"Recently me and a friend decided to replicate what you did with the $100,000 blog post... so far with almost ZERO marketing spend we've got $50,000 revenue in business (and growing!)." - Nick G

How I Made $100,000 From One Blog Post (With $688.71 Ad Spend)

chris von wilpert

by Chris Von Wilpert
Last Updated:
25 Apr 2024

I spent one week writing it. I spent one MONTH promoting it.

Then I got this message:

noah kagan twitter direct message

9-figure Founder of Sumo.com & AppSumo.com

Here’s what happened…

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I was looking for a way to get more clients for my business.

I had spent three years trying different marketing tactics:

  • Running Facebook ads to a lead magnet.
  • Running Facebook ads to a webinar.
  • Sending 10 minute personalized videos via email.
  • Hiring an agency for $3k/mo to send outbound emails.
  • Posting inspirational and educational photos on Instagