Neil Patel's $100,000 per month challenge - Month 1

Ok so I have been a follower of Neil Patel for some time. The guy just provides so much excellent information for free that you should really follow him.

Anyway I have decided to try his $100,000 challenge step by step to see if it can be done by someone as useless as me.

There are a few twists and turns but first a little disclaimer: I already have a site that makes a little money each month from which I have linked to my 'new' site (just like Neil did in his challenge). This shouldn't make much of a difference though.

Instead of going the white label route I will try both the affiliate route AND the white label route. The reason being that my budget is very small so I may not get any white label agreements (time will tell).

My 'new' site is actually around a year old and already has a few posts on it. I haven't worked on it since it was initially set up but I am aiming to post 1 post per week day (.ie Monday - Friday).

While I am concentrating on the new site I have hired a writer to work on my established site just to keep the content coming along. I'll post there 2 - 3 times a week. Link building and content marketing I am doing myself for both sites.

My budget is around $500 and I aim to spend 2 hours a (weekday) morning working on the new site. This is enough time to post an article and do some link building.

I've already spend around $100 on FB ads and am doing outreach as stated in the article plus I am spending some of that budgets on the writer mentioned above.

So, who is with me? Who wants to do this challenge. Let's motivate each other to work very hard for 1 year and see what happens.

My goal: to generate $2,000 a month income by March next year.

What's your goal?

PS Because I have limited time to work on the sites I won't be checking this post too often but I will post my updates each month (and yes I have kids and plan to take holidays when they take holidays :-) )

Edit:

Month 1:

Ok so the second month is nearly up so I'd better post an update about month 1.

I actually made some sales on the new site for a total of around $88. I wasn't expecting many sales especially since I made around $5 for the first month of my more established site. So $88 in the bank is a nice bonus.

I ended up publishing 1 article per week day in the first month plus I had a give away for an Amazon voucher just to get some traffic and blog comments happening.

The content was all fairly basic consisting of reviews and informative posts. The big lesson that I learned was even though the searches for the main product of the new site are way lower than searched for the keyword of my established site the profit per sale is much bigger. I guess that the key take away is not to put too much weight on monthly search figures but also look at pricing.

Most of my competitors are only focusing on lower cost products while I reviewed both higher and lower cost product. By doing this I found a few higher priced items which other people are not covering so I am ranking top 10 for those keywords without any major link building.

I only had 2,481 views for the month according to wordpress figures. I had installed analytics but that messed up my theme big time so I spend a day sorting that out. The view figure was boosted by the give away though and I have similar figures for this month but without any traffic bait such as giveaways.

I only starting a major link building campaign yesterday so hopefully May traffic will be much higher.

Currently I'm between a rock and a hard place as the winter season has gone so my main sites earnings are plummeting and it's a bit too early for the summer season to kick in. Hopefully things will really get going in May.

The Facebook shout out idea didn't really work out well. I had a few interested people but when I shouted out for them they didn't return the favour. I have a new FB strategy though which I'll describe for month 2.

I also have a new content strategy which I'l also go into in my next post.

How is every one else doing with their blogs? Let us know below.

Month 2

The 2nd month was an absolute disaster in terms of how much time I had to spend on the site. I did manage to post a few new posts and towards the end of the month I started my link building campaign.

Once thing that I have already noticed is that FB shout out for shout out deals don't work well. You are much better creating an excellent piece of content and suggest that if the FB (or twitter etc) page shares your article you will share or retweet one of theirs. Approx 1 in 10 will do this.

The best thing is that once they have done that you just say that it would be cool to mention each other and share or retweet posts going forward. Once you have reciprocated in the initial exchange everyone will want to partner up going forward. So the next time you have an epic post you can simply ask for these pages to share your post and they will.

Earnings for the new site were about $120 so I'm happy with that......I can't wait for the true summer weather to begin.