How I Built a Side Project Into a Million-Dollar Business

In this video, I'm going to show you how I started a side project that turned into a business that eventually sold for millions. And today, I'm going to show you exactly how I did it and the most important lessons that you can apply to your own business. So, looking back, the number one thing that made a difference was I took advantage of an opportunity, but not a fad. So, let me explain. My first business was an

SEO training company called Backlinko. Before I started Backlinko, I struggled with all my business and the main reason looking back was I would jump from shiny object to shiny object. Whether it was affiliate marketing or something else, it was always a new platform, a new tactic, a new strategy, and I was just jumping from thing to thing to thing. Instead of looking for an opportunity in the market and then working on that for over 5 years.

Because if you want to build a business that's actually successful and actually legit, you usually need to work on it for at least 5 years for it to be successful. You can do okay in a shorter period of time and it does happen, but most businesses take at least 5 years to grow into something significant. So, in my case, I was kind of sick of just like chasing my tail and creating these businesses that were kind

of like side hustles that never really went anywhere. I wanted to build something real. So, I realized that there was an opportunity in the market for a site and a platform that would teach people white hat SEO with actionable strategies. Because at the time, I was doing SEO and I wanted to get more into white hat SEO and I couldn't find anything in terms of actionable strategies. It was all vague, create great content, build relationships with

people, and all that nonsense. It didn't tell you actually what to do. And I realized that there was probably other people like me that wanted to solve this problem. So, I created the site that I wanted. But I also knew that it was going to take time for this thing to take off because it just takes time to build a real business. That was sort of what I realized. So, I was willing to do this for

5 years. It wasn't this flash in the pan thing where I was like, "Oh, it's opportunity. I need to jump on it before the loophole closes." I realized this was going to be a grind and I was going to have to work hard on it for 5 years like any legitimate business and I'm glad I did. So, yes, you do want to find an opportunity in the marketplace, preferably something that's trending up, a market that's growing,

but also it needs to be something that you're willing to work on for 5 years. Because if you hate it, it's very likely you're going to stick with it for that long. Just like a Grubhub for example. Grubhub is huge, but they started back in 2004 and they didn't sell for 17 years. Like it took them 17 years of building, building, building before they finally sold. So, if you want to build a business that's like worth

selling, you need to find something that's an opportunity, but also something you're willing to work on for at least 5 years. And most gurus will tell you to jump on the next big thing. That's because gurus have to create content around something. There isn't a huge market for people to watch videos from legitimate entrepreneurs who are saying, "You need to work on something really hard for years and then you'll see success." It's much easier to say,

"Do this thing that's blowing up right now and you'll make a bunch of money in a short period of time." And that's why the gurus are always jumping from shiny object from shiny object, whether it's affiliate marketing, drop shipping, Clubhouse, Periscope, ChatGPT, whatever it is, they're going to jump on some big trend and tell you that's the thing you need to do. But real entrepreneurs will always tell you it takes years. If you look at actual

entrepreneurs who have taken their businesses and sold it or taken their businesses public, they're never going to say, "The number one thing that helped me was I jumped on some random trend." They'll always say, "I built something and worked on it for years." Because it's really the only way to do it. So, make a long story short, the number one thing is you want to find an opportunity in the market, preferably a growing market, and something

you're willing to work on for years. Now, for me it was really easy because I liked SEO. I liked learning about SEO. I'm an SEO nerd. So, for me, I had no problem working on that business for 5 years. Yes, I did eventually get burned out on it and that's one of the reasons that I sold it. I have a whole video on this. But for the most part, it was something that I realized that I

enjoyed, that I wanted to work on. And it wasn't something that was like, "Oh, this opportunity just appeared and if you don't take advantage of it, you're going to miss out on this next big thing." 99 times out of 100, that next big thing fizzles out into nothing. And where are [music] you? Back to where you started. And that's what happened to me for like 4 years before I started Backlinko. But I'm not a guru. I

don't have anything to sell. For me, I'm just providing the lessons and the advice that worked best for me to help me build my business from scratch into a business that I sold to a publicly traded company for millions. The next thing that made a huge difference for me was delayed gratification in the sense I didn't rush to monetize. When I created Backlinko, I didn't launch my first paid product until 10 months after I launched. So,

almost a year. Now, I had the luxury of having an affiliate site that was doing well at the time, agency stuff I was doing at the time. So, I had the luxury where I didn't need the money. It didn't need to be monetized right away. So, what's the advantage of not monetizing? Well, you can focus on building your audience. It's really hard to simultaneously build an audience and sell a product. Because once you're getting to the

product side, you need to worry about product development, branding pricing plans customer support, refunds, Stripe. There's a million things you need to learn on that side. If you can just put that to the side for a few months and just focus on building your audience, it's going to help you in a number of ways. One, you're going to build your audience faster because you can just focus 100% on that. As you're building your audience, you're going

to interact with your audience and they're basically going to tell you what they want and what you should build. So, with Backlinko, I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to monetize, but once I launched the blog and I started to build an audience, people were telling me, "I want an online course about SEO that tells me step-by-step what to do. I'm overwhelmed with SEO. I'm reading blog posts, I'm watching videos, I hired agencies that didn't

work out. I just want a plan." So, when I created my course, I made sure it wasn't like an intro to SEO course. It was a step-by-step plan. SEO That Works was designed to be like, "This is an effective blueprint for you." And this is something that I only learned after having 10 months of talking to people and talking to my target audience. If I didn't talk to them and I just launched a course based on

what I thought they would want, it probably would have been totally different and not as effective. The other thing that helped a lot was to focus on one channel at a time. It's really tempting to be like, "I want to be big on Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn and have a podcast and have a YouTube channel and do speaking gigs." Like it's really tempting to do that and that's initially was my sort of instinct when I

launched Backlinko. It was like, "I want to be everywhere. I want to be like the SEO guy." And I quickly realized it was impossible for one person to do that. What I did was I focused on one channel at first, which in my case was basically content marketing and SEO. I really focused on just creating awesome blog content and building up an audience that way. Once that started to get some traction, I moved on to email

and I focused on building my email list and learning how to monetize my email list. Then I went to YouTube. But these were like a year at least in between because I was learning these platforms as I went along. When I created Backlinko, I knew some stuff about SEO. I had an affiliate site that was doing well. But I didn't know anything about like legit content marketing, creating stuff that people were like, "Wow, this is cool.

This is amazing. I want to share it. I want to link to it." That's what I learned from the first stage of Backlinko. And then when I created my email list, that was my first email list. I literally didn't even know how to collect an email. I didn't even know how to send an email, send a newsletter, or segment my list, or any of that stuff. It takes time to learn these things. So, I spent a

year learning that and mastering that. Then I moved on to YouTube. Never created a video in my life. I had to learn how to like come up with video topics, be good on camera, which is a really difficult skill for me. How to create videos that are compelling. How to optimize them for YouTube SEO. I had to learn all this stuff. Then I moved on to LinkedIn and I had to learn how to create LinkedIn posts

that people wanted to read, that were engaging, that weren't cheesy. And I got 80,000 followers on LinkedIn. Now, looking back, I have all those channels mastered. But if I tried to do them all at once, they all would have probably had mediocre results and it wouldn't have gotten anywhere. So, I recommend really focusing on one channel at a time. The channel itself doesn't matter. It's whatever's going to work best for you. Maybe you're really good at

podcasting. Well, that should be the channel you focus on. Maybe you're really good at writing LinkedIn posts, then do that. Maybe you're really good on video, then do YouTube or TikTok. The point isn't that one channel is necessarily better than the other, but it's to focus on one, learn it, master it, grow on it, and then move on to the next one. The next thing that was huge for me is I learned how to sell with

email. So, with Backlinko, 99% of our sales came via email. When I first launched my course, I had a big button on the site. Like, "The course is here. You can buy it." And no one bought it. And I learned sort of through trial and error that email is the best way to sell anything and it's a skill that anyone can learn, especially when it comes to product launches. In fact, not only did we sell 99%

of the courses via email, when I took the same process to Exploding Topics, which is my SaaS startup, email was huge for us. We went from 0 to 10K MRR in a month because we launched via email. We built up a big newsletter and then we launched a product to that list. If we just had our website change from everything's free a paid plan, hopefully you buy it, it would have taken us months if not a

year to get to 10K MRR. Instead, in 3 days, went from 0 to 10K MRR because I knew how to sell with email. It's a real skill and something worth mastering. And honestly, when I said last time that there's no channel that's better than others, there is actually one and that's email. Email is definitely king when it comes to learning how to sell and building a big business. It's very rare that you'll find a huge business

that didn't succeed due to email. I mean, just look at it this way. How many YouTube channels have you followed where they launched something? Like, "Hey, check out this thing." How many times have you actually done it? Very rare, right? But how many things have you bought or at least looked at from an email? It's like 100 to one, right? Email is a powerful channel because you're getting directly in front of your target audience um as

opposed to publishing something and hoping that the social media algorithm gets it in front of somebody. The next thing I learned that was huge was getting out of plateaus. No matter where you are in your business, you're going to see periods of growth and you're going to see periods of plateaus. And when you hit a plateau, it's important to know how to get out of it. And this is something I had no idea how to do.

