TLDR - Lil Nas X was a college dropout sleeping on his sister’s couch with a negative balance in his Wells Fargo account. 5 months later he'd broke Mariah Carey’s record for the most consecutive weeks at No. 1. This post tells the story:

Part 1

Most musicians think like failed startups. Too much time creating. Not enough time promoting.

When Lil Nas X dropped out of college to pursue music he didn’t create much. Instead, he lived on Twitter, made online friends and got popular posting memes. His account quickly grew to 30,000 followers.

The plan was to use his following to promote his music. But it wasn’t that simple. In Nas’s words:

I’d post a funny meme and get 2,000 retweets. Then I’d post a song and get 10.

So Nas got creative. He stopped tweeting SoundCloud links and started writing a song he could promote through memes. In his words:

It had to be short. It had to be catchy. It had to be funny.

Old Town Road was the result. And on the 3rd December 2018 Nas paired it with a video of a dancing cowboy and shared it with his followers (see tweet).

The video went viral. So Nas stuck to this formula: Short viral videos. To the tune of Old Town Road. With the full song linked underneath.

As an unknown artist, it was the only way he could get the word out. And the views started piling up:

Part 2

Inspired by Old Town Road's success on Twitter it spread to TikTok, and then onto Billboard’s country music charts. Yes, the country music charts. Nas listed it as a country song aware that the charts were less competitive.

One week later Billboard removed it for “not being a country song”. Ironically, this was the best thing that could have possibly happened. Billboard's decision turned Old Town Road into a national talking point and two weeks later it was No. 1.

Nas wasn't stopping. He began lining up remixes with some of music's biggest stars.

Billboard has a loophole whereby remix plays count towards the original song's chart placement. With every remix millions more streams poured in, and Old Town Road became impossible to budge.

17 weeks later he'd broke Mariah Carey’s record for the most consecutive weeks at No. 1.

It’s easy to forget quite what an extraordinary achievement this is. Five months earlier, Nas was a college dropout sleeping on his sister’s couch with a negative balance in his Wells Fargo account.

Part 3

On my first day researching Old Town Road I read a quote from Nas:

A lot of people like to say “a kid accidentally got lucky”. No. This was no accident.

The more I learned about Nas the more I believed him.

A key moment in Old Town Road's rise was a video of a man standing on a galloping horse going viral on Twitter. The audio was set to Old Town Road. Different versions of the video were viewed millions of times.

I wanted to know how the video spread, so I did some digging and found it first posted on the 24th December: (see tweet)

I asked the Twitter user why he made the video. He told me that Nas sent it to him. But it doesn't end there.

Aware that people watching the video would search for the full song, Nas changed the song title on YouTube and SoundCloud to include the lyric from the viral video — “I got the horses in the back”.

He also posted on the NameThatSong subreddit which ranked on Google. Now, anyone searching from the video had an easy route to the song.

Things didn’t happen to Nas. Things happened because of Nas

Virality is not mystical. The story of Old Town Road is not magical.

Look behind the curtain: Nas is sitting in his underpants, on his sister's couch, iPhone in hand, making the whole thing happen.

No one knew him. No one wanted to check out his song. No one promoted anything for him.

He made friends, made them laugh, and built an audience. Then he packaged his song in a way that fit into their life. The rest is history.

A final quote from Nas to end:

u can literally scroll down my account and see my promoting this fuckin song for months. each accomplishment it gets just makes all this shit feel so worth it. i can’t stop taking about it.

***

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed it I share more real world marketing examples over on MarketingExamples.com

I see hundreds of post each week with people asking for the magic pill to become successful. I would sell this info for $99 but no one would buy it because there is really no secret to it.

1. Worked 14 years (steady 9-5 w2 job)without a vacation or a off day. Literally missed 6 hours of work the day my son was born and another day when I had the swine flu. Saved money

2. Picked a industry that created the most millionaires and spent every waking second learning as much as I could about the industry and all the different niches and verticals. (Real estate)

3. Found the most successful people in my area and emailed them asking how I could provide value to them in exchange for learning and eventually having opportunities to be apart of deals.

4. Obtained a real estate license and agreed to write offers for a group of investors, I would receive $750 at closing and credit the rest of my commission to the investors. Wrote thousands of offers and pocketed over $100k cash, credited close to a million to the investors.

5. Learned what the investors looked for, who they used for lending and contractors. Started to buy my own properties and do joint ventures with the investors group.

6. Found contractors in the service industry who were great operators but terrible at business. Bought into their companies and assembled a team to handle the backend. (Hvac, roofing, roll off dumpsters).

7. Built a portfolio of 19 rental houses that I paid on average $125k for. When the market spiked I sold 14 of the properties for a average of $310k per unit.

8. Paid off the 5 rental properties and that cash flow pays my living expenses. Dumped the rest of the money into a self strorage deal, and short term rentals. At the age of 38 my net worth was north of 4 million and my monthly cash flow from all properties and businesses is over $20k a month with some months hitting $60k. It took 20 years and a lot of 80 work weeks to build “passive income”. Looking back I regret not spending time with my kids and family. Having money is nice but relationships, family, health, and memories is a lot better. The more you make the more you spend. My life and problems are still similar to when I was paycheck to paycheck, I just have nicer cars, house, and am able to do whatever I want whenever I want. Which gets boring quicker than you would think. The market has changed so much I no longer invest in real estate, have seen a lot of people over leverage and lose it all. Hope this rant helps someone. Key point to take away is just find something and go all in, but also live your life and cherish your family, friends, health.

Hello from Tanzania,East Africa.

Sorry for my English,I have been I this sub for a while and it is very useful and inspiring.

I survive my selling coffee in my area,it's just a very busy area with a table and benches for people to sit. It's very common setting in Tanzania. I sell black coffee and ginger tea which is like 100Tsh per cup.

From starting with only 25$ as a capital untill now I managed save up to 250$ dollars . Although it's tough as I live in a very tight budget to save this.

I'm Targeting to a have a nice place and buy an espresso machine.

I just wanted to share my entrepreneur story. Thanks

A lot of you may recognize me from the post I did a few months ago regarding selling t-shirts on Amazon https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/56xvo1/how_we_made_150000_profit_slinging_tshirts_as_a and of course a ton of comments making jokes about the t shirt industry.

Since Merch by Amazon (the program I was using in the old post), is still on lockdown, I am going to show you step by step how to take graphics/designs, and sell them on Amazon on 10’s if not 100 different kind of items by using the new Shopify Amazon integration combined with print on demand services to fulfill your orders. This means you can take action TODAY.

Before any of you get on your pedestal about self promotion, yes, this did come from the Merch Informer blog, and yes you can do this method I am about to lay out for you 100% without using any tools. If you want to learn something, continue reading. If not, continue on with your day. Let’s do it.

What Is Merch?

If you have been reading what I have been posting this last year, you may be thinking about Merch by Amazon where the focus was just t-shirts. Merch, however, goes a lot more broad than that. This can include anything from funny novelty t-shirts to flags you hang on your wall, to the yoga pants that are worn to the gym and everything in between.

If you have sold on Amazon before, or pushed t-shirts and realized how many customers you have access to, then you know how lucrative it can be. Shirts are just the tip of the iceberg though. If you could start selling beach towels, coffee mugs, yoga pants, flags, and any other type of merch without ever seeing or touching inventory on Amazon, imagine how your earnings would explode overnight.

Why Merch?

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-revenue-1024x768.png

As you can see from the image above, Amazon is doing it’s very best to capture as much market share as it can. That is literally all they care about, grow bigger than everyone else! At the very end of 2015, they opened yet another program to attempt to take over another sector of the market: Merch by Amazon. This program was aimed at dominating the print on demand (POD) niche, and it was an overnight success.

This program allowed everyday people and designers like you and I to put up original artwork and funny says on novelty t-shirts and sell them to Amazon customers without ever dealing with customer support or touching the actual product. Amazon sold, packaged, and shipped your products and gave the designer a royalty. Earnings from early adopters were absolutely massive and in some cases into the 100’s of thousands of dollars.

Unfortunately, Amazon did not expect the monster growth of the Merch by Amazon program and quickly turned it into an invite only program. Recently they have been processing so many orders that they have completely stopped accepting people to the program and people who do have an account are not allowed to publish or are allowed to publish with restrictions.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/online-retailers.png

You can see that if you want to make money online by selling apparel, you NEED to be selling on Amazon. There is really no other way around it. By 2020 they are going to be absolutely dominating the online market place and you have the chance to be a part of it.

With Merch by Amazon closed to the public, and not wanting to deal with shipping items from China or dealing with a print shop for every order, what can be done?

Fulfillment by Amazon is an option, but from our experience, not a very good good one. You would have to buy the products a head of time and send them to a ware house. With Merch by Amazon, we clearly know that selling Merch hands off is the way to go!

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-Christmas.png

Use Shopify To Sell Your Merch!

Many of you reading this are at least familiar with Shopify as a content management system and online store payment processor. From here, you will be able to put your products up for sale and sell them to customers who visit your site.

With recent changes and Shopify integrating with Amazon, this 100% the way to go. Why?

You will have access to not only T-shirts but….

• Tank Tops

• Phone Cases

• Beach Towels

• Coffee Mugs

• Cutting Boards

• Stickers

• Long Sleeves

• Hoodies

• Dog Bowls

• Flags

• Blankets

• Mouse Pads

• Shower Curtains

and much more!

Are you starting to see the big picture here? You can take the artwork that you created for shirts or other mediums, and turn a single image into 10s if not hundreds of different products that you will sell ON Amazon.com. No more handling inventory or trying to drive traffic to your store anymore.

This is going to be a long one, so strap in, and let’s go over step by step on how to set up everything so you are no longer held back by Merch limits.

Shopify Amazon Print On Demand Method

To make this method work for you, you are going to need 4 things.

• Understand Amazon BSR (Best Sellers Rank) and what sells best on Amazon

• Designs/Artwork

• Amazon Seller Account

• Shopify Account

Let’s go over how I get everything set up and then we will tie them all together.

Understanding What Sells on Amazon (Best Sellers Rank)

The very first thing you need to do before you start your journey is understand what sells best on Amazon, how to spot these items, and how to properly research the different niches you want to create merch around. There are two very key aspects that you need to have a solid understanding of to have any success. These are Amazon BSR or Best Sellers Rank, and the second is understanding Copyright/Trademark.

Amazon BSR (Best Sellers Rank)

Every single product that is sold on Amazon has something in the product information called the Best Sellers Rank or Amazon BSR. It will look very similar to this:

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/BSR.png

The BSR is a representation of how well that item is selling in its respective category. The smaller the number, the more items they are selling. The higher number, the fewer items they are selling. For example, if a shirt were to hit number 1 in clothing, it would be the most popular shirt selling on Amazon.

From my experience selling, a BSR of around 100,000 in clothing equates to around 1 sale per day. This is not set in stone, but 100k BSR is usually what I focus my sites on when doing niche research.

Copyright/Trademark

You also need to have a full understanding that you are not allowed to infringe on someone else’s copyright or trademarks. This means that you are NOT allowed to simply copy someones design and put it up on another piece of merchandise. Doing so would be breaking copyright laws.

If someone has a particular saying in their artwork that is selling particularly well, they might decide to trademark that term. This would mean that you are NOT allowed to use this term in any of your designs even if it looks completely different.

