- eBiz Insider
- Posts
- SEO community side gig = $891,000 per year 😎
SEO community side gig = $891,000 per year 😎
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
SEO Community Side Gig = $891,000 Per Year
Your First $25K Revenue on Amazon
$400K and 23 Countries From a $30 Plugin
Six-Figure Niche Staffing Marketplace
Quit His Frustrating Job and Built a $1.5M/Year Business
Their No-Code Tool Earned $60,000 in 6 Months
The First Thing You Do Every Day
Did someone forward this to you? → subscribe here
SEO Community Side Gig = $891,000 Per Year
Check out Traffic Think Tank, an online membership community for SEOs.
The membership is $99/month and per a recent profile the business was sold for $1.8 million last year 💰
There were 750 paying members at the time of sale.
750 x $99 x 12 = $891,000 per year 😎
Confirmed via the profile…
it was bringing in about $1 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue), according to one founder’s LinkedIn profile.
Matthew Howells-Barby, Ian Howells and Nick Eubanks are the founders of TTT…
The crazy thing is, this was always a side gig for the three founders. For six years, they were juggling it alongside their full-time jobs.
Why sell at all? “We didn’t have the time required to take it to the next level,” Howells-Barby told They Got Acquired.
🚀 Origin story…
Back in 2014, Howells-Barby got invited into a small, private Facebook group where top SEO experts shared strategies that had worked for them. The cardinal rule: Nothing was to be leaked outside the group.
Then…
In 2017, he and his two co-founders – who were all members of the Facebook group – launched Traffic Think Tank. They organized it like this:
– Charge a $99-per-month subscription for access to a private Slack community.
– Publish a new piece of educational content every week.
– Allow members to ask them questions directly.
– Host a monthly live Q&A on Zoom.
😕 They weren't sure it would work, but it did…
They limited their community to 100 members at first, and they quickly maxed that out. While they focused on educational content, it became apparent that Traffic Think Tank was really in the business of personal connections.
The more connections it facilitated, the more valuable it became.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any mention of how they got those first 100 members paying $99/month.
I assume all 3 founders had a bit of an audience already and leveraged that 💪
Matthew’s insight for anyone building a community…
Your customers are also the product. The less satisfied those customers are, the less valuable the community is as a whole.
At $99/month, TTT is also a nice contrast to the $9/month membership business we featured recently.
Both did well, so clearly this model can work at higher and lower price points 🤑
Also, I like how Matthew came up with the idea after spending time in another community on the same topic.
Are you part of any communities that you find lacking?
Could you start your own (better) version and charge for it? 🤔
Your First $25K Revenue on Amazon
Today's email is brought to you by Helium 10 👈
Helium 10 is a popular all-in-one software used by Amazon sellers. It has over 20 tools in product and keyword research, listing optimization, operation, analytics, marketing, and more.
Plus, when you sign up you get access to Freedom Ticket, a highly-rated Amazon FBA course 🥳
One student told us…
[Freedom Ticket] teaches fundamentals and covers pretty much everything you need to know to earn your first $25k revenue on Amazon.
👉 Use this link to sign up to Helium 10 Platinum before Apr 30th, and you can get 35% off for 2 months.
So it costs only $65 to get started. With that you'll have full access to the software + the training and you can cancel the monthly payments at any time 😎
$400K and 23 Countries From a $30 Plugin
FormCraft is a form plugin for WordPress that was launched back in 2013 by Nishant Agrawal.
Nishant sells the plugin via the CodeCanyon marketplace 👀
The listing shows 21,000+ sales at $30 per license.
21K x $30 = $630,000 🤑
CodeCanyon takes a cut of that revenue, but even so it's likely Nishant has earned around $400,000 from that plugin alone.
🏝️ That income has given him a lot of freedom…
In 2013 I gave up my apartment to live a nomadic life, while working on FormCrafts. I have since been to 23 countries, and lived in 8 of them.
I tried out the demo version of Nishant's plugin. It's simple to use but packs in a lot of features.
However, browse the comments and reviews and you'll see a lot of complaints and feature requests 💬
One request that Nishant says isn't possible with the plugin…
We want to created a web based form that will serve as a check-in kiosk for delivery drivers at a stationary iPad. They will need to submit information like name, number, tracking number but also the ability to take pictures of the delivery notice with the iPad camera without leaving the form page. Is this possible?
So clearly there are plenty of opportunities to build an improved version of FormCraft.
Or, better yet, to create a niche version that solves a specific problem like the one above 👆
Of course, you'd need to do some research to make sure there's a big enough market there for a viable business.
Beyond this, you could browse CodeCanyon or similar marketplaces, looking for other long-time bestsellers with lots of complaints or feature requests 🧐
🗂 Six-Figure Niche Staffing Marketplace
From the archive, published August 2022…
Another niche success story: Locumate “connects pharmacies and temporary pharmacists (called locums in Australia) through their marketplace.”
Despite only launching in January and being focused on a specific niche in a relatively small market (Australia), Locumate is apparently on track to generate $100,000+ in revenue in its first year 📈
The company is run by a husband and wife team, Surge Singh and Kavita Nadan. Kavita owns a pharmacy herself, so she had lots of insight and connections in the industry.
This is another angle to consider for whatever industry you’re interested in or have access to: what connections or transactions in that industry could you help facilitate? 🧐
If it’s tough for two groups in that industry to do business, there might be an opportunity for a marketplace to make it easier.