When I launched Backlinko, it grew pretty quickly to seven figures. But I hit a huge plateau for almost a year where I didn't know what to do. And I asked a friend of mine who has a very successful business what I should do and he told me I had two groups of people in my audience. I had problem experts and I had problem aware. And I never heard of this concept before, but what he told me

was problem experts are people that are aware of their problem, they know about the solutions out there. So, if you have back pain for example, you're not just usually aware of the problem, you're an expert. You know, you can go to a chiropractor, you can do acupuncture, you can get surgery, you can take supplements, you can use heat. There's a million things you can do. So, you're a problem expert. So, when someone presents you a solution,

you know how it fits within the world of solutions out there. So, someone says, "Hey, I have this new thing you can try, this new device. It's going to help your back pain." You know, "Oh, that's new. I've never heard of that before. That doesn't exist. Let me try that." It's a much easier sell. The other advantage of selling to problem experts is that they'll seek you out. They know they have a problem, they're actively seeking

solutions. So, when you present a solution, they'll come and find you. You don't have to work as hard to get in front of them. Problem aware people, they're more like, "Okay, I have this problem, but it's not a big deal, and I don't really know about the solutions yet." In my case with Backlinko, the problem experts were people that were like, "I know I need more traffic. I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried that, and

nothing works." So, when I presented my solution, which was unique, this course SEO That Works that'll show you step-by-step how to get higher rankings and more traffic, they were like, "Perfect. That's new. I've tried everything else. It's something else to try. Let me try it." Problem aware people are totally different. Traffic is, you know, they know it's a problem, they're problem aware, but it's not a big problem. And marketing to these two groups is totally different.

With problem experts, it's easy. Here's my solution, buy it. With problem aware people, you first have to warm them up and make the problem that you're solving a big deal in their mind. So, for example, in my case, problem aware people were people that own online businesses. They might have bigger problems than traffic. Maybe they have product problems, maybe they have lead gen problems, maybe they're having problems with their social media accounts. The point is, traffic

is not seen to them as a big deal, or else they become problem experts. They're still just problem aware. So, your marketing has to shift from, "You tried all this stuff, it didn't work, here's my thing, traffic is a huge problem that you need to solve right now." In most markets, 80% of people are problem aware, and only 20% are problem experts. So, once you tap out your problem experts, you're going to hit a plateau because

there's just a finite number of them, and you need to learn how to market differently. So, for me, I had to learn how to completely change my marketing approach from marketing to problem experts to marketing to problem aware. And specifically, what I did was learn how to do product launches. And with product launches, there's a whole thing called the pre-launch, which is before you even launch your product, you talk about the problem and make the problem

seem like a huge deal that if they only solve this problem, all their other issues would go away. So, in the case of an online business owner, they have all these issues, what I said is, "What if you 10x your traffic? All his problems will go away." "Well, I'm not getting enough leads cuz I'm doing outbound, and my messages are going to spam, or people aren't responding." Well, what if you get 10x the number of people

to your website? Would that solve the problem? Yes. That's the key in that early stage of the launch process is it takes someone from problem aware to problem expert. That's something I had no idea about, and I had to learn the hard way. So, once I learned that, it was an inflection point, that was huge for my business, and got me out of that first plateau. So, the last lesson I want to share with you is

to focus on compound channels instead of one-offs. And what do I mean by that? Well, compound channels are channels that, as you invest in them, and as you have success with them, they grow automatically. Now, it takes time to get going, and it can take time to actually build. You're building momentum every time you publish something on the platform. So, for example, on YouTube, whenever you publish a video on YouTube, a certain percentage of subscribers see

it, right? And that pushes it to new people who aren't subscribers yet, and some of those become subscribers. So, your subscriber count grows. So, the next time you publish a video, you have more subscribers. So, some of those new subscribers will, you know, help the video spread to people that haven't seen you yet, and those new people become subscribers, and so on and so forth. And eventually, that compounds into a huge audience. As opposed to a

channel like ads and funnels and partnerships, which are all one-off. Like, you create an ad, it does well for a while, and then it doesn't, you have to create a new one. And then you have to create a new one, then you have to create a new one. And you're always creating new creatives to try to sort of stay ahead of the curve, but you're not building anything, right? You're just basically chasing your tail, staying one

step ahead of fickle consumers on Facebook, or whatever, your competitors that are copying your ads, or copying other people's ads, or the ad de jour of the day. You're not really building anything. One of the things that really helped me looking back was that I really focused on these compound channels. It took a while to get going, that was a downside. If I just opened a Facebook ads account and started selling, I would have got to

my revenue goals or whatever a lot faster, but now that I look back, I'm glad I built those channels because those channels ended up being huge for me. Like, I built an email list of over 200,000 subscribers because every time I sent out an email, a certain segment of those people would share the email with other people that weren't subscribed yet, then they would subscribe. This also helped me sell the business because I actually had something

to sell. If your business is just like e-commerce drop shipping plus funnel plus Facebook ads, there's nothing to sell. There's no assets there. What are you going to sell? Your your Facebook ads login or your and your AliExpress login? There's no real asset there. But if you're selling like an email list, a website, IP, technology, whatever, you're actually building something that compounds, that's a valuable asset that another company might want to buy. So, yeah, those are

my business lessons from growing my actually two companies now. And now I'd like to hear from you. What's the number one takeaway that you got from this video? Let me know in the comments section below. Or maybe there's something you want me to like do a deep dive on in the future. If so, let me know in the comments, and I'll check it out, and I'll see you in the next video.