Copyright and Trademark are both different beasts so make sure you are not infringing on someone else’s intellectual property. A lot of times, you might put something up on Amazon which then gets trademarked later on down the road. They can then use this trademark to come after you and the items you put up causing infractions and an entire mess. If you have thousands of products up like we do, this can be almost impossible to keep track of. If you are at all concerned about this, make sure you are checking daily.

Getting Designs/Artwork

When I first started, I created some designs myself. Since I am not a designer by trade, this took a lot of my time up and I had to actually watch some tutorials on YouTube to make sure I was using Photoshop correctly. Once I saw just how well my designs were selling on Amazon, I started to scale up very quickly and this meant getting a designer (or 5), on board to start cranking out original designs.

Finding a good designer can be extremely hard. You want one that you can count on to be on time, every time. You also want a designer that has some integrity and will be original when you send them ideas. I have managed to hire my entire team of designers at full time for $4 per design each. This may just be personal experience but a lot of them from the Philippines and this really ads up to a great wage in that part of the world.

I have found excellent success by using Upwork. Upwork is a marketplace to post jobs you are interested in completing and then hiring freelancers. Below is the script that I used to hire each one of my designers.

Hey, I am in need of 400 t-shirt designs in the time period of 2-3 months.

Your task will be pretty basic, I will send you ideas of t-shirts I want to make and you make them yourself in your own unique style. For example, I might send you a link of a already existing tshirt and I would need you to be inspired by it and create a better version that is in your own creative style.

I will leave a lot of 5* reviews so that you will be able to get jobs easier in the future and this is a long-term position. Once we have done the first batch of 400 – around 4 per day, we could continue if everything looks good.

I look forward to doing business with you!

This works well for me because I always have a lot of designs for them to do because I am quickly scaling up so they will have some long term work from me. It also works well because a lot of very talented people are new to the Upwork platform and are trying to build up their profile to find other jobs. Lots of great reviews from you as a satisfied client can help them in this journey. What this means for you is that they are going to put the best effort forward in order to earn those 5 stars.

Quick Note: Weeding Out Bad Designers

When I first tried to hire someone to design for me, they stole images and straight up copied designs. This is wrong, and will get your Merch account banned. I was not able to use any of these designs.

When I first hired someone, I let them know that they cannot use any images which are Copyrighted, or infringe on any Copyright someone else owns.

Then, I will send them a T-Shirt idea that is very clearly Copyright infringement. If they copy it or do not change it enough to be considered free use, I will immediately get rid of that designer (and that design). The design may have cost me $4, but that is an extremely small price to pay to weed out the copycats!

Amazon Seller Account

The next piece of the puzzle that you are going to need is is an Amazon seller account. You can sign up for one here: https://sellercentral.amazon.com

This will ask you to sign into your Amazon account and if you do not have one already, simply sign up for one.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/sign-up-for-Amazon.png

Once you are signed up and logged in, there are few things you are going to want to do. First you will want to navigate to the upper right hand corner to “Settings” and then Account Information. It will bring you to a page that looks like this:

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/information.png

Fill out the Deposit information so that you are going to get paid, and the tax information. Feel free to change any of the other information but for now all that you need to change is how you get paid, and the tax information.

Next, navigate to the left hand corner of that page where you should see a “Your Services” box.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/your-services.png

Click on Manage and then upgrade your account to a Professional Account.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/your-services.png

This offers you multiple benefits. It will cost you $39.99 a month, but…

• No $0.99 Closing Fee for each item sold, only a monthly $39.99 subscription fee, referral fees and variable closing fees

• Ability to collect US sales and use taxes on your orders

• Customize your shipping rates and services levels for all products (except Books, Music, Videos and DVDs)

• Manage your inventory using feeds, spreadsheets, and reports

• Manage orders using order reports and order-related feeds

• Access Amazon Marketplace Web Service to upload feeds, receive reports, and perform other API functions

• Ability to offer Promotions and Gift Services

• Eligibility for Featured Merchant status and listing placement in the Buy Box.

Simply put, If you are selling more than 40 pieces of merchandise a month, you are much better off get a pro account so you have higher profit margins. For this method to work with shopify, a Pro account is REQUIRED.

Shopify Account

Getting a Shopify account is extremely easy and they have a 14 day FREE trial. Head on over to Shopify.com and click on the get started box in the upper right hand corner.

You will then just need to fill out your email address, password, and the store name you want to create.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/set-up-shopify-store.png

Click on the big green create your store button and Shopify will start setting itself up.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/setting-up-a-store-300x177.png

Connecting Shopify and Amazon For No Inventory Fulfillment

Now that you have a fancy new Shopify store for free for the next 14 days, it is time to start taking advantage of what it has to offer. At first, your store will look just like this when you log in.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/brand-new-created-store-1024x631.png

In the lower hand corner, you will see “Apps”. Click on this.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/apps.png

What we are looking for here is an App that will fulfill all your orders for you. This is how we are going to print on demand without holding any inventory ourselves.

Search for Teelaunch. It will bring up the page for this app that looks like this:

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-app.png

Click on the big green “get” button to install this app. You will need to quickly confirm that you want to install it on your shopify store.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/install-app.png

Click on Install App and let it do its thing. Once the app is installed, go back to the left hand side menu, and click on Apps again. We are about to set up this app and add our first product.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-1024x164.png

Once you click on the app, you should see this dashboard:

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/new-product-1024x303.png

Click on the Account button in the upper right hand corner. We want to make sure everything is set up to auto accept and fulfill orders.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-account.png https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-account-1.png

Fill out this page making sure that the top box says “YES”. You will need to add a credit card for the orders that you send Teelaunch. While you will be paying them the base price for the shirts and other merchandise orders you send them, you will be collecting the money from the sales in the Amazon central account.

You will also need to set Shopify to NOT automatically fulfill orders. To do this, go into your Shopify settings -> Checkout and then in the Order processing section, unselect to automatically fulfill the order items. In most cases “Do not automatically fulfill any of the order’s line items” will be selected which is the setting you want.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/auto-fulfill-1024x513.png

Adding Your First Piece Of Merchandise

Now we are finally ready to add our first piece of merch. From the teelaunch app, you will want to click on “New Product” on the bar near the top of the page.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shirt-choices-1024x425.png

This is where you can see all the products that are available for you to put your designs on! Not only can you do shirts (which is what this entire tutorial is going to go over), but as mentioned above, there are so many other pieces of merch you can print and send to customers on Amazon. All without lifting a finger for the products yourself. Teelaunch will take the orders and ship them for you while you sit back and collect money off the designs and products!

For this method, we are going to be using the Gildan Unisex shirt. As you can see I have chosen that one on the screen. Once a product is chosen, scroll down to the bottom and click on “Start Designing”. This will bring up the product information and give you a little information about the shipping costs. This is also the space where you can upload your artwork to the shirts and pick what sizes and colors you want the shirt to be available in.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/publish-design-1024x536.png

As you can see, using this shirt, it will cost you $8.50 as a base price and $4 shipping. Click on “Choose File” to upload your design and then play around with dragging and dropping it as well as dragging the edges out so it displays properly on the shirt you want to list. I just took one of my Merch ready shirts to display how it would look. Pick a few colors and a few sizes.

Important: You will need a separate UPC code for every single color and size variation you pick. I will go into this in detail further down, but it is best to not automatically select every color and every size.

Once the design is looking good, click on Review and publish Designs. This will bring up a page where you can add product tags, add your selling price, title and description.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/setting-up-shirt-1024x535.png

Once you are satisfied with how everything looks, go ahead and click on publish at the bottom of the page and your shirt will start processing in all the colors and variations that you have picked.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/processing-to-store-1024x328.png

This can take a little while if you pick a lot of sizes and colors. As you can see from the above picture, I have 48 different variants of just this one shirt! Once it goes through all of them, your shirt is now published in the back end of your shopify store.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shirt-uploaded.png

The entire point is to publish your goods on Amazon though right? To do this, we need to connect them now.

Go back to the main shopify menu and click on “Add a sales channel”. This is BRAND new from Shopify and why I am so excited!

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/main-menu.png

You can also find the same thing from the home page. It will be at the bottom. From the screenshot here, you can see you need to hit the install Amazon button to add this as a sales channel to your site.

If you are new to shopify, you do NOT need to create an online store since we are interested in only selling your products on Amazon using a print on demand service (teelaunch).

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-Channel.png

Once that is installed, you should see the sales channel added to the menu.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-sales-channel.png

Go ahead and click on it and it will more than likely ask you to update Amazon. This is what you want to go ahead and update the sales channel.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/update-amazon-plugin.png

Once it is updated, you will be able to access the page. From here, you want to be able to connect shopify to your Amazon sellers account we set up earlier.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/connect-Amazon-account-1024x176.png

Click on Connect to Amazon. There is going to be a popup about Amazon MWS. You will need to agree to this. Essentially this is giving Shopify access to your seller central account so they can interact with each other properly.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/agree-to-Amazon-MWS.png

Once these are connected, you will see a screen that looks similar to this. You will see that the account is connected properly:

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/account-set-up-1024x544.png

Click on the Listings in the left hand corner. We want to take the shirt we just put online and then put that shirt we created in Teelaunch onto Amazon.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/sell-on-Amazon-1024x405.png

Click on the sell on Amazon button. This will bring up a list of the products that you have on Shopify that you may want to sell on Amazon. Since we used Teelaunch to create a shirt, this is what is going to come up in the list.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/select-product-1024x419.png

After you select the product that you want to list on Amazon, they are going to ask you if you are selling a product from another brand, or from your own brand. Select your own brand.

Note: For all the Merch by Amazon users, this is your first real opportunity to build a coherent brand and put work into growing your brand on multiple sales channels. You have full control here and will even be able to respond to the reviews you get!

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/select-your-brand-1024x326.png

When you pick that the product is made by your brand, you are going to come to the Amazon listing details. This is going to look very familiar to you if you have sold shirts on Merch before.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-Listing-Details-1024x540.png

Enter in the title, your brand name, the bullet points, and description. You will need to pick a category and will notice that you cannot sell the shirt for both genders at the same time. That is perfectly fine, you can go back after the shirt is live, and then sell the other genders version under the same listing.

Finally, when you scroll down, you will see variants that you have chosen when you were creating the shirt. There will be one for every color and size combo that you created.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Shirt-Varients.png

For each variant, go through and make sure the correct colored image is showing up for the title of that variant. As you can see from the above screenshot, I made sure the Royal Blue image is showing for the royal blue variant of the shirt.

SKU

You will need a unique sku for every single varient of your shirt. Your visitors will never see the SKU or the UPC, but Amazon requires you to enter this information in for every shirt Variant.

For the SKU, head on over to https://www.random.org/strings/ and select the following options and click go. You can generate however many strings you need by modifying the first box.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/use-for-SKUs-1024x622.png

You can use each line as one of your SKUs.

UPC

Each product and variant must have its own UPC code. These are 12 digit codes. If you have sold on Amazon FBA before, you may have used EAN. So far with the Shopify integration, these will not work so you will need the 12 digit UPC. I highly recommend buying these on Ebay. You can get 1000’s of them for only a few dollars. Once you have them, enter a unique UPC for every variant of the product.

Clothing and Apparel Category Approval

You will notice that Shopify tells you that you need approval from Amazon before you can list in this category. Click on the “apply to sell in this category” link and open it in a new tab.

Make sure you answer truthfully to these, but you will be auto approved in the end!

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/apply-to-category.png https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/apply-to-category-2.jpg

The next step is going to be answering some questions about the images you will use. Go through the questionnaire and make sure you answer them all properly. Remember that the images you will be using are being pulled from Teelaunch so they are all good to go with Amazon’s requirements.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-image-requirements-1024x515.png

After that is complete, fill out the information and submit your application!

