How I Made My First Million (STILL WORKS TODAY)

In this video, I'm going to share with you the first method that I use to make a million dollars. Because I actually think it is the best method even today for a new entrepreneur to get a foot in the game and to build a long term profitable business that sets them free for a very long time. I started my first business when I was in college and what I did was I built tiny little websites that ranked for search terms and then I sold products on them as an affiliate. I also built an email list on those websites and, and I would send offers and marketing messages to the people who opted in. Now this was way back in 2006 when there were very few tools to be able to do this. I was hand coding websites on dial up Internet. Man, that makes me sound old. I was hand coding HTML in Dreamweaver. If you know what that is, it means you're old too. Now there's all kinds of tools and resources to be able to do what I'm going to share with you in this video. And I think it's the best opportunity for somebody who's just getting started to, to build a really profitable income stream that gets to $10,000 a month in profit or more. I'm gonna share with you exactly how this model works. But first I wanna share with you what happened to me when I first started doing this. I thought for sure that nobody would ever read my stuff. I thought that I would just enjoy writing and creating content about this and maybe it would get my name out there a little bit. And I had built a little bit of an email list by creating content on a website that was only a few hundred people and eventually a few thousand people. I remember saying to a friend of mine who was getting 30 opt ins a day, oh my goodness, 30 people for free were entering their email address. I was like, how the heck are you doing that? I'm getting like eight a day just by writing content. And that was all I was getting, was just a few people a day who were finding my content and opting into my email list. But about a year later, someone invited me to promote a product as an affiliate. And I thought that I, you know, was just this small little fish who had a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers on an email list. And I ended up placing third in that launch and they sent me a bunch of prizes. I beat all of these other people who are my heroes and I was like, what in the world is happening? How does somebody tiny like me beat all of these big guys? And it was because I had a relationship with the people who were reading my content. And because I had that relationship with those people, they trusted my opinion when I promoted a product. And all of a sudden I started showing up on leaderboards all over the place. I would write content about the company that I promoted and they would link back to it or they would highlight it and other people would find it. And all of a sudden I would go to these events and people would start noticing me or recognizing my name because they had seen me on leaderboards or sales promotions. I was still in college at this point and I remember my mom calling me, seeing one of the checks that got mailed to my house that I grew up in. And she asked me what illegal activity I was participating in from my Christian college dorm room. And I said, mom, I won a sales contest or I at least placed third. She was like, how did you do that? You're 19 years old. And I was like, I'm just writing content on a blog and I'm building an email list. Now get this, fast forward 15 years. There are still people who are on my email list today that found me when I was a blogger in college. And that's why I think this model is so effective for people who are first getting started because they can double down on something that they're interested in. It allows them to have short term cash flow, even if it's something small like a few thousand dollars a month. But it's an asset that can build over many, many years because there are customers and followers who have built a relationship with me over a decade of me continuing to write content for the email list that I built starting way back in college. So now let's the how and how you can get started with this. Basically what I did was I built content sites where I would blog and create articles, share my opinion, get other people to post on the websites, and I would rank for key terms on Google doing search engine optimization. Now what's interesting is today there are really big businesses doing this and selling for a lot of money. Sam Parr's the Hustle Co comes to mind right now. He built a website that was just content and an email newsletter and HubSpot bought that for. The amount wasn't disclosed, but Sam has indicated that was somewhere around $30 million in 2021. There are other content businesses like that one that are raising capital and building writing teams and going really aggressively in this direction. But you don't need to have venture capital or to have visions of having an eight figure exit in order to Build one of these websites that you really enjoy and, and to build an audience that rewards you in the form of dollars and consistent profit. So what I did was I built these tiny websites around things that I enjoyed talking about. And then I would post content or I would hire a writer on Upwork, give them the terms that I wanted them to write about, I would post them on the website, and then I would just see what sticks. I used a tool called semrush.com, it's still available today. Costs a few bucks a month if you want the pro version, but it will tell you where you are ranking for certain key terms. So as you throw some content onto the website, Semrush will tell you what keywords you're ranking for, and then you can go back and optimize those pieces of content so that