$250k+ Per Year From A Dorm Room?? (IT STILL WORKS)

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this video. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran, and today what I want to share is how I made six figures from my college dorm room. Yes, that was over 10 years ago. You're old. And yes, it still works. In fact, it works better today than it did when I was in college. So for those of you who are looking for a side thing or you're looking for a business that you want to start, this video is really going to help you out. Now, I'm 33 years old. That makes me old on YouTube. But the things that I did when I was in my late teens, early and mid twenties made me six figures consistently every year. And it set me up for becoming a really successful entrepreneur in my late 20s and now my 30s. And this strategy still works. It will continue to work for years to come. In fact, there's a lot of opportunities that exist now that didn't exist back then that make it faster and easier for new entrepreneurs to get started. So this is the overall strategy, creating content websites that sell affiliate products. I know, life changing, right? When we go into the nitty gritty of this, there are some nuances that make this really profitable and make this grow really quickly. And it's the type of business that could very quickly earn an extra 1500 to $3000 a month, and it could eventually get to the point where it made 10,000. And in my case, I had some websites that were doing 15 to $25,000 a month, sometimes even more when you layer in some of the strategies that we'll talk about in this video. But the overall high level strategy is a content website around one core topic and then being an affiliate for the products that are in that area, in that niche. And when you have the content on a very specific topic, you become the expert in that niche. And it makes your recommendations for products a very trustworthy source, which makes it very likely that you'll get a lot of commissions doing that. So I got into this when I was 18 years old. I had just graduated high school. I got $1,000 in checks from friends as graduation presents. 25 bucks here, 100 bucks here. I think my uncle gave me 200 bucks. And I had friends who were putting that money into books and school and all this. And I just had this question for myself. I wonder if I could turn this into an Internet business. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I was going to school thinking I was gonna be a pastor of all things. I didn't do that, by the way, but I was going to School thinking I was gonna be a pastor making 35 grand a year for the rest of my life. And so I had this to do something on the side. I had an itch to scratch and it was becoming an entrepreneur. So I bought this book, one of those $47 ebooks that talked about building review sites, building little information hubs that reviewed other products, basically becoming like, are any of you old enough to know what Consumer Reports is.

Doing? Reviews of popular products, that was the idea. And then becoming an affiliate for those products. Now, back then, you could pretty much review anything you wanted and it could look really crappy and people would still buy it because traffic was cheap and people weren't used to seeing trustworthy sites on the Internet. It was all a bunch of really crappy websites. This is 2006 for goodness sake. Today you actually need to be an authority on a specific topic. And I thankfully was ahead of the curve enough to say, I want to do this one step better than everybody else and actually look like an authority on these topics. So I took the time to actually create content on these websites before blogging was even a thing. Today, that's the expectation. So what you will need to do is pick one specific topic that you're really interested in. And it doesn't need to be your passion, it doesn't need to be your life's work. It just needs to be something that you're interested in. Could be photography, it could be travel. There's lots of money made in travel blogging. It could be raising pets or exotic animals. It could be making money online, it could be swimming. It can be whatever you want. Just some topic that you're genuinely interested in that you want to learn more about. And then the next step is, can you make a list of five to 10 products in that niche market that a lot of people buy? And it could be Amazon products. The best ones are info products because they have the highest commissions. So if you go on clickbank.com or if you just google your topic plus affiliate program, you can find a lot of different products that have affiliate programs where you can make anywhere from 10 to 50% of the sale price. And that's like as much as the person who's selling the product is often making. And you have to do any of the or creation or any of that stuff. So that's layer one. Layer one is you're picking a topic that you're interested in and you need a few products that you can sell. But the important layer is becoming the info hub for this very Specific topic. And the more specific, the better. The more specific the person is who's finding you, the more helpful your content can be. And the question then becomes, how are you most comfortable making content in a way that would be consistent enough for you to build a following and for you to also be trustworthy enough for people to take your recommendations? That can be podcast, it can be YouTube, it can be blogging. Now back when I did this, this was the very early days of YouTube. If you had YouTube videos, you were way ahead of the curve. This was before podcasting, this before Apple podcasts was a thing. Spotify wasn't invented and blogging was still new. So if you are starting today, you have the benefit of way more traffic and way more ease of creating content, because Everybody has a YouTube channel and everybody has a blog and everybody has a podcast. So you having a specific topic for your content hub has very easy distribution to whoever needs to hear it. So for you, wherever you can consistently make content, that is the next piece of the puzzle for you. When you layer in these two pieces, you'll see that the long term goal is for you to become an authority on this specific topic and for you to also have more specific pieces of content that recommend products. This takes time for about three months. You may not see much momentum at all, but certainly within a year, if you are consistent in putting out weekly content and bringing it all back to one central place, that being your website, that is when you will really start to see a lot of traction. Now there's a third layer to this where the profits get a lot bigger and build a lot faster. And it's by building an email list on your website. Now, I was very early in email marketing, thank goodness. I've been in email marketing since 2007 and it's just as effective today as it was back then. A lot of people will argue differently, but no, getting a message into somebody's inbox that they want to hear is a very, very powerful tool. So build your email lists very early. And email lists can be built by sending out a weekly newsletter that is just a content roundup of what you put on your blog or your video podcast over the previous week or month. It can also be where you give your commentary on what's going on in the overall sector, what's happening in the news, and you just give your opinion and you also review products in that newsletter as well. I use it to just kind of be a personal blog where I share what's going on for me and I share the lessons that I'm learning along the journey of becoming a really successful entrepreneur for you, you can do it once again. However you're comfortable creating content, it could just be used to send people to your new YouTube video if you want them to. It can just be to send people to a new blog post and it just be a place for you to give value to your audience. You can absolutely do that. The way that this will monetize is six months from now, when someone is doing a big promotion for a product in your market and they want your help promoting it and they pay you and you're honest about the fact that you're being paid for the promotion, or you're an affiliate for that product and you send a bunch of your email list subscribers over to their webinar or whatever they're promoting. There's one more layer to this that is extremely effective and very profitable. As you start to get traction on your website and as a content hub, start building webpages on your website that review specific products. This is where I made the majority of my money as an affiliate in college. In fact, I was making six figures as a 19 year old from my college dorm room just with these specific, we called them money pages where we would write reviews of products and sometimes I would buy the product and I would video myself going through it or unboxing it or whatever it was. And I would do positive reviews and I would do negative reviews and I would recommend whether or not somebody should buy it or not. In fact, I got a lot of emails from angry companies who are upset that I did a negative review about them.