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/submit-clothing-application.png

After you hit Submit Application you will now be instantly approved and can go back to your shirt listing you were working on in the other tab!

Finishing Amazon Listing

Now that you have your SKUs and UPCs listed on each variant of the product, it is now time to submit your product listing. If everything has been entered properly, your listing will go through!

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/listing-created-30-min-to-live-1024x173.png

As you can see from the image above, the listing has been successfully submitted to Amazon. Your listing should be listed in a pending status. This generally will change within 30 minutes to live and you will have a link to your product on Amazon.com.

Note On Shipping

When your product finally goes live and you check it, you might notice that the shipping is higher than you expected. Well, you can change this! The shipping is all controlled within your Amazon seller central account.

Head on over to your Amazon account and find the Shipping Settings and then Shipping Templates. Click on Edit Template and then you will be able to pick what type of shipping you will charge your customers.

As you can see from the screenshot, I decided to change shipping from $4.49 for everyone, to $2.99 for the lower 48 states.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shipping-times-1024x461.png

ROI Calculations

This is going to vary per shirt depending on what you price at. Keep in mind that with certain products you may be making a lot larger percentage. You might be making 100% ROI with yoga mats for example.

For shirts though, if you are pricing at 17 dollars, and charging 3 dollars shipping, then the total charge will be around $20. With Amazon fees around $3, and the t-shirt costing you $12.50 (cost of the shirt plus shipping) and a 30c Shopify fee, this leaves you around $4.25 profit for something you never touched! Scale that up by a few hundred if not thousands of shirts you are making great money.

Scale it up even further with the multitude of products you can reuse your designs on, and now you are talking about MASSIVE money, all from your original designs.

Getting Your First Sale on Shopify with Amazon

Now with your listings live, you are probably going to get some sales. When you get a sale, they will show up in Shopify (as well as seller central). Make sure you are only dealing with the orders through Shopify though.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/first-order.png

Getting your first order feels great! What is even better though is that from here it is 100% hands off.

If you go back down to apps and then go into the Teelaunch app, you should see this:

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-production-1024x360.png

Without touching it, your shirt is now being made with Teelaunch and will be shipped to your customer as soon as it is complete. This is possible for t shirts and all other products that teelaunch offers.

Fulfilling Orders Manually

If your orders are not automatically going through to Teelaunch, you will need to do them manually. The only reason this may be happening is that the Shopify/Amazon integration is BRAND NEW and I have been assured by higher ups that this is being worked on and will be fixed soon if anyone does encounter it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF9EMFzsXOI

Getting Revenue From Amazon

In order to get your money from your seller account on Amazon to your bank account, you need to have a few things.

The first thing is that you must have valid credit card information on file for verification and billing purposes. This is why you added this when you set up your seller account. The second thing you must have is valid bank account information so a transfer can occur. This can be added in the “my profile” section of your seller central account.

Basically the way it will work is that after you get a sale, it will show up in your Shopify account. Once the order is marked “fulfilled”, the buyer will be emailed to let them know that their product is on the way. The funds held within Amazon will be deposited to your account every 14 days. The good news is that you can request funds faster than that! Here is what Amazon has to say on the subject.

https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/amazon-payment.png

Wrapping It Up

The Shopify/Amazon integration represents a REAL massive opportunity in the print on demand space and is going to see plenty of people make millions of dollars a year. In order to take advantage of this opportunity successfully you need only a few things:

• Know what sells on Amazon

• Be willing to WORK and scale your business

• Know how to properly optimize your Amazon listings

If you are not hopping on this opportunity today, you are 100% leaving money on the table that is there for the taking. There is zero need to run traffic, zero inventory to hold, and 100’s if not 1000’s of possibilities for making money with the crazy selection of products you can now put for sale on Amazon.

That about raps it up ladies and gentlemen. Any questions ask them below.

I have an SaaS product in the tech space that was launched within the last two months. I built up an email list prior to launch, am running ads on various platforms and have some revenue coming in. However, my product is very niche and it’s hard to create look-a-like audiences for it.

I want to switch up my strategy to get a much broader reach and I think PR is probably my best option for reaching as many business-oriented people in the tech scene as possible.

Any suggestions on how to go about doing this? I am open to hiring a PR firm but afraid of partnering with the wrong one. Any green/red flags to look out for when searching?

Got ripped off by too many courses so took matters into my own hands

I scraped 112K total comments from Facebook Groups, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and X on discussions related to side hustles.

Used Grok and Gemini 2.5 to filter the ones with most sources reporting success & least upfront investment. Sorted into offline & online.

Offline side hustles:

1. Odd jobs on Taskrabbit like assembling furniture, mowing lawns or pressure washing. People say the leads are consistent and they can set their own schedule.

2. Dog sitting / walking on Rover then building your client list for long term stays which pay way more as some people avoid doggy day cares. With multiple dogs, people are making a solid income.

3. Being a senior companion through Care or Nextdoor / Facebook Groups. You don’t need medical experience. Just offer rides, company, or light errands. People are making a full time income with just a few clients per week.

4. Organize & promote local meetups related to specific interests. You find the venue and sell tickets through Facebook Events or Meetup. People host business networking, senior events, or dating advice seminars this way and make thousands per event every week.

5. If you live near even a semi-touristy city make a listing on Airbnb experiences for things like walking tours, food tours, bar crawls, couples photography, or other experiences. Earnings vary widely.

Online side hustles

6. Create an online newsletter for your city or county using Beehiiv. Write a bit of local news and feature ad spots for local businesses. Promote the newsletter by running Facebook Ads at very low daily spend that are geo-targeted to your city. Depending on population people report making more than their corporate job.

7. Make quiz videos & Reddit story videos using VUBO and post them on TikTok and YouTube shorts. Until you’re eligible for adsense & TikTok creator fund payouts, you can sell your own digital product, an affiliate offer, or get paid by brands to feature their logo/product in your videos. Several people in a Facebook Group report earning a full income doing this.

8. Write and publish ultra specific books on Amazon KDP and rank for long keyword searches. “First Time Mom Guide to C-Section Recovery” or “How to Train a Rescue Greyhound”. People report using AI to help them outline and write books and claim that you can make serious money once you publish many titles.

9. Sell Print on Demand products on Etsy. People are using ChatGPT to make designs then putting them on mugs, tshirts, bottles and candles, and listing them on Etsy. Get inspired by best sellers and don’t reinvent the wheel. Most report using Printify for fulfillment.

10. Make UGC (user generated content) for brands. Find clients through Billo, Collabstr, Fiverr and X. Film some portfolio videos with products around your home. People are making more than jobs by doing this part time and the secret is to craft your niche. Example: health and wellness products.

Hope this helps! Now go make that bread!

More than 12 years ago I became brainwashed by Gary V, Grant Cardone, and Tia Lopez. Night after night, I’d pour a drink and sit in front of my computer, wishing I wasn’t trapped at my day job selling copy machines. I dreamt of owning my own business, I could feel it in my soul but with no experience, money, or connections that burning desire was just existential dread. Over the years, I became obsessed with the idea of “success” and money making. The more content I consumed, the more the algorithms fed it to me.

I did indeed start my business and somehow, despite my best efforts to f*ck it up, it grew into the baddest bar and restaurant cleaning company in Portland Oregon. I guess the way it happened was my relentless work ethic and my inability to say no. The jobs kept rolling in and I’d just do them, no matter what. It didn’t matter if I didn’t sleep for 24 hours, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a day off for more than 3 years, I didn’t even care that people saw me as a janitor. Money is money and I was going to get mine. I was building my dream and cashing checks. And the whole time I had Goggins in my ear calling me a bitch and asking me “who’s going to carry the mops?”

Eventually, I had no choice but to build a team. I had several hundred hours of work to do each week and there literally wasn’t enough hours in 7 days to even do 1/4 of the work if I stayed solo or even hired a small team. So I did what any moron does and I put out job ads with zero back end processes to actually be a decent employer. I figured this is a pirate ship and once I assemble a crew, then I’ll stop to get organized and check the map.

All hell broke loose. I’ll save that story for another time, but just know those scurvy dogs tried to kill me and the business. But I had Jocko telling me that this was my fault and if I wanted it to change I needed to take responsibility. I started to analyze my situation as if I were an employee working for me. I realized, oh shit, these entry level janitors don’t give af about my business. They just want a check and want to go home.

At first it was a pain in the ass and I was like “nobody wants to work these days” but that gave me no power and it made me weak. I had to be reflective and ask, “is that true, or are you an idiot and they just don’t want to work for YOU”. That question and the following answer really appealed to mh self loathing nature and I found comfort in my failure, but I also realized that if this is my fault maybe I can fix it.

I started to see some stuff on tiktok about quiet quitting, and “your work isn’t your family”, I started to realize that people had their own dreams and interests. I wasn’t the special guy with the only plan for success, which was painful for me to realize. lol. I started thinking, how can I support these employees of mine? How can make their lives better?

I came up with a plan. What I I steered into the gig work economy? My employees didn’t seem to want long hours even if it meant overtime and more money. Those were my values, not their. They want to go to school, work another side job, and sort of piece meal their work day. They want multiple streams of income from different sources and not be totally reliant on some shitty janitor job working for a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

So I broke the shifts into 2-3 hours per day and advertised the job as a side gig. (I know part time work had been around forever, but hey it’s marketing) my job ads were like, “make $2000 per month before your day begins. Work solo, listen to your headphones, be done before 9am and have the rest of the day to live your life on your terms”.

I did initially think, who the hell is going to work part time as a janitor? I’ll only find disfunction and chaos, but I decided to look for people who have busy lives. We hired teachers, students, tattoo artists, bartenders and servers, stay at home parents. The job is ideal for anyone who wants some extra side income that is stable and doesn’t impact the other things in their life because it’s so early in the day or on the weekends.

Those job ads brought in hundreds of applicants every time I posted them. All of a sudden people were not trudging through the day and getting in a bad mood from 8-9 hours of manual labor. There was less fighting and drama. If someone no call Jo showed, it was super easy for someone to pick up a 2 hour shift, rather than scramble to pick up 8 hours. Since we work in the off hours we used to start at 4am, good luck finding a replacement when hour staff flakes at 4am. But with my new plan we could push the start times to 7am, which made it easier for people to show up to their job.

Went through and split up all the roles and jobs. Sales people, office managers, service managers, assistant managers. All part time. When people would rise above and show an interest in the job or want more hours, we of course made a path for them. This let me incentive people more too, not only could they get raises for doing good, they could get more hours. On the flip side, if they were a toxic mess, we could phase them out with very little impact.

Yes, there were some trade offs or things to consider. Communication is much more of a priority with more people. Some new hires will flake sooner because they don’t value it like a full job, although once I got the right people into place most of my staff sticks around for several years. It’s a bit more work for scheduling and HR, but not much and my office can keep up on the demands.

Anyway, I think the world is changing and as an employer we can be flexible and give our team the lifestyle they want. People do want to work hard, they want to get good at their job, but they also have boundaries and their own interests. Just because we want to hustle and grind to be the best janitor in the world, doesn’t mean we need to drag innocent bystanders along with us. People want to work from home, they want flexibility, I say steer into it if you can. You might be surprised with a happier and more functional staff, in world where “nobody wants to work anymore”

<rant>

I see the hastag #hustle #grinding and I start to laugh at the images that appear.

