Many of us have dreamed of quitting our jobs in pursuit of our passion projects. From starting YouTube channels to opening up at commissions, there’s a plethora of options for making money that isn’t tied to a 9-5.
Take blogging for example; according to First Site Guide, there are about 570 million blogs on the internet. Of those 570 million, about 1 in 4 people surveyed said they started their blog because they wanted to be self-employed.
But how do you get started making an income as a new blogger? Renowned entrepreneur Neil Patel looked to answer this question with his famous $100k challenge. Starting a new blog from scratch, Neil hoped to achieve his goal of earning $100,000 per month from the blog within one year.
Sounds crazy right? While Neil already had plenty of blogging experience before embarking on his challenge, his notes concerning what steps he took each month of the challenge can give us a road map for how we can emulate his success story.
With this post, I’d like to break down Neil’s strategy month-by-month in the hopes that it helps you build a successful blog of your own.
The Starting Line
Neil begins his journey explaining the most crucial component of making money from your blog; traffic. That’s because blogs make money from visitors coming to your site, so the more visitors, the more money you can make. Pretty self-explanatory stuff.
Therefore, Neil reasons that his primary focus will be building traffic. He estimates that for a blog marketing to consumers you’d need between 1-1.5 million visitors per month to earn $100,000 per month. By the end of the challenge, it turned out that just 200,000 visitors a month was enough to reach their goal.
Based on these goals, it was decided that affiliate products and ads would not be a focus because of their low earning potential. Instead, the focus would be on selling digital products (like ebooks), subscription services (for recurring income), and physical products.
With these ideas in mind, let’s dive into the first month.
Month 1 – April
Visitors: 35,419
The first month ended up with an impressive 35,000 visitors to the site, mostly thanks to a single post on Neil’s new nutrition blog that went viral on Facebook. At the time, the blog only had four posts in total as the focus was on traffic acquisition over content creation.
Neil explains how managed to drive so much traffic in only a month: Facebook ads.
Like any other ad service, Facebook ads can get expensive fast if you’re just blindly creating ad campaigns. Using the default target audience generated by Facebook will end up costing you a dollar per like, or more. To keep prices low, Neil decided to target an international audience in countries where English was popular. Ads targeted towards countries in regions such as southeast Asia are significantly cheaper than those targeting Americans.
So while the blog’s overall audience was aimed at an American market, Neil chose to target his ads towards a cheaper ad demographic in order to more cost-effectively increase the amount of likes on his page. His ad campaign ended up driving 3,282 likes and averaged 3 cents per like.
Once Neil felt he had gotten enough likes, he switched gears and started reaching out to Facebook pages with 30,000 or fewer followers to do shout out for shout out deals. He would tell his followers to like and follow the other page, and the page he reached out to would do the same for him. Neil calculated that about 1 in 10 pages reciprocated his request for the shout out. By the end of the first month, the Facebook page gained over 50,000 fans.
The last major strategy used this month was googling related resource pages and emailing their corresponding site owners to add Neil’s blog to the site. Finding .edu resource pages was the biggest priority since links from them have more impact than a regular .com site.
Here’s a link to one of the resource pages as an example: https://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/nut/extension/nutrition_links.html
Month 2 – May
Visitors: 33,216
Because of potential legal issues, Neil brought on Mike Kamo, a certified nutritionist, to fact-check his content and help write material for the blog.
Too many visitors were coming from Neil Patel’s blog chronicling the 100k challenge, so he decided to stop linking to his nutrition blog from it. Other major traffic sources this month were 9,563 Facebook visitors (with the associated Facebook page hitting over 100,000 fans) and 1,786 Google visitors.
Neil was no longer paying for ads at this point and was continuing to focus on shout-out-for-shout-outs with other nutrition Facebook pages as well as fostering engagement by creating relevant Facebook posts. Buzzsumo, a site that helps you find posts with lots of engagement, was one of the sources from which Neil and Mike found articles to share with their audience. Neil also mentions browsing competing nutrition Facebook pages to see what kind of articles were working well for them.
