improving your skills, the odds are in your favor.
🗂 From VA to $600K In Only 2 Years
From the archive, published January 2023…
As I’m writing this, a company called Saenz Global has a broken website and a combined ~2000 followers on Instagram and TikTok.
And yet they apparently earned over $600,000 in revenue in their first 2 years of operations 💰
The company is essentially a small team that provides virtual assistant services for the roofing industry.
Founder Thais Saenz said in a recent interview that she left her corporate job to build the business 🏗
Her first clients were “anyone that is alive and breathing and has a business” and she would help manage their social media presence.
Thais’ initial clients included…
🌮 A taco company
💊 A pharmacy
🪟 A window and door installer
🍕 A pizza shop
Thais started hiring help pretty quick. Then she landed a roofing client, learned how to do permitting for that industry, and decided to niche down and focus on roofers exclusively.
She says niching down “has been the best thing that ever happened to our company.”
The hardest thing about starting the business?
It was all mental, the confidence, the battling the inner doubts… like is someone really going to pay for this? … it was the constant fear of rejection.
I was so afraid to post on Facebook that I had a company because, oh my gosh, what if I don’t do a good job? What are people gonna think? What if my co-workers see all of these things?
To overcome all this, Thais’ motto became, “do things scared.”
In other words: she treated her fear like a pothole, not a dead end. She would see it, acknowledge it, and keep driving regardless 💪
Also a good reminder in that interview about the power of TikTok: when they had only 570 followers, Thais says the company was still getting about 10 discovery calls a week from the platform.
I believe that’s because TikTok is amazing for showing your content to the exact audience it’s made for. Saenz Global makes content for roofers, and TikTok ensures they see it 👀
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. If you'd like some help getting started as a virtual assistant, check out Hannah Dixon's free 5 Day VA Challenge.
It starts on Monday, and people say things like this about it…
The 5 day VA Challenge was the tipping point, that was the end of the old me and the beginning of my new life, literally.
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