Sexy girls, stupid motivation quotes, cool cars, wealthy lifestyles...

What an amout of crap. Its all so stupid, we are getting fed that the idea of a successful entrepreneur is to have expensive cars and hot girls dancing arround while making pasive money all day.

And the reality of a successful entrepreneur is fucking insomnia, solitude, dealing with stupid clients, deadlines, investors behind your back tracking everything, mad girlfriends, 0 free time...

Of course there are entrepreneurs living life and earning sexy money. But not everyone. 97% don't.

When im "sidehustling" at home after a long 8h of working and check instagram to see this kind of shit.. it makes me laugh.

Shoutout to all grinding dads that sidehustle for a better family future.

</rant>

EDIT: Thanks for the goldie random hard worker(s)! My first SECOND goddamn.

4 Years ago I wrote this post about me making $4k per month and then turned it into a case study on how to build local service businesses. A couple hundred people from Reddit followed along to build companies and those companies now do a combined $50 million per year!

If you want to start something in 2017, I've updated the case study a bit below.

Note: This is local service business. Not sexy enough for most of you and that's fine. But I have not found a more predictable path to building a million dollar business than this and I’ve built several, successful, businesses so far.

WHY LOCAL SERVICES?
Frankly, there is a TON of money to be made.

These are huge markets in terms of $$$. However, unlike regular e-commerce companies where you are competing with the best internet marketing people in the world, with local services you're competing with just the people in your neighborhood, most of whom do not understand internet marketing at all.

And on top of this we come with a crazy advantage with online booking that 99% of the companies don't have. Imagine a store that sells simple things but for some reason nobody in the industry allows you to purchase online. Well a bunch of redditors are changing that in cities all around the world, and crushing it.

And that’s why we have been able to take such a big chunk out of the industry so quickly. My goal is for this network to grow from $50 million a year to $1 billion in the next 5 years. I think it’s possible.

A few screenshots from some of the folks that followed along...

Here’s one guy, and another , and another, and another, and another, and another ...shoot the last one was launched by a 19 year old kid, they got to $2mil per year in 2 ½ years. Shoot, it took me 3 years to get $2mil per year. Bastards! haha

When you add all the companies up, it’s $50 million per year and most started less than 3 years ago. I have the raw data for that $50 million number btw, and we're working with someone from r/dataisbeautiful to go through it and create something to compare revenues, figure out growth rates, correlations with city sizes etc. Will make another post on that when it's done in a week or two.

WILL THIS WORK FOR EVERYONE?

Nope. But if you have hustle and been trying to come up with “business ideas” or haven’t figured out that sexy mobile app you’ve been dreaming about, then read on for how to build the most annoying (yet fast growing company) you can imagine.

This isn't just me saying this btw, the fastest growing Ycombinator company (before they jacked it up) was also a home cleaning company.

OKAY ON TO THE CASE STUDY: HERE'S HOW TO FINALLY START SOMETHING IN 2017
Before you get started: Try to do just do one thing per day, even if it’s just reading an article, or it will get overwhelming. This is going to be a slow steady candle burning, not a quick passionate flash fire that burns out. Here goes:

Sunday, Jan 1st, 2017 That's today. Do nothing. Just chill, let the alcohol wear off, and relax. The next 30 days will be sick!!!

Monday Jan 2nd: Choose Your Industry Wake up, eat a good breakfast and get ready to crush 2017. Choose one, listed here in order of likelihood of success in my opinion: Home cleaning, carpet cleaning, home painting, lawncare, laundry. I've also seen people do well with mobile car detailing, dog walking, and others. Simple local services, but we'll be doing NONE of the actual work! I’m going to assume home cleaning for simplicity for this guide, but you can interchange that with almost any local service you can imagine.

Tuesday Jan 3rd: Use Yelp to check out the competition Check out your competition on Yelp by searching for 1 star reviews. Goal is to not repeat the things your competition keeps getting wrong. Watch this video on analyzing the competition.

Wednesday Jan 4th: Adding Value Easy day. Spend the day thinking about customer service and how you will add value to the industry. The goal is a long term successful business that does not repeat the issues your competitors have problems with. Watch this video on adding value.

Thursday Jan 5th: Create Your One Page Business Plan
The days of the 60 page business plan is over. Fill this bad boy out as a simple guide. We'll come back to this as you get more information. Watch this video on the one page business plan.

Friday Jan 6th: Choose a domain
I typically use this site for domain ideas. I like to create domains that have one keyword in the domain and then one sexy word for human beings. Example: Lawn Tribe. That way both Google and Humans understand what you're offering. Watch this video on us choosing a domain.

Saturday Jan 7th: Branding
Good looking people get more breaks in life. Same for good looking websites. Launch with a good looking brand that looks more like a startup than an old school company. The goal is to have the most professional site in your industry in your city. Just spend the day googling around for your service in your city and looking at their websites.

Sunday Jan 8th: Chillaxing Day
Go for a run, or bullshit a bit on reddit, or whatever you do to unwind. So far not much has happened, but next week things will start to ramp up and you'll need a mental break.

Monday Jan 9th: Planning the website So we need to get a good looking site. Three choices:

1. Get a cheap wordpress theme and tweak it. 2) Buy a more expensive but ready-to-go theme that is already branded beautifully (if we do say so ourselves) 2) Most expensive: Get something built yourself. I personally like 99designs for homepage design and created a guide on how to get good outcomes there:

Step 1: Setting up the contest: https://vimeo.com/147716915
Step 2: Marketing the contest: https://vimeo.com/147716917
Step 3: Finding Inspiration sites: https://vimeo.com/147716918
step 4: Managing the contest: https://vimeo.com/147716916
Step 5: Wrapup and handover https://vimeo.com/147716914

Bottom line is, I don't launch any projects with ugly design.

Tuesday Jan 10th: Copywriting
You have to write engaging content for your website. For the top section make sure the customer knows where you do business: Things like “Premier Maid Service in Los Angeles” or “You Deserve a clean home in Nevada”. You get the gist. The goal is casual and fun copywriting for the entire site. Watch this video on our copywriting efforts.

Wednesday Jan 11th: Building Trust
There are few little things we want to incorporate, that this video covers. Trust is the currency of the internet. We can't build a successful company without certain trust factors on the site like human faces, trust icons, etc. Watch this video on how we build trust.

Thursday Jan 12th: Pricing
We’re going for simple online booking, that's one of our major competitive advantages, so keep in mind we have to have a pricing structure that works. Here’s something to read on pricing from the original case study. In this video we discuss how we figured out pricing.

Friday Jan 13th: Building a form for hiring
The goal here is to throw up ads to find service providers and have them fill out a form on your website that you can then use to follow up. You can use something like www.groovehiring.com (my company) to have people apply on your website. You want to present a nice landing page that looks professional and groovehiring helps with that. This is what it looks like. Check this video out for some more info at the 1 minute mark.

Saturday Jan 14th: Choosing the right people
How to choose the right folks on craigslist. Read this and for how to reward them, read this.

Sunday Jan 15th: Chill out!
Some good games on today if you're a football fan. Take it easy and rest your brain if you can. Next week we start to line things up for launch.

Monday Jan 16th: Our Marketing Channels
Here's our marketing Channels and how we’ll be making money. There are a ton of places to get customers and we'll show more in a few days, but for now, watch this video to start to get familiar with marketing channels.

Tuesday Jan 17th: Adding a video to your website
This isn't necessary but it defintely helps you stand out. Watch this video of Dara creating her video for her website.

Wednesday Jan 18th: Set up live chat and other ways to contact you
Set up live chat (Tawk.to is free and great) and consider a popup to capture emails. We use phone.com for phones but there are plenty of tools out there. This vid has a bit on email capture.

Thursday Jan 19th: Thumbtack
We're not launched yet but this will be important for us to figure out, out of the gate: Here's how to get clients on Thumbtack, and here is Dara’s first shot. It worked out in the end, but here’s how the first stab went for some real world angst.

Friday Jan 20th: Thumbtack Day 2
Thumbtack will be important for us for our early jobs, check out this video for more Thumbtack strategies.

Saturday Jan 21st: Gift Cards, discount codes, etc.
Gift cards, discount codes, and other ecommerce tools. Just familiarize yourself online with techniques ecommerce folks use to increase conversions and grow revenue using ecommerce tools. Everything here you’ll get from www.launch27.com

Sunday Jan 22nd: CHILLAX
Trump is now president, and Facebook is probably going crazy with memes and stories. You'll need this day. Trust me!

Monday Jan 23rd: Get set up to take credit cards
Sign up at stripe.com to get a stripe account. This will be the credit card processing company that allows your customers to book online with ease. We use stripe because it integrates perfectly with the booking form we'll be using.

Tuesday Jan 24th: Sign up at Launch27 (Full disclosure: I’m an owner)
This is going to be the software that runs the entire business, from booking form, to recurring bookings, to credit card integration, to customer database, the entire shebang. The booking form you get here you will add to your website with a simple copy and paste.

"Oh wait, so this is just selling shovels in a gold rush?" Yeah. A gold rush where I've already figured out how to pan the gold myself, made millions there, showed other people how to do it and a lot of them are making millions as well, and then 2 years later I created a shovel that simplifies the entire process. And in this gold rush, the gold just happens to be fairly predictable and easy to pan. :-)

Wednesday Jan 25th to Sunday the 29th
Last minute checks, launch27 integration, logo upload, business set up, contracts etc.

Monday Jan 30th. Launch Day!
This is 1 month from now. And that's how we build businesses. From idea to launch in 30 days. Watch this video for some tips on how we get our first customers. Cycle through this list as well, there are a ton of ways here that have been shown to be solid for getting clients.

Yep, it’s hard.

One month of hard work, but in 30 days you can start making money instead of dreaming about that fancy mobile app that you’ve been planning out for the last 2 years!

COSTS: Domain: $10
Hosting: $10 per month
Theme: $450 (website)
Launch27: $59 per month
From here on out if you can budget $300 per month for marketing it would be a win. (That’s like eating out money and cable/cell phone bill )

Core customers will come from: Yelp, Adwords (hire someone), Thumbtack, Craigslist, local seo, and others. Will come back on February 1st to continue this if enough folks give it a shot.

BUILD SOMETHING IN 2017
At the end of the day build something! If not this, find something else. But there's no excuse to be hanging out in r/entrepreneur for years without working on something.

Makes no sense :-)

Knowing you guys really well, I know there are a ton of excuses you've already created for why this won't work. I wrote this: The Top 12 Wantrepreneur excuses on how to get past them.

Good luck and AMA

P.S. Want to add this as someone said I make it sound too easy. Business is risky. Anyone that tells you otherwise has never started a business. It's incredibly difficult, subject to fail, will make you overweight sitting at a computer, will give you high blood pressure and anxiety if you're not careful, and it is incredibly difficult to find customers (and shoot sometimes even more difficult to have those customers pay you when you're done). Nothing about business is easy, otherwise EVERYBODY would be doing. It takes an almost insane person to take on trying to make it in the world with their own two hands and take on ALL the responsibility for the livelihoods of a lot of people. Just keeping it real! This is hard, but doable, because a ton of people have done it, but it's not for everyone by any means. Not everyone is cut out for entrepreneurship to begin with and certainly not everyone is cut out for local services and dealing with human beings. Good luck.

If you want additional training on this and be on weekly calls with me as you set this up go here: https://programs.overthinkacademy.com/register?buynow=yes

30% of the posts consists of cancerous Shopify shops.
30% of the posts consists of people trying to make money off us, one way or another, be it trough affiliate marketing or some elaborate scamming scheme or whatever.
20% of the posts are people who have legit problems and need advice.
20% of the posts are about people who actually have to say something.