Month 3 – June
Visitors: 33,562
While the blog only received an increase of 1,287 visitors, Neil stated he felt confident about the direction of the blog.
This month, search engine visitors grew from 1,786 to 3,675. The growth was good, but not at the point the blog wanted to reach. Unfortunately, it takes around 5-6 months for a site to begin gaining weight in Google’s algorithm, but the blog was slowly making its way there.
For those reading this in hopes of starting their own successful blog, keep in mind that blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time for a blog to gain enough traffic to be able to generate significant income. Three months in, Neil’s blog had yet to be monetized, meaning no income was being generated despite all of the effort put in thus far.
Moving on, the Facebook page saw a decrease in traffic to the site this month so Neil and Mike shifted their focus towards writing more mainstream content that would do well in the long run. At this point, Mike was posting 4-5 articles per week.
With more content being produced, the blog started to gain traction with its email list. The blog’s biggest fans subscribed to the emailing list which in-turn, encouraged them to keep revisiting the site. According to the blog’s analytics, over 80% of all comments on the blog came from the email list. It may feel too sales-y to market your email list when you first start, but it’s an essential part of keeping your biggest fans engaged.
The other method of building the site was continuing with acquiring links. Previously, Mike and Neil had gone after .edu sites, but began branching out this month. They also began building relationships with big name sites like GQ and Vogue without yet asking for links.
Month 4 – July
Visitors: 26,370
This month the blog saw a considerable dip in traffic with only 26,370 visitors, about 7,000 of which came from search engine traffic. Despite this, the nutrition blog now ranked for over 100 keywords within the first 20 positions on Google.
Content-wise, Mike wrote an article every single day of the month, driving up their amount of content considerably. Neil aimed for Mike to be posting two articles per day, but ultimately it wasn’t sustainable due to time-constraints. The pair also continued manually reaching out to acquire backlinks to the site.
At this point, the blog was still not making any income, but the primary money-making strategy had been decided on. Neil planned to have them white-label fish oil supplements and advertise them on the blog. White-labeling is essentially the practice of taking an existing product and selling the product under your own name and label (with permission, of course). Neil noted that the ideal products to white label were those with over 500 reviews and an average rating of 4.5 stars or higher.
Months 5 & 6 – August/September
Visitors (in September): 66,473
No update went out in August, so these statistics are all from the month of September.
Traffic grew sharply this month, and Neil attributed it to a viral Facebook post on their page. The post in question was, “What Happens to Your Body When You Quit Sugar”. Search engine traffic also had a big boost to over 19,000 visitors. While better than July, Neil noted he was disappointed with the level of growth and attributed to them focusing too much on content creation and not enough on link building. The blog had over 100 articles on it by the end of the month.
To remedy this, Neil instructed Mike to search for links to posts similar to theirs, and then reach out to those posts to ask for a link to their own page instead. They also began to use Buzzsumo more heavily and reached out to users sharing popular posts and asking them to share content from the nutrition blog as well.
This strategy was a huge success and led to over 30,000 visitors from social media sites. You can see the outreach template they used for this here.
Last update for the month was successfully finding a fish oil brand willing to accept a white-label deal. The pair were unable to get it approved for Amazon before the end of the month, but hoped to have it ready soon.
Month 7 – October
Visitors: 42,822
Total visitors dropped in October, and Neil attributed this to Facebook posts not doing as well. On the other hand, traffic from search engines continued to rise to over 25,000 visitors. Despite social media taking a hit, the growth in search engine traffic is a positive sign. This is because social media takes sustained effort to maintain whereas visitors from search engines are more passive. Both sources are important, but search engines allow you to reach users who aren’t following your social media presence.
This month Neil and Mike also took a closer look to see which posts were getting the most attention. The pair found that their more unique posts such as “What happens to your body when you quit sugar” were vastly outperforming the topics that already had thousands of articles written about them. They decide to continue shifting their focus towards unique content to get the most bang for their buck.
The last big update for this month was the start of sales for the pair’s fish oil. Neil points out that the key to doing well on Amazon is good reviews- and at least 1000 of them.