they'll rank higher. There's also tools like ahrefs, that's a H R E F s dot com that will show you where to get links and what the likelihood of you ranking for certain key terms is. But as you continue to create content on this topic, you'll rank for more search terms. You'll have more clear insight into what you should be writing about or what you should be getting other writers to write about. And you can optimize the site to get more visibility on Google and get lots of free traffic. A lot of sites will just sell advertising on these pages, and that's how they make their money. There are many, many big websites that do this. In fact, the Daily Wire is one of these. And they did over $100 million this year. Now they have podcasts and YouTube channels and all that. And I would absolutely recommend that you do that if you're really passionate about a topic. But most of these big organizations just sell advertising on all the eyeballs that they're getting on these topics that they're writing or creating content about. But I would take it one step further. I built email lists so I would capture the email addresses of the people that were coming to my website and. And those email newsletters are worth a lot of money right now. The Morning Brew and the Hustle Co both had multimillion dollar exits because of the value of their newsletter. And that is an asset that you can build over time. If people are consuming your emails and they're buying stuff from those emails, that is an asset that can be sold for a whack ton of money. If you look at what Gary Vaynerchuk teaches, he talks about choosing your passion, choosing something that you're interested in, and then starting a podcast or a YouTube channel, or creating content on social media so that you build a following around that passion and then monetize it later. I take it one step further and I say you take all of that content that you're making and you build a blog and an email newsletter and you create that as the asset. Because if you're building the email list, then you always have eyeballs who will buy your course launches or your affiliate promotions. Or if you decide to follow my playbook of building a physical products business and getting it to 100 sales a day. The fast way to get to 100 sales a day is by talking about the launch that you're doing on your website and on your email newsletter. Now, if you're already in business, if you're in E commerce or coaching or consulting, one of the best ways to get clients is by doing this exact method, by building a content hub and building the email list on that website. And then when you create content through your podcast or a YouTube channel or social media, you send them back to the website, you collect their email address, and that's how you can build a really long term asset that grows over time. That is also how you can make a business sellable, even if you think that what you have right now would never be bought by somebody else. Using this method, I was making over $100,000 a year from my college dorm room. And I kept doing this until I decided to go into my physical products brand background where I had a few exits and I made millions of dollars. Interestingly enough, the audience that I built while I was blogging and doing all of this and building small email lists was the foundation for me even going into that direction because I had been building up relationships with all of these followers and all these people who wrote me emails. And I ended up partnering with some of them, I ended up masterminding with some of them, and I built further relationships in the direction where I went next, which was building physical products brands. Now it kind of comes full circle for me because I'm doing both of those two things. The company that I sold for $15 million back in 2017, I just bought back for under a million dollars. And now we're building capitalism.com, which is my primary focus, into a content hub, to be bigger than just right, Ryan Daniel Moran Bigger than one podcast, bigger than one YouTube channel. We're turning that into a blog following the same model that I built in college, the same model that I've talked about in this video. So these are models that still work to this day. In fact, they might even work better today because the Internet's bigger, Google is bigger, there's more tools and resources. And now it's easier for anybody who's interested in a topic to make a splash in a marketplace because they have more places to share their work. So if you can write or speak or create content and you can hire somebody to transcribe it and turn it into a blog post, then you're ready to be able to do this and start leveraging all of that attention and use all the things that you hear about from Gary Vaynerchuk or Lewis Howes about growing audiences on social media to amplify the content that you're building on your website and build the email list that will be the asset for a very long time. Time. That, my friends, is what I believe to be the best opportunity for somebody who's brand new to get started, build a six figure business and create an asset that they can grow for many, many years. It's also a wonderful foundation for you to launch a physical products brand. If you decide to follow my work. I help entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses that they can sell. So if you've got a blog with lots of followers or even a small amount of followers, you can leverage that for the launch of of a brand that you can sell as well. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran. I help entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses. Thanks for watching this video and if you found value in it, hit the subscribe button and I will mentor you on your journey to $1 million. Thanks for watching.