That's 40% content and 60% spam. Even with the content, every other post is someone trying to convince us they make 653 Quadtrillion a day. There is no requirement for evidence, everyone can just join and spread their cancer. No one seems to be knowledge about anything, people just make assumptions over and over again.

It was fun while it lasted, but this is now as cancerous as YouTube. Too many marketing articles, too many 17 year old entrepreneurs. I am here to learn, but I simply don't see that happen, every other problem is shit, things you get in the first grade of business school.

But, if you like shameless plugs to articles, social media marketing, dropshipping, shopify, ebay, amazon and aliexpress, people cluecless about the simplest subject then this the place for you!.

Note: This is a chapter out of my Growth Hacking Book called Secret Sauce: The Ultimate Growth Hacking Guide. This is only one of the 17 chapters that read just like this.

Also, the links I posted here are broken, but you can view the whole thing beautifully formatted on Medium here

After my post about making money from an affiliate site was at the top of this sub for a couple days, I've received more than 50 PMs asking for more info on how SEO works and how to get authority sites ranking. I have a chapter about that in my book, so I'm just going to publish it for free.

For what it's worth, I drive millions of dollars of traffic in the most competitive key terms online, including with new sites, so if you come in here to comment "this won't work" you're wrong. It's hard work, but it's not unreasonably hard. So much so that I decided to call it "SEO is not hard."

Formatting on reddit is hard, so it's also on Medium here.

It's also one of the several chapters of a book I wrote, which you can purchase here

SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time

SEO In One Day

SEO is simply not as hard as people pretend like it is; you can get 95% of the effort with 5% of the work, and you absolutely do not need to hire a professional SEO to do it, nor will it be hard to start ranking for well-picked key terms.

Of all the channels we’ll be discussing, SEO is the one that there is the most misinformation about. Some of it is subtle, but some of it is widely spread and believed by so-called SEO consultants who actually don’t know what they’re doing.

SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do. It’s also something that has a lot of faux veneer around it. Consultants want to make it seem incredibly difficult so that they can charge you a lot, but I'll show you exactly how to do it, step by step, and you'll win.

How Google Works In order to understand what we need to do for SEO let’s look back at how Google started, how it’s evolving today, and develop a groundwork from which we can understand how to get ranked on Google.

First, we're going to reverse engineer what Google is doing, and then simply follow their rules, picking the right keywords, and get your sites ranked.

The Early Days of Google

The idea for PageRank — Google’s early ranking algorithm — stemmed from Einstein. Larry Page and Sergei Brin were students at Stanford, and they noticed how often scientific studies referred to famous papers, such as the theory of relativity. These references acted almost like a vote — the more your work was referenced the more important it must be. If they downloaded every scientific paper and looked at the references, they could theoretically decide which papers were the most important, and rank them.

They realized that because of links, the Internet could be analyzed and ranked in a similar way, except instead of using references they could use links. So they set about attempting to “download” (or crawl) the entire Internet, figuring out which sites were linked to the most. The sites with the most links were, theoretically, the best sites. And if you did a search for “university,” they could look at the pages that talked about “university” and rank them.

Google Today

Google works largely the same way today, although with much more sophistication and nuance. For example, not all links carry the same weight. A link from an authoritative site (as seen by how many links a site has pointing at it) is much more valuable than a link from a non-authoritative site. A link from Wikipedia is probably worth about 10,000 links from sites that don’t have much authority.

At the end of the day the purpose of Google is to find the “best” (or most popular) web page for the words you type into the search bar.

All this means is we need to make it clear to google what our page is about, and then make it clear that we’re popular. If we do that we win. In order to do that, we’ll follow a very simple process that works every single time with less effort than you probably think is required.

Gaming the System

Google is a very smart company. The sophistication of the algorithms they write is incredible; bear in mind that there are currently cars driving themselves around Silicon Valley powered by Google’s algorithms.

If you get too far into the SEO rabbit hole you’ll start stumbling upon spammy ways to attempt to speed up this process. Automated software like RankerX, GSA SER, and Scraperbox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc.

Some of that stuff works very short term, but Google is smart and it is getting smarter. It gets harder to beat Google every day, and Google gets faster at shutting down spammy sites every day. Most don’t even last a week before everything you’ve done disappears and your work evaporates. That’s not the way you should do things.

Instead of Internet-based churn and burn we’ll be focusing on building equity in the Internet. So if you see some highly-paid SEO consultant telling you to use software and spun content to generate links, or when you see some blackhatter beating the system, just know that it’s not worth it. We’re going to build authority and get traffic fast, but we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t disappear or cripple your site in the future.

On-Page SEO

The first step in getting our site ready to rank is making it clear to Google what our site is about.

For now we’re going to focus our home page (our landing page) on ranking for one keyword that isn’t our brand or company name. Once we do that and get that ranking we can branch out into other keywords and start to dominate the search landscape, but for now we’ll stay laser focused.

Keyword Research The first thing we need to do is to figure out what that keyword is. Depending on how popular our site is and how long it’s been around, the level of traffic and difficulty we’ll get from this effort may vary.

The Long Tail

There’s a concept we need to be familiar with known as the “long tail.”

If we were to graph “popularity” of most things with “popularity” being the Y axis and the rank order being the Y axis, we’d get something like a power law graph:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75

There are some big hits that get the majority of attention, and after a few hits the graph falls sharply. The long-tail theory says that as we become more diverse as a society the yellow end of the above graph will stretch forever and get taller.

Think of Amazon. They probably have a few best-selling products, but the majority of their retail revenue comes from a wide variety of things that aren’t bought anywhere nearly as often as their best-selling products. Similarly, if we were to rank the popularity of the songs played in the last 10 years, there would be a few hits that would garner the majority of plays, and an enormous number of songs that have only a few plays. Those less popular products and songs are what we call the long tail.

In SEO this matters because, at least in the beginning, we’re going to go after long tail keywords — very exact, intention-driven keywords with lower competition that we know can win, then gradually we’ll work our way to the left.

Our site isn’t going to outrank ultra-competitive keywords in the beginning, but by being more specific we can start winning very targeted traffic with much less effort.

The keywords we’re looking for we will refer to as “long-tail keywords.”

Finding the Long Tail

In order to find our perfect long-tail keywords, we’re going to use a combination of four tools, all of which are free.

The process looks like this:

1. Use UberSuggest, KeywordShitter and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywords

2. Export those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic level

3. Search for those keywords with the SEOQuake chrome extension installed to analyze the true keyword difficulty

Don’t be intimidated — it’s actually very simple. For this example we’ll pretend like we were finding a keyword for this book (and we’ll probably have to build out a site so you see if we’re ranked there in a few months).

Step 1: Brainstorming and Keyword Generating

In this step we’re simply going to identify a few keywords that seem like they might work. Don’t concentrate too much on culling the list at this point, as most bad keywords will be automatically eliminated as a part of the process.

So since this is a book about growth hacking, I’m going to list out a few keywords that would be a good fit:

• Growth hacking

• Growth marketing

• Internet marketing

• Growth hacking guide

• Growth hacking book

• Book about growth hacking

• What is growth hacking

• Growth hacking instructions

That’s a good enough list to start. If you start running out of ideas go ahead and check out keywordshitter.com. If you plug in one keyword it will start spitting out thousands of variations in just a few minutes. Try to get a solid list of 5–10 to start with.

Now we’ll plug each keyword into UberSuggest. When I plug the first one — “growth hacking” — in, I get 246 results.

Clicking “view as text” will let us copy and paste all of our keywords into a text editor and create an enormous list.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI.

Go through that process with each keyword you came up with.

Now we’ll assume you have 500+ keywords. If you don’t, try to start with something more generic and broad as a keyword, and you’ll have that many quickly. Ideally you’ll have over 1500.

Step 2: Traffic Estimating

Now that we have a pretty good list of keywords. Our next step is to figure out if they have enough search volume to be worth our while.

You’ll likely notice that some are so far down the long tail they wouldn’t do much for us. For example, my growth hacking list came up with “5 internet marketing techniques.” We probably won’t go after that one, but instead of guessing we can let Google do the work for us. This will be our weeding out step.

Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner is a tool meant for advertisers, but it does give us some rough idea of traffic levels.

Google doesn’t make any promise of accuracy, so these numbers are likely only directionally correct, but they’re enough to get us on the right track.

You’ll have to have an AdWords account to be able to use the tool, but you can create one for free if you haven’t use AdWords in the past.

Once you’ve logged in, select “Get search volume data and trends.”

Paste in your enormous list of keywords, and click “Get search volume.” Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a lot of graphs and data.

Unfortunately the Keyword Planner interface is a little bit of a nightmare to work within, so instead we’re going to export our data to excel with the “download” button and play with it there.

Now what we’re going to do is decide what traffic we want to go after.

This varies a bit based on how much authority your site has. So let’s try to determine how easy it will be for you to rank.

Go to SEMrush.com and enter your URL, looking at the total backlinks in the third column:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*aV3sF59d8Bt3Aqqw.

As a general rule (this may vary based on how old your site is, who the links are from, etc.), based on the number of links you have, this is the maximum level of “difficulty” you should go after.

Number of Backlinks:Maximum Difficulty

<30:40

<100:40–50

<1000:50–70

1000+:70+

Go ahead and sort the data by difficulty, and eliminate all of the stuff that is too high for your site (don’t worry, we’ll get those keywords later). For now you can simply delete those rows.

Exact Match

One important thing to note is that Google gives us this volume as “exact match” volume. This means that if there is a slight variation of a keyword we will see it if the words are synonyms, but not if they are used in a phrase, so the traffic will be underestimated from what you would expect overall.

Now with that disclaimer sort the traffic volume highest to lowest, and from this data pick out five keywords that seem like a good fit.

Here are mine:

• growth hacking strategies

• growth hacking techniques

• growth hacking 101

• growth hacking instagram

• growth hacking twitter

Mine all look the same, but that may not necessarily be the case.

Keyword Trends

Unfortunately the “keyword difficulty” that Google gives us is based on paid search traffic, not on natural search traffic.

First, let’s use Google Trends to view the keyword volume and trajectory simultaneously. You can enter all of the keywords at the same time and see them graphed against each other. For my keywords it looks like this:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb.

The ones I’m most excited about are purple and red, which are “Growth hacking techniques” and “Growth hacking Twitter.”

Now we’ll take a deeper look at what the competition is like for those two keywords.

Manual Keyword Difficulty Analysis

In order to analyze how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword, we’re going to have to look at the keywords manually, one by one. That’s why we started by finding some long-tail keywords and narrowing the list.

This process gets a lot easier if you download the SEOQuake Chrome extension. Once you’ve done that, do a Google search and you’ll notice a few changes.

With SEOQuake turned on the relevant SEO data of each site is displayed below each search result.

We’re going to alter what is displayed, so in the left-hand sidebar click “parameters” and set them to the following:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07.

Now when you search, you’ll see something like this:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X.

SEOQuake adds a ranking number, and the following at the bottom:

The Google Index: This is how many pages from this base URL Google has indexed

Page Links: The number of pages linking to the exact domain that is ranking according to SEMrush’s index (usually very low compared to reality, but since we’ll be using this number to compare it wil be somewhat apples to apples)

URL Links: The number of pages pointing to any page on the base URL

Age: The first time the page was indexed by the Internet Archive

Traffic: A very rough monthly traffic number for the base URL

Looking at these we can try to determine approximately what it would take to overtake the sites in these positions.