But it got people to trust the products that I said somebody should actually buy. So for you, what that means is taking that list of five to 10 products that you want to review, doing a full blog write up or full video write up about them and then linking to it as an affiliate. And it's important that you're honest about the fact that you're an affiliate. And the way that I always did this was I said, hey, by the way, I'm an affiliate for this product. I make a few bucks if you buy it through my link, which helps me sustain my business. Some people think that that's a bad thing. They think that it's actually sways my opinion. But the way that I see it is I have a financial incentive to make sure that my viewers and subscribers get the product that will actually help them. So I am an affiliate for the products that I recommend and the link is below. That's how I would always say that as a way to both be honest and also kind of disarm the situation because you don't want to hide the fact that you're an affiliate for something, use it to your advantage. Since I was doing this back in 2006. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. There are more opportunities that exist today than did back then. A lot of people will say that this is harder, there's more competition, more people are trying to do that. And that's all true. There are more people doing this, but there's so much more traffic now. There are so many more opportunities for you to win. There are so many different platforms that make it easy for you to get in front of enough people for you to make this your full time thing. I think the beauty of all this is literally any market can be a full time business, even a six figure business. Gary Vaynerchuk sometimes says that this is the first time ever that somebody can make $73,000 a year. Talking about only peanut butter. What? And he's right. He's absolutely right. The reason why more people don't do this is, is because for the first three to six months, it looks like nothing's happening, which is the case with any business. The hack around that is to pick something you're genuinely interested in. Because the worst thing that could happen is that you learn a lot about a topic that genuinely excites you and that you have a small side gig that is really fun for you to do. There's all these opportunities that open up as a result of you picking a market that you're genuinely, genuinely interested in, creating content, reviewing products, and building an email list. That's the formula. And it happens so much faster today because there's so many more opportunities for you to grow. One of the things that I used to do that really helped me was I created little content syndicates. And what that meant was I would choose five people who were about at my level and we would prefer each other for content. What that would mean is that we would interview each other on the podcast regularly, we would share each other's content, tag each other, we would do videos together, we would prefer each other for our channel. And every time we were on each other's content, it helped everyone. And so the six of us became kind of known as a little mafia on this top topic. And that creates a lot of potential distribution on any topic. Pick a market, a niche that you're really interested in, create core pieces of content and choose a few core products that you're Going to promote long term, continuously put out content in some sort of multimedia fashion, build an email list, create collaborations with people who are in your space. Those five things over the next several years will make you a full time entrepreneur on a topic that you're really interested in. And it can grow to the point where it is a multi six figure business. You just gotta get into it knowing that the first year is gonna be a grind just like anything else. You're starting something brand new. So if you've been sitting on the sidelines looking for a way to have something on the side that could eventually be full time, I think this is the best opportunity for everyone to get started. Not everybody is going to build a physical products brand, which is my favorite way to build a business that you can sell. It's what we talk about and something called the capitalism incubator where we get really involved. Our favorite people to work with are people who have content sites because we can just plug a physical products brand into that and watch it explode. So if you've got a content site, you're watching this like you should totally. That just spoke like I was in, it was 1999. Like you should totally join the capitalism incubator. It's going to make you, I shouldn't say it'll make you super rich. That could get me in legal trouble. But we can help you build a seven figure business that you can sell for people who are just looking for something on the side. I think building a content site is like the best, fastest, easiest way to get started doing something long term that is going to pay dividends for most of your life. If you found value in this video, let me know in the comments and I'd love to hear. Are you thinking about a niche market right now that would be interesting enough for you to go all in on? Because I bet we could brainstorm how to make that a full time thing. If you are an entrepreneur who is on a journey to build businesses and invest the profits, that's what I help people do. So subscribe to this channel and we can help you get on the path to becoming a successful entrepreneur who builds businesses, invest the profits and has freedom. Because that's what this game is about. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism.com, and I'll see you next time. Take care.