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- 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
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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
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$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.
Quit His Frustrating Job and Built a $1.5M/Year Business
Jason Yormark is the founder of Socialistics, a "social media agency that helps businesses turn their social media efforts into real measurable results."
Per a recent interview, they’re doing $1.5M/year 💰
Jason says…
I’ve been involved with social media marketing since 2007, and have pretty much carved my career out of that. It was a natural progression for me to transition into starting a social media agency…
I had to side hustle something long enough to build it up to a point that I could take the leap and risk going full time on my own…
This went on for about 18 months at which point I had reached the breaking point of my frustrations of working for someone else, and felt I was ready to take the leap since I had the wheels in motion.
📈 To get traction…
I tapped into my existing network to get my first few clients. Then it was a mix of trade shows, networking events, and throwing a bit of money at paid directories and paid media.
This is really a long game. You have to plant seeds over time with people and nurture those relationships over time. A combination of being helpful, likeable and a good resource for folks will position you to make asks in the future.
If people respect and like you, it makes it much easier to approach for opportunities when the time comes.
Solid advice.
It’s also highly likely that you'll find your first clients in your existing network; you just have to put yourself out there 📣
Jason adds…
I launched the agency about 7 years ago, so we are benefiting from the years of pushing out content regularly, so we have a decent inbound flow of leads.
Just like any other business…
Owning a marketing agency is going to have hills and valleys no matter what you do.
IMO, service businesses are an underrated way to earn a good living online.
That's why I often recommend freelancing as the best way to start earning online 🚀
You start out selling your existing skills – or even skills you're still learning – and you can evolve that business into an agency over time.
$1.5 million per year might sound unrealistic, but it starts with finding just 1-2 clients to work with.
Use the three methods outlined here to find those first clients 👍
Their No-Code Tool Earned $60,000 in 6 Months
Dan Kulkov and Sveta Bay are the founders of FounderPal, an AI-powered marketing co-pilot for your business 🤖
You can use it to come up with marketing strategies, user personas, business ideas, etc.
🤑 Sveta revealed in a recent interview that their main product…
Brings us around $10,000/mo via one-time payments…[and has] earned us $60,000 in 6 months.
She also writes…
We started Indie Entrepreneurship two years ago with MakerBox. After years of working with teams, we both wanted to spend less on communication and more time on building good products.
That’s how we started to sell digital products around marketing…
This led us to $5000/mo. But after months of experiments, we couldn’t go beyond it. We noticed that Founders prefer tools over educational resources.
That’s when we added a sprinkle of AI. We launched Marketing Mega-Prompts — a paid collection of 40 unique ChatGPT prompts. BOOM, the sales are pouring in.
💡 The key insights for Dan and Sveta…
many Solopreneurs want to outsource marketing badly. However, current AI products only focus on generating cheesy email subject lines and spammy blog posts for SEO.
1. Solopreneurs need a strategic CMO, not a content marketing intern.
2. People prefer clicking buttons more than texting with ChatGPT
3. We know how to write unique mega-prompts
Those insights led to what is now their main product: Marketing Strategy Generator
So basically Dan and Sveta mastered AI prompting for a specific audience (marketers), then turned that expertise into a time-saving product.
Could you do something like this for your audience? 🤔
Being marketers, Dan and Sveta didn't really know how to code.
So…
We built FounderPal with no-code to move fast. Instead of spending 3 months to learn basic programming, we pay Bubble $32/mo to ship in 3 weeks. This approach allowed us to work alone without any external funding.
The first version was very minimalistic and only cost us $150 in the first month (Bubble + OpenAI costs).
Looks like Twitter is a key marketing channel for them; Dan and Sveta have amassed a combined ~50k followers on there 📈
That existing audience was also key to a successful launch on ProductHunt.
Sveta's tips for PH 👇
Focus on getting into the top 5. This will be good enough to get traffic and free features from newsletters (for example, AI newsletters monitor every AI-related tool).
If you can’t get past 100 upvotes [on PH], that’s a good sign to double-down on audience building.
Seems like an unfair advantage, having an audience like that.
But everyone starts with zero followers.
Start building your audience today and you'll reap the benefits down the line 💪
🗂 The First Thing You Do Every Day
From the archive, published February 2023…
Here’s a highlight from the book Essentialism that Readwise recently resurfaced for me…
One practice I’ve found useful is simply to read something from classic literature (not a blog, or the newspaper, or the latest beach novel) for the first twenty minutes of the day. Not only does this squash my previous tendency to check my e-mail as soon as I wake up, it centers my day. It broadens my perspective and reminds me of themes and ideas that are essential enough to have withstood the test of time.
The bigger message here is to start your day proactively, not reactively.
What’s the first thing you do on your computer each morning? 🌅
Do you dive straight into checking messages and notifications, or do you nourish yourself with some deep reading or by taking a chunk out of the biggest task on your to-do list?
…
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. Today's email is brought to you by Helium 10 👈
Use this link to sign up and get 35% off for the first 2 months. With that you'll have full access to their highly-rated Amazon software and training.
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