You’ll notice that the weight of the indicators change. Not all links are from as good of sources, direct page links matter much more than URL links, etc., but if you google around and play with it for a while you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it takes.

If you have a brand new site it will take a month or two to start generating the number of links to get to page one. If you have an older site with more links it may just be a matter of getting your on-page SEO in place. Generally it will be a mixture of both.

Keep in mind that we’re going to optimize our page for this exact keyword, so we have a bit of an advantage. That said, if you start to see pages from sites like Wikipedia, you will know it’s an uphill battle.

Here are a couple of examples so you can see how you should think through these things, starting with “Growth hacking techniques.”

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E.

Entrepreneur.com is definitely a big name, and “growth hacking techniques” is in the title explicitly. This will be difficult to beat, but there are no links in the SEMRush index that point direct to the page.

(By the way, I wonder how hard it would be to write an article for entrepreneur.com — I could probably do that and build a few links to that easily, even linking to my site in the article).

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA.

Yongfook.com, have never heard of that site. 206 total links, not much traffic, this one I could pass up. It does have quite a bit of age and “Growth hacking tactics” in the title explicitly, so that would make it tough, but this one is doable to pass up after a while.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90.

Alright, so quicksprout is relatively popular, a lot of links, good age, lots of traffic, a few links direct to the page but not a ton.

But the word “tactics” doesn’t even appear here. This page isn’t optimized for this keyword, so I could probably knock it out by being optimized specifically for “growth hacking tactics.”

Let’s jump down a ways to see how hard it would be to get on the front page.

17 total pages indexed? Created in 2014? No links in the index, even to the root URL? This one’s mine. I should be able to front-page easily.

So this looks like a good keyword. Now we just have to get the on-page SEO in place and start building a few links.

(Note: After doing this a few more times I learned that I could probably get austenallred.com toward the top of "growth hacking press," so I changed the on-page optimization of one of those pages to focus on that keyword, and we'll see how it goes.

On-Page SEO

Now that we have our keyword selected, we need to make sure Google knows what our site is about. This is as simple as making sure the right keywords are in the right places. Most of this has to do with html tags, which make up the structure of a webpage. If you don’t know html or understand how it works, just pass this list to a developer and they should be able to help you.

Here is a simple checklist you can follow to see if your content is optimized.

On-Page SEO Checklist

☐ Your keyword is in the <title> tag, ideally at the front (or close to the front) of the tag

☐ Your keyword is close to the beginning of the <title> tag (ideally the first words)

☐ The title tag contains less than the viewable limit of 65 characters (optional but recommended)

☐ Your keyword is in the first <h1> tag (and your page has an <h1> tag)

☐ If your page contains additional header tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc) your keyword or synonyms are in most of them

☐ Any images on the page have an <alt> tag that contain your chosen keyword

☐ Your keyword is in the meta description (and there is a meta description)

☐ There is at least 300 words of text on the page

☐ Your keyword appears in the URL (if not the homepage)

☐ Your keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy

☐ Your keyword (or synonyms — Google recognizes them now) is used other times throughout the page

☐ Your keyword density is between .5% and 2.5%

☐ The page contains dofollow links to other pages (this just means you’re not using nofollow links to every other page)

☐ The page is original content not taken from another page and dissimilar from other pages on your site

If you have all of that in place you should be pretty well set from an on-page perspective. You’ll likely be the best-optimized page for your chosen keyword unless you’re in a very competitive space.

All we have left now is off-page optimization.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO is just a fancy way to say links. (Sometimes we call them backlinks, but it’s really the same thing.)

Google looks at each link on the web as a weighted vote. If you link to something, in Google’s eyes you’re saying, “This is worth checking out.” The more legit you are the more weight your vote carries.

Link Juice

SEOs have a weird way to describe this voting process; they call it “link juice.” If an authoritative site, we’ll say Wikipedia for example, links to you, they’re passing you “link juice.”

But link juice doesn’t only work site to site — if your homepage is very authoritative and it links off to other pages on your site, it passes link juice as well. For this reason our link structure becomes very important.

Checking Link Juice

There are a number of tools that let you check how many links are pointing to a site and what the authority of those pages are. Unfortunately none of them are perfect — the only way to know what links are pointing to your site is to have crawled those pages.

Google crawls most popular pages several times per day, but they don’t want you manipulating them, so they update their index pretty slowly.

That said, you can check at least a sample of Google’s index in the Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools). Once you navigate to your site, In the left-hand side select “Search Traffic” then “Links to your site.” There’s a debate raging over whether or not this actually shows you all of the links Google knows about (I’m 99% convinced it’s only a sample), but it’s at least a representative sample.

To see all of your links, click on “More” under “Who links to you the most” then “Download this table.” This, again, seems to only download a sample of what Google knows about. You can also select “Download latest links” which provides more recent links than the other option.

Unfortunately this doesn’t let us see much a to the value of the links, nor does it show us links that have dropped or where those links are from.

To use those there are a wide variety of tools: If you have a budget I’d go with ahrefs.com as they have the biggest index, followed by Moz’s Open Site Explorer (most of the data you can get with a free account, if not then it’s slightly cheaper than ahrefs), and finally SEMrush, which is free for most purposes we need. MajesticSEO uses a combination of “trust flow” and “citation flow” which also works fairly well to give you an idea as to the overall health and number of links pointing to your site.

All of these use different internal metrics to determine the “authority” of a link, but using them to compare apples to apples can be beneficial.

Link Structure

HTML links look something like this:

<a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword”>Anchor text</a>

Where http://www.somesite.com is the place the link directs you to, the title is largely a remnant of time gone by, and the linked text — think the words that are blue and you click on — is called the “anchor text.”

In addition to the amount of link juice a page has, the relevance of the anchor text matters.

Generally speaking you want to use your keyword as the anchor text for your internal linking whenever possible. External linking (from other sites) shouldn’t be very heavily optimized for anchor text. If 90% of your links all have the same anchor text Google can throw a red flag, assuming that you’re doing something fishy.

If you’re ever creating links (like we’ll show you in the future) I only ever use something generic like the site name, “here” or the full URL.

Internal Structure

Generally speaking you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly-messy link structure.

Some say the ideal link structure for a site is something like this:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*tWHFIzBzG7zq6uii.

That’s close, but it gets a couple things wrong. First, you’ll never have a structure that organized, and second, in an ideal world every page would link to every other page on its same level. This can easily be done with a footer that feels like a sitemap or “recommended” pages. That allows you to specify anchor text, and pass link juice freely from page to page.

Unfortunately it’s impossible to draw such a web without it becoming a mess, so you’ll just have to imagine what that actually looks like.

We have just one more thing to go over before we start getting those first links pointing to our site.

Robots.txt, disavow, nofollow, and other minutia###

Most of SEO at this point is now managing stuff that can go wrong. There is a lot of that, but we’ll go over what will cover 99% of needs, and you can Google if there’s something really crazy.

Robots.txt

Almost every site has a page at url.com/robots.txt — even google has one.

This is just a plain text file that lets you tell search engine crawlers what to crawl and not to crawl. Most are pretty good about listening, except the Bingbot, which pretty much does whatever it wants no matter what you tell it. (I’m mostly kidding.)

If you don’t want Google to crawl a page (maybe it’s a login page you don’t want indexed, a landing page, etc.) you can just “disallow” it in your robots.txt by saying disallow: /somepage.

If you add a trailing / to it (e.g. disallow: /somepage/) it will also disallow all child pages.

Technically you can specify different rules for different bots (or user agents), but it’s easiest to start your file with “User-agent: *” if you don’t have a need for separate crawling rules.

Disavow

Google will penalize spammy sites, and unfortunately this causes some bad behavior from bad actors. Say, for example, you wanted to take out a competitor. You could send a bunch of obviously spammy links to their site and get them penalized. This is called “negative SEO,” and is something that happens often in highly contested keywords. Google generally tries to pretend like it doesn’t happen.

In the case that this does happen, however, you can “Disavow” links in the Search Console, which is pretty much saying, “Hey Google, don’t count this one.” I hope you’ll never have to use it, but if you hire (or have hired) a bad SEO or are being attacked by a competitor, that is how you combat it.

Nofollow

A link can have a property called “nofollow” such as this:

<a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>.

If you want to link to somebody but you don’t want it to count as a vote (you don’t want to pass link-juice), or you support user-generated content and want to deter spammers, you can use a nofollow link. Google says it discounts the value of those links. I’m not convinced they discount them heavily, but other SEOs are so they seem to deter spammers if nothing else.

Redirects

If you’re going to change a URL, but you don’t want its link juice to disappear, you can use a 301 redirect. A 301 will pass a majority of the link juice.

Importantly, Google views www.austenallred.com and austenallred.com as different sites. So decide on one, and redirect all of one type to the other.

Canonical URLs

If you have two pages that are virtually the same, you can add something like <link rel=”canonical href=”https://www.someurl.com/somepage”> to say “hey, treat this page as if it were that page instead, but I don’t want to 301 it.”

And with that, we’re ready to build our first links.

Link Building

Link building is where SEO really starts to matter, and where a lot of people end up in a world of hurt.

The best way to build links is to not build links. I’ve worked for companies in the past that don’t have to ask for them, they just flow in from press, customer blogs, their awesome blog posts, etc. If this is an option (and we’ll go over a couple of ways to make it more likely) you’re in a great place.

If not, at least in the beginning, we’re going to manually create just a few.

We’re going to create them in legitimate ways and not hire somebody in India to do so. That is a recipe for disaster, and I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen that take down a site.

Web 2.0s The easiest way to build high quality links are what SEOs call “web 2.0s.” That’s just a way to say “social sites” or sites that let you post stuff. Now tweeting a link into the abyss won’t do you anything, but profiles, status pages, etc. do carry some weight. And if they come from a popular domain that counts as a link.

Some of the easiest are:

• Twitter (in your bio)

• Github (the readme of a repo)

• YouTube (the description of a video — it has to actually get views)

• Wordpress (yes, you’ll have to actually create a blog)

• Blogger (same here)

• Tumblr

• Upvote-based sites (HackerNews, GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, Reddit, etc.)

If nothing else you can start there and get a half dozen to a dozen links. There are always big lists of “web 2.0s” you can find online, but keep in mind if you’re going to build something out on a blogging platform you’re going to have to really build something out. That’s a lot of content and time, but you have to do it the right way.

We generally keep a bigger list of Web 2.0s here. Some may be out of date, but you should probably only build a half dozen to a dozen Web 2.0s anyway.

Expired Domains

Another way to get link juice is by purchasing an expired domain. This is more difficult to do, but there are a lot of options such as expireddomains.net. (Google “expired domains” and you’ll find dozens of sites monitoring them.)

You’ll want to purchase a domain that has expired and restore it as closely as you can to its original form using an archive. These sites likely have some link juice to pass on and you can pass it to yourself.

Link Intersection

Another way to find places you can build links is by using a link intersection tool. These find sites that link to “competitor a” and “competitor b” but not to you. Theoretically, if they link to both of your competitors, they should be willing to link to you. Moz, Ahrefs, LunaMetrics and others have link intersection tools that work quite well.

Now that we have a few basic links flowing, we’re going to work on some strategies that will send continual links and press, eventually getting to a point where we don’t have to build any more links.

Your First Drip of Traffic — Becoming an Authority Site

Awesome — you have a site that converts well, your SEO is in place, ready for you to drive traffic. Now what?