Giving away the product in exchange for good reviews is both expensive and against the rules- a point that Neil makes clear. Instead, they decide to give away the fish oil at cost (so they neither gain nor lose money) and ask for reviews. Those who accept the oil aren’t obligated to write a review, but it’s a start. Once they reach between 500-1,000 reviews, they plan to adjust their product sales pitch to make it more attractive to consumers. This will involve analyzing the competition’s prices and product descriptions to better compete.
Month 8 – November
Visitors: 58,260
Traffic grew this month, including search engine visitors. Over 36,000 of the total traffic came from searches. Continuously posting new blog posts and asking for links back to their site has finally started to pay off.
While they note that producing constant content is important, Mike slowed down to writing only 2-3 articles per week.
As for their fish oil, Neil and Mike reached out to Amazon’s list of top 100 reviewers. They found that the top 100 generally wouldn’t accept the chance to review if the product wasn’t given away for free, but had more success the further down the list they got. Neil refers to it as “a numbers game”; the more people you reach out to, the more chances to get a review. They also made use of their growing email list to advertise their product. The email included a coupon which 61 people redeemed for a discounted bottle.
Though they managed to sell a few hundred bottles of fish oil, the pair encountered trouble with some negative reviews. Bottles were being sent to customers with smeared labels, making the products look unprofessional. Neil adds it to the to-do list for next month.
Months 9 & 10 – December/January
Visitors (in January): 159,945
A combined update again, the blog saw huge success in January largely in-part to weight loss New Year’s Resolutions. Thanks to the large number of visitors and health conscientiousness, $76,326 worth of fish oil supplements were sold.
Knowing January would be a big month, Mike increased his content production back up to 7 articles a week. Because of this, the content was fairly basic, but it did still help boost search engine traffic to a whopping 117,000 search engine visitors.
Not many other updates for this month, although the pair mentioned they were still tweaking their Amazon product page descriptions. Playing with the price point didn’t affect their profit margins one way or another, so refining their product copy was the best they could do here. Ads proved not to be cost-effective.
Month 11 – February
Visitors: 200,709
Month eleven saw another healthy increase in traffic. Despite this, revenue fell to $54,000 due to running out of fish oil stock. Neil estimates that their revenue would have been close to about $98,000 if they’d had enough inventory.
In the meantime, the pair tried out supplementing their revenue through affiliate marketing, meaning they advertise someone else’s product in return for a percentage of the sale. It ended up not generating them any sales and the strategy was abandoned. Neil attributes this to the fact that they used the affiliate’s product pitch instead of writing a better pitch themselves.
Month 12 – March
Visitors: 218,811
The final month! March is typically when health and fitness sites begin to see their increases taper off for the rest of the year, but the blog still did well. Less content was produced this month, but Mike ended the month coming up with new content ideas such as infographics to help spice up their content.
Amazon revenue hit the challenge’s goal at over $112,000 this month. As a round-up, Neil mentioned the key components to successfully growing Amazon sales:
- Getting lots of positive reviews, particularly by high-ranking reviewers
- Adding specific long tail keywords to your product page
- Combating negative Amazon reviews by leveraging your email list for more positive reviews
- Temporarily using ads to increase the number of sales to rank your product faster (though it isn’t cost effective in the long-run to keep using them)
Despite the lack of success last month, in March the pair decided to give another affiliate product a try. They tried a product called The Truth About Abs and found that it brought them a good amount of sales. By marketing the product to their email list, the pair made an extra $8,900 in revenue for the month.
If you want to make extra affiliate income off your blog, then Clickbank is the largest database for affiliate products. Signing up is free, and you can search by categories like popularity and revenue per sale.
Conclusion
Though it was a year in the making, Neil and Mike were able to meet, and exceed, their goal of generating at least $100,000 per month from their blog. Neil already had experience blogging before the challenge, but thanks to the in-depth explanation of all the moves they made, we hope this post will help you figure out how to get your blog to reach the same heights as theirs did!