--
Below is a guest post from John Bardos of CreatorBoom.com. Join over 2,200 content entrepreneurs getting the best links of the week to help start and grow an online business. John screens more than 200 sources every week to find the most valuable content to grow your audience and build your business.
Interested in sharing a guest post? Reply to this email, and let's talk!
--
Mention the word "startup" and most people immediately think of some innovative new technology or software application. For a non-technical founder, the idea of starting a new business can be very intimidating.
Startups don't always need to be technology focused. You can build a very lucrative business around your content, and the best part is that it can be largely passive if you build out the right team.
Here are 10 content creators and other non-technical entrepreneurs that have built very successful businesses:
John Lee Dumas started the Entrepreneurs On Fire daily interview podcast back in 2012. Starting with short, daily 20-minute entrepreneur interviews, John built a lucrative $2 million per year business selling online courses, coaching, notebook journals, and a mastermind program.
John Lee Dumas was one of the first build-in-public practitioners. He still publicly publishes his earnings reports so you can see exactly how much he is making every month.
Lesson: Publishing daily allowed John Lee Dumas to 7X the exposure and experience of a typical weekly podcast. This was a major differentiator at the time.
Bobby Hoyt's primary business is Millennial Money Man, a website promoting affiliate offers. Hover over the top menu items, and you'll see links to best bank accounts, best investing apps, best part-time jobs, and other articles full of affiliate links.
Bobby also partnered with Mike Yanda to run Laptop Empires to help people start and grow online businesses through courses and a $47 monthly membership. Hoyt says the membership and courses earn a stable $30k per month at the time of the Starter Story interview.
With a reported $88k of monthly revenues, that means that Hoyt is making tens of thousands of dollars through affiliate promotions.
Lesson: While the financial niche is very competitive, it is also one of the most lucrative. Referral commissions are typically in the $25 to $100 range, with payouts up to $400 for luxury cards.
Michelle Schroeder-Gardner runs Making Sense of Cents, a personal finance and lifestyle website. Michelle started her website as a part-time hobby in 2011 and quit her job 2 years later to go full-time on the business.
Michelle makes more than $50k per month from affiliate marketing and has had more than 8,000 students take her $197 course.
She is reporting over $5 million in lifetime earnings now. It's no wonder she took a couple years off to live on a sailboat and travel the world.
Lesson: Another lucrative personal finance blog. This is a competitive niche, but there is always room for a different perspective. Writing about the lifestyle that Michelle's financial independence offers builds credibility and connection with readers.
Adam Bryan runs Urban Tastebud, an affiliate marketing blog focusing on ranking and reviewing subscription boxes. Adam is reporting monthly revenues of $51k.
Adam started by publishing a $19 ebook on gluten-free menu items from popular fast food chains. After the ebook completely flopped, he started to publish the content for free on a blog. This attracted hundreds of visitors a day, and people started buying his ebook even though all the content was freely available on his website.
Eventually, Adam wrote an article promoting the 5 best gluten-free subscription boxes with affiliate links. This generated $2,000 in commissions at a time when the website was making less than $1,800 a month.
After the unexpected success of that first affiliate article, Adam decided to focus on niche subscription boxes like hot sauce, vegan, and barbecue. He’s now expanded to more popular subscription box categories like clothing, wine, and meal kits.
Lesson: The act of publishing and promoting new content on a regular basis will lead to new opportunities if you are willing to experiment. Most of what you do is not going to work at first. Keep trying, and you'll find a way. The only way to fail is to give up too soon.
Biron Clary is the founder of a job search and career advice website read by more than a million people per month. The site earns $50k per month primarily from advertising and affiliate sales.
When Career Sidekick first appeared on Starter Story, e-books and a job search course were promoted heavily on the site. Biron has since stopped selling paid products to better promote the free content instead of pushing people through a sales funnel. This has led to more social sharing, engagement, and ad revenue.
Lesson: Advertising revenue can be lucrative for content websites with enough traffic. Website visitors and newsletter subscribers can quickly tire of constant pushes to buy paid products. Helpful, high-quality, and free content will always be valued.
Jeff Proctor co-founded DollarSprout.com, a personal finance blog geared towards millennials. Yet another highly lucrative affiliate marketing blog in the finance niche.
Look how DollarSprout focuses on side hustles, jobs, online businesses, passive income and their podcast.
Of the three personal finance websites in this article, DollarSprout has the best site architecture and SEO. SimilarWeb reports that the site gets 297k visitors per month. In comparison, MakingSenseofCents gets 195k, and MillennialMoneyMan gets 146k visitors per month.
Lesson: Succeeding in a competitive niche almost entirely depends on search engine traffic. Notice that I used "personal finance blog" to link to Dollar Sprout. That copies the original Starter Story link and will help the website rank for personal finance-related terms. It's a lot of work to get those backlinks, but it's a major factor in search engine rankings.
Site architecture (menu structure) is also critical. Study how DollarSprout structured the home page menu. They are doing everything very well.
Matt Oney, runs ZenmasterWellness, an affiliate marketing website for product reviews and comparisons in the mental health and wellness space.
He's able to earn $40k per month from about 80k monthly visits. That is a great return on that amount of traffic. That means that every visitor generates about $0.50 in revenue.
For someone that hates writing and started with zero HTML knowledge, Matt Oney has built a very successful and lucrative business. With over 90% of visitors coming from organic search, Matt knows that SEO is critical to his business, and he's become an expert on the topic.
Lesson: Content-based websites need traffic. While some have found success by building a large following on social media platforms like Twitter. Written content needs SEO. This is especially true if affiliate links are the primary business model.
Ryan Robinson runs ryrob.com, where he focuses on blogging and marketing topics. Ryan started blogging part-time in 2014 and reached his first $100k year in 2017. Two years later, he made $451,238 in a single year.
Ryan's signature content is his How to Start a Blog post which generates lucrative affiliate commissions from BlueHost web hosting. In a single month in 2019, he earned $43,510 just from BlueHost referral fees.
At the time of his Starter Story interview in 2021, Ryan reported traffic of about 500k monthly visitors and revenue between $25,000 to $55,000 each month. Most of that is affiliate commissions, but Ryan also sells sponsored posts and his own courses and books.
Lesson: Picking a niche with high affiliate earning potential is important. Website hosting companies can pay commissions of up to about $200 because the lifetime value of those customers is so high. Top affiliates can negotiate higher commissions because of all the business they are delivering.
Mason Woodruff is a food blogger with two sites, MasonFit and With the Woodruffs. Starting part-time in 2014, Mason went full-time on the blogs in 2018. His wife joined him in 2020.
85-90% of their revenue is from MediaVine display advertising, which dynamically inserts ads into articles. Since going full-time in 2018, revenue has been roughly doubling each year. In 2020, they reported monthly revenue of $15k to $20k on about 133k monthly organic sessions. Traffic increased 38% in 2021 to about 2.2m organic sessions for the year.
In October 2022, the Woodruffs’ two sites were getting 306.5k and 81.1k monthly visits, according to SimilarWeb. That would put them at over 4.5 million visits for the year. More than double in 2021.
Lesson: Affiliate sales can be very lucrative, but they are not the only way to make money with your content. Once you get enough traffic (50,000 to 100,000 sessions per month), you can apply for advertising networks like MediaVine or AdThrive. The Woodruffs say they earn $50+ per 1000 page views. However, revenues can vary a lot depending on the niche.
This site here is also a great example of a content-focused startup. Founder Pat Walls started the site back in 2017 with just 3 interviews. Five years later, Starter Story has more than 4,000 case studies.
In September 2022 alone, the business made $74K in revenue and had over 1.5M visitors. The Starter Story newsletter now has more than 100k subscribers.
In the beginning, advertising and sponsorships were the only sources of revenue. Now, 38% of revenue comes from premium memberships. With over 2,500 active members, the paid subscription alone generates $30k/month. More than half of the revenue still comes from advertising and sponsorships, with affiliate sales making up about 5%.
Lesson: Starter Story built a huge library of case studies using standardized interview questions. It would be impossible to do that many interviews through live zoom calls. A typical podcast might do 50 to 100 interviews per year. Starter Story can do over 1,000.
Ready to become a content startup?
Don't let a lack of technical skills stop you from starting your own business. Content entrepreneurs are making tens of thousands of dollars per month or more in almost every niche imaginable.
The best part of many of these businesses is that you don't have to deal with customers. With advertising and affiliate-focused businesses, there are no fulfillment issues, no returns to deal with, and no angry customers. It can take years to get sufficient traffic, but once the content is created, it can continue to generate passive income for years.