As you’re probably learned at this point, a site that converts very well but has no traffic flowing to it still converts zero traffic.

We’re going to fix that.

This section takes a lot of time and effort, and in the beginning you’ll likely wonder if you’re doing anything at all. Remember that class in college that is so difficult it’s the point where most people give up, effectively weeding out the people who aren’t ready to major in a specific subject?

Well this is the weeder-out chapter of growth hacking.

Take a Long-Term View The reason so many people stumble on this step is the same reason people stumble on so many steps that take a little effort under time — losing weight, investing in a 401(k), etc. In the beginning you’re going to have a little seedling of traffic, and you’ll be looking up to those who have giant oak trees, thinking, “I must be doing something wrong.” You’re not doing anything wrong. The traffic starts as a trickle before it becomes a flood.

But don’t worry if you’re a startup. Our goal is to get enough traffic that continuing to do this effort will be sustainable (meaning we won’t die before we start to see the rewards), but at the same time we’re building equity in the Internet.

The type of traffic we want to build is the type that will compound and will never go away. We want to create traffic today that will still give us a little trickle in five years. Combining hundreds (or thousands) of little trickles, our site that converts, and a great product we will create a giant river.

Future chapters will go into depth on the networks we need to drive traffic from, so in this chapter we’re going to focus on traffic that’s network-agnostic. Traffic that we can’t get by tapping any specific network.

Just to give you some idea of scale, I’ve seen this process drive over 500,000 visits per day, though the build up to that level took almost a full year. What could you do with 500,000 visits per day?

Monitoring Alerts

To start we’re going to use the keywords we found in the SEO chapter, and inject ourselves (and our company) into the conversation wherever it’s taking place.

To do this we’re going to use software called BuzzBundle.

BuzzBundle This software lets us do a few things:

Constantly monitor all mentions of a specific topic, competitor, or keyword across multiple locations on the Internet (from Facebook groups to Quora questions to blog posts) where comments are available Allow us to leave a constructive comment that references our product or company

Disclaimer: This is not the SEO comment spam you’ve seen This step takes thought, effort, and a real human who understands what they’re typing. I don’t often say this, but you cannot effectively automate this step without it becoming spammy. If you’re trying to replicate the automated SEO spam you’ve seen on various blogs and sites this will probably work, but you’ll get banned, your clickthrough will be a fraction of what it could be, and you’ll be banned

Productive Commenting

We’re not going to fire up some awful software to drop spun mentions of garbage onto various comment sections online hoping that brings us SEO traffic. Our comments must do two things:

• Be contextual. We are only going to talk about the topic presented in an article or tweet, and only mention our company when it naturally fits in

• Contribute to the conversation. I should learn something or have value added to my life by reading your comment

If you do these two things a few changes will take place: First, you’ll notice that people click on your links because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute. Second, people will respect your company because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute.

And with that disclaimer, we’ll move on to the nitty gritty of how this is done. Let’s fire up BuzzBundle and get to work.

Accounts and Personas

The first thing you’ll want to do in BuzzBundle is go to Accounts -> Add new accounts. This is the starting point for everything we’ll do, as we need accounts to comment.

One thing you’ll notice about BuzzBundle is that it lets you use multiple accounts. I find it beneficial to think from multiple perspectives and therefore multiple points of view, but I don’t want to go too far overboard and be spammy.

I’d recommend doing something simple — create 2–3 personas, each of whom you identify with (or are you), and enter them into your BuzzBundle accounts.

Personally I don’t even change my name, I just use a different one (eg. Austen J. Allred vs. Austen Allred) or use a few photos, just so it isn’t literally the same name and same photo blanketing the Internet.

Disqus

Disqus is a comment system used all over the place, and it carries some caveates. Disqus will ban you if you use the same link in every post, so there are two workarounds:

Use a lot of different accounts, rotating IPs or using a proxy every two days or so Use your site URL as your “display name”

Both of these work, but the second one is much easier in my view.

UTM Parameters

Using links with our UTM parameters here will be very beneficial. We’ll be able to track traffic back to each individual blog or site, and if necessary double down on the ones that are driving traffic.

Link Shorteners If you ever start to run into problems with getting your link posted, it may be useful to use a few link shorteners or some 301 redirects.

To keep it simple you can use a link shortener that 301s such as bit.ly, or if you want to spend a little more time you can set up your own site and 301 the traffic from a certain page to your money site.

Using BuzzBundle

Let’s get started with the BuzzBundle.

First, it’s going to ask you for a keyword. We already have a keyword from the SEO section, but we may want to do something even a bit more generic. For this one I’m going to go with “growth hacking.”

Simply hit “go” and let BuzzBundle get started.

It will load different content types into different columns, but generally we are going to be scrolling through until we find something that looks compelling and like we can actually contribute to.

The first thing I clicked on was this:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FtoN2kYmo5y3Oc1w.

It’s a review of another book about growth hacking. All I had to do was comment, tag the author, ask him if he were willing to review our book, and offer to send him one for free. (If you’re that person reading this now it’s going to be pretty awkward).

My assumption is this person will find the conversation to be completely authentic, because it is. When you're authentically reaching out to people you get rid of all of the icky-ickyThe fact that there’s now a link on his video that people who are searching for something else will find is just an added bonus.

As an aside, I much prefer to hold “shift” and click on a link to open it in my normal browser if I’m just going to be commenting as myself.

The next one I found was a roundup of great growth hacking blog posts from the week.

I left the following comment:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*m-1C10p2aY9Ymjjz.

Note how I followed him on Twitter so that it’s obviously personal and not an automated spam comment. I even went a little bit overboard and tweeted at him just for kicks.

That is how you get people on your team.

As you get further along and have an idea of how to get a good response, I’d recommend starting to sort by reach, ramping up the number of keywords you’re searching for, and possibly even -gasp- upgrading to the paid version of BuzzBundle.

Someone told me this 5 years ago and it stuck in my mind since :

“If you work for someone else, you are just a cost to them. And costs by nature are meant to be kept down. In 99% of the cases, salaries and wages never made anyone rich.”

Our senior DevOps engineer thought I'd lost my mind. He didn't join a startup to do sales. So he promised me 5 calls and I guaranteed he'd never have to do it again. It was a bit of a back-and-forth but I strongly believe it fundamentally changed how we build products.

When I sat in on the calls, I observed a few things:

- Seeing them explain why our competitor's platform was "too complex for non-technical users."

- Seeing them assure the customer that the continuous monitoring was actually working (We had beautiful logs and metrics. But what they wanted was a green checkmark.)

- Seeing them respond when customers asked "Can someone just do this for me?"

Most of our team are backend engineers too and I think this fundamentally made them better product designers. At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.

The rewrite took 2 weeks. We removed 60% of features. Added a simple progress bar. Built Slack integration for questions. Created "done-for-you" workflows.

Our support tickets dropped 70%.

The biggest problem with most engineers is actually over-engineering.

1. Users don't care about your elegant solution - they care about their problem going away

2. Technical correctness < user understanding - if they can't use it, it doesn't matter how well it's built

3. Every feature has a cost - not in code, but in user confusion

Since this experience, I've made this a mandatory culture in our team. Every engineer takes 5 sales calls per quarter. There's always going to be a little pushback. But hearing the exhaustion in a customer's voice when they say "I just need this to work." does it all. I think it helps build up their instinct.

Step 1) Sell people the idea of being successful. If you can convince people they are moving in a positive direction by reading your material then you have already won over your audience, even if they never do a thing with it.

Step 2) Give a bunch of general, bullshit advice that can't actually be applied because EVERY business is different but seems practical.

Step 3) Talk about how profitable your venture is while wasting your "valuable" time trying to create a book that you will sell for $10.00 because you are actually a sham and make money by selling the idea of success instead of actually creating anything of value.

Step 4) Make sure you have no moral compass and have sociopathic tendencies

Step 5) Being an egocentric douche is an added plus

Step 6) Take a bus to the city and look for nice cars to pose with and buy fake Hublot watches off Aliexpress to post photos of on Instagram to create the illusion that you are extremely rich for your followers

Step 6) Profit

If all else fails you can create a subscription box company. I hear the margins are GREAT.

So, this is one of those dumb ideas that somehow worked out way better than expected. I live in a country where nicotine pouches weren’t sold… until recently. A company opened up selling them, and people were losing their minds over it. They would put new stock on their website at random times, and every day it would sell out within 3-5 minutes. If you weren’t fast, you missed out.

I was actually using these pouches myself and getting tired of missing the drops. So, I wrote a simple Python script that would monitor the website for stock updates and send me a Telegram notification the moment they were available. Worked like a charm—I never ran out of pouches again.

Then I thought, why not share this with others? I moved the notifications to Twitter, and every time stock became available, my bot would tweet about it. People went nuts for it. The Twitter account blew up, gaining 5,000 followers in just two weeks.

At that point, I figured it was time to monetize this thing. I stopped the free Twitter notifications and posted an announcement: if you still wanted to get notified, you’d have to subscribe to my Telegram bot—$5 for one month or $10 for three months. And believe it or not, I made over $15K in about a month and a half.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for the consumers), the company eventually ramped up production, and nicotine pouches became available all the time, so the hype died down. It was short-lived, but I made some solid money with just a basic Python script and some simple market timing.

This is aimed at younger folks and those just getting started in entrepreneurship, particularly in tech.

All over TikTok and Reddit, people keep throwing around all this useless advice to "become successful." Wake up earlier, read more books, etc. Courses about getting an "entrepreneurs" mindset. That you have to hustle and work hard.

All of that is bullshit. Those attributes will not make you successful.

I mean don't get me wrong--it's good to organize your life. But speaking as someone who founded four successful online businesses and works in a VC firm, these trendy pieces of "advice" are all platitudes.

The best piece of actionable advice I can give, based on founding four successful businesses and working with other successful firms, is this:

1). Pick and industry or niche, and master it.

This is a huge pre-requisite that's not emphasized enough. Identify the industry or niche you want to enter (as specifically as possible) and become a master in it. Learn everything you can.

Buy products from your (future) competitors. Understand the pain points that consumers in this industry face. Do market research. Figure out which keyword combinations to target. Learn about the technical attributes.

The most successful businesses I've worked with all follow the same trend: They were formed by people who used to work in a specific industry as 9-5 employees, working for a company. They accumulated significant industry-specific knowledge, and understood pain points. Then they started their own business in this industry, targeting those pain points.

2). Target an intersection of two industries or niches.

What happens if you can't pick which industry or niche to enter? Or what if your selected industry is too competitive?

Do this: list what you're good at, or what you're interested in. These can be as random as you'd like. Then, pinpoint a (viable) intersection between two listed interests or skills.

For example: let's say you can build websites relatively well. You're also interested in cars.

As we're all aware, the web design industry is **extremely** competitive. And what do cars have to do with web design?

Instead of entering the web design field, enter the web design field targeting automotive dealers and mechanic shops. Build a few fake demo websites for auto mechanics, and then cold call auto mechanic shops with poor websites and offer them their services. Capture the vertical.

Time and time again, I've seen this trend:

• Person works for a corporation, in a specific industry.

• Person accumulates knowledge about said industry.

• Person leaves the company, and starts his own small business targeting a pain point that their former employer was unwilling to target.

Lost my business overnight during this virus...

Spent 10 years building... soul sucking time spent...

2 employees perfect for the job who won’t now come back... customer base pissed..

Built from scratch to Quarter million a year in revenue.. was proud but now that’s zero.

And you know what?

I don’t give a FUCK!

I learned so got damn much over my time.

I always had a foggy picture of real business.. always fought peel back the layers of mystery.

Not any more. I know this shit now.

I know marketing.. inbound leads to sales.

I know CRM.. keeping customers tight.

I know numbers.. can read and forecast PL, cashflow, balance sheets like a champ.

I know systems.. ran business on autopilot for 2 years.

I know VA’s.. had 3 helping run my business.

I wrote 3 books and built an app with no dev skills.

Drank a ton of good beer with new friends whenever I wanted .

Walked away with half mil to my name by end of it. Bought a house a few years ago

So fucking bring it. The biz was good to me and now it’s done. I don’t give a shit.

I’ll come back stronger. Smarter. More resilient.

To the next chapter fuckers.

I came across this post, and it got me thinking: making money is often about understanding human nature. Some industries thrive because they tap into deep desires, fears, or insecurities.

Here’s the list:

1. Men’s lust – Adult entertainment, dating apps, and OnlyFans are billion-dollar industries.

2. Women’s desire for beauty – Skincare, fashion, and fitness keep growing because the demand never stops.

3. Elderly’s health – Healthcare, supplements, and assisted living services make fortunes.

4. Children’s education – Parents spend heavily on tuition, online courses, and skill development.

5. Rich people’s fear of loss – Wealth management, insurance, and investment firms profit from this.

6. Poor people’s desire to get rich quickly – Get-rich-quick schemes, lotteries, and even certain coaching programs feed off this.

Whether ethical or not, these industries will always have demand.

It’s day 100 of my journey.

Who am I?

I’m a Software Engineer living in Serbia, with no prior experience in sales or entrepreneurship.

What I’ve tried in these 100 days?

I tried to create my own mobile app, but it went really slow, so I’ve decided to work on it later, not during my challenge - $0.

I’ve created a few digital products (black and white, minimalistic maps) and selling them on Etsy - $4.

I’ve started offering mentoring services for beginner level programmers. That worked pretty well in the beginning, but then it slowed down - $2115.

I’ve started making YouTube videos about my life as a software engineer. It’s going very slow but that’s normal, I guess. It won’t help me with my challenge, but I believe that in a long-term, having (and growing) a YT channel is a good idea. And I simply like making videos - $0.

I’ve found a freelance project where I work as a backend developer, just like my main job. I understand it’s not very entrepreneurial because it’s just a job, however, at this stage it seems like the best option to make some money, because I already have the skill - $8000.

After one of my previous posts, a guy DMed me here on Reddit and asked me if I can do the coding in his new application. We had a conversation, I liked the idea, so I’ve started to work on that project as well. It doesn’t make me any money now but maybe it will in the future - $0.

So in total I’ve made $10119.

Also a couple of people donated me a few bucks - $25.

Which means I'm finishing my challenge with $10144.

Summary

As you can see I failed. I've made 10X less than I aimed to make.

Do I have any regrets? Absolutely no. I'm happy that I've made 10K and I believe if my goal was $10K I would make only $1K or so.

What did I get from this challenge?

• I learned something new about myself. I'm happy to know that I can work hard and be disciplined. It gives me confidence that I can achieve anything I want, that I won't quit.

• I'm proud of myself that I went public with my challenge inspite of the anxiety and fears. It was very difficult for me to make my first post, and look at me now, I can publicly say "I failed" and I'm OK with that. Because I realize that any fail teaches you and I'm glad to learn my lessons.

• I learned new skills. I've started work with JavaScript, Vue.js, React Native, those are all new to me. Mentoring other people helps me to grow as a software engineer and as a potential team leader. My communication skills have got better as well. Also I delved into SEO, marketing, sales, SaaS, so a lot of good stuff which I believe, will help me in the future.

• I got about 200 new connections on LinkedIn.

• I had conversations with different people from all over the world and I absolutely loved it.

• I received a lot of advice from you which was especially great for me. A lot of different opinions, fresh ideas, and tips.

Why I didn't achieve my money goal?

• I definitely needed a plan. I didn't have one.

• I was trying too many things. I had to choose one thing, work hard and scale it.

• I needed more knowledge in sales and marketing.

Final words

I want to thank each of you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for wishing me good luck, for your invaluable advice, for your support. Thank you haters for making me less sensitive to judgement. Thank you all.

It's been an awesome 100 days.

Bye.

When I first got into the private jet business (no, I don’t own a jet), I thought I’d be selling these private jet flights to celebrities, billionaires, CEO’s etc. What I didn’t expect was the surging client base of Gen-Z’s, influencers, online gurus and dropshipping coaches.

The funny thing is that most of these people don’t even care about getting from A to B, most of them book the shortest route and some of them don’t even leave the ground… they just want pictures, and videos of them on the jet sipping champagne lol

At first this was extremely weird and I “judged” these people. Like why would they spend money just to flex on Instagram? It felt fake, very shallow.

But over time i realized that this was the product. The private jet is what people REALLY want. But they aren’t buying transportation, they are buying an image, a story of showing everyone “I made it” for most of them, painting this picture is more valuable than the jet itself.

The crazy is the absurdly MASSIVE demand for these fairly cheap private jet flights. I never imagined an entire market of people who aren’t rich but desperately want to LOOK rich.

But honestly, this was the best thing that could have happened to me because I don’t have to convince anyone to buy. The product (which is the jet flight) sells itself and I close those deals with little to no effort.

The lesson: sales isn’t always about the product you’re selling. It’s more about selling the feeling behind it and getting people emotionally invested. If you understand ego, you’ll understand markets.

Wasn't sure if this should go on r/confessions or here, but figured i'd share.

5 years ago I was bored at work (tech sales) and was browsing craigslist for services needed and came across a post about needing a valet company for a private party. I thought to myself, I could do that! So I replied and said I had a valet company (I did not know the first thing about valet companies) and soon after I was heading to their house to have a meeting about logistics. It was a huge house in a very wealthy neighborhood ($4M+ house), and this very nice husband and wife greeted me and said they were planning a graduation party for their son and parking was limited (house on a hill) and would need valet. I asked how many cars were expected, where we could park, times, etc and said i'd check with my "team" and get right back to them.

I then called a few valet companies and told them I was a party planner for a wealthy family and needed a valet service. I explained that I would be their main point of contact and to please ask their staff not to speak to the owner. I provided the details and decided on the one that had the most reasonable prices and seemed legit (had insurance etc) and they sent me an invoice. The total for this service was $1,000 for 5 hours and 7 guys. So I created my own invoice, fake letter head, etc for $3,000. I sent it to the "client" and had no idea how they would respond to the price and not a few minutes later he said "perfect!" and I was stoked. I took a deposit (personal check made out to me) to pay the valet deposit, etc.

The day of the event was stressful. The owner of the house thought I owned this valet company and the valet company thought I was a party planner! I kept going between the two to make sure that the right hand never talked to the left. At one point the actual owner of the valet company stopped by and I told him his guys were rockstars and got him out of there as quickly as possible.

The event was a huge success. The valet guys were awesome to hang out with. I basically just hung out, ran a few cars myself and gave them all the tips. The plan was executed perfectly.

After the event I came back to get my check and the wife had made me a huuuge goodie bag of food from the party (indian familu and Indian food i'd never had before. Was amazing). Told me how great we did, and all the compliments from their guests, etc.

After that day I did a lot of research on valet companies, the market, the margins, and almost started a business but ultimately decided not to pursue it.

Anyways, that's how you make $2k in a day. Always remember kids, there is money to be made a million different ways if you get a little creative and put your mind to it.

My only regret... looking back at this picture of his house, I should have told him I also owned a roofing company :) :)

Pic here: Valet for a day https://imgur.com/gallery/XB8tzFQ

EDIT: Wow, crazy amount of comments and positivity. As a new member here, this is sweet!

One point of clarity for "Fake Invoice". I didn't mimic the valet company, or pretend to be another company. Not even sure why I used the word "fake". It was a real invoice. I don't have a copy at this point but it likely said " Letterhead "MY NAME VALET SERVICES"
Date Event SERVICES: VALET/PARKING 5 HOURS (start/end) TOTAL COST OF SERVICE DEPOSIT

THANK YOU"

If that is considered fraud then color me igloo.

I’m Noah Kagan, host of Podcast / YouTube and founder of Sumo (free tools to grow your website and business) and AppSumo (Groupon for Geeks) where we help entrepreneurs kick more ass!

Before becoming an entrepreneur I worked at Intel, was employee #30 at Facebook, and #4 at Mint.

I want to help as many people as possible love their work so I've created my products and businesses to help me achieve this mission. It's also why I'm here today for this AMA!

I've been a Redditor for years and started AppSumo ON REDDIT.

Happy to talk about marketing, starting and growing businesses, tacos, getting over depression, productivity and anything else so AMA!

Verification: https://twitter.com/noahkagan/status/867372612548218880

Ps. Love you guys / gals. My favorite thing is seeing you take action. Let me know in PMs what you do and the results following this AMA.

Pps. I planned on spending an hour here but y'all are AWESOME, spent most of the day. I'll be back tomorrow to answer remaining questions. As well, I'm donating $1k in Reddit gold cause of all the great comments.

Ppps. Thanks so much for the love guys, had a lot of fun. If you want to check out my businesses or connect with me you can do so below:

• Noah Kagan Presents Podcast – chats with fun people

• YouTube Channel – videos on business

• OkDork - my blog about marketing and scaling companies

• KingSumo – WordPress plugin for giveaways

• Sumo – Free tools to grow your email list

• AppSumo – "Groupon for Geeks and entrepreneurs"

This may be pretty controversial to lots of you here who hero worship people like Gary Vee and others, but it is important. The industry that has developed around entrepreneurship is infested with what I call 'Toxic Positivity'. It is dangerous and counterproductive.

Here are some examples:

• Telling you its possible that everyone can have businesses making 6 or 7 figures of revenue per month. Yes it happens, but it is not particularly likely or even desirable in many cases. Keep your goals achievable and realistic. Dont be blinded by the unicorns.

• We are often told you need to get up at 4.30am and never sleep. This is obvious BS. Get up at a time that keeps you productive, get a decent nights sleep and look after yourself. Burnout is real, if you dont stop, your body will force you to stop.

• Its really difficult. There is no shortcut to success. There is no automatic formula someone can teach you. Experience matters. Dont forget this when you're seeing adverts telling you to buy ebooks in the latest online trend. Stop looking for the next big thing, stop thinking short term, stop wanting there to be a hidden secret to making it work.

• Dont neglect your friends and family, they are a vital support network that no amount of money can buy back at the end. Its not necessary to avoid all social events or relationships in order to succeed.

• Contrary to what we are told, not everyone needs to aim to be a millionaire or billionaire to succeed at business. There are millions of people running profitable businesses, living good lives that operate at a smaller scale.

• Owning a Lamborghini isnt important in life. Remember what real value is.

• There is no shame in not being an entrepreneur. People in jobs aren't all idiots who are being manipulated by corporations. Working hard at a job and bringing home a reliable paycheck for your family is honourable, will most likely pay more and offer you long term contentment.

• The best investment you can make is in yourself. Eat healthily. Exercise or play sports. Give yourself mental health days if you need them. Use your support network. Keep learning. It will all pay off throughout your life.

• It isn't all about content all of the time. At some point you are going to have to actually make tangible sales and stop designing content.

• Motivation porn is exactly like regular porn, its impossible to live up to and warps your understanding of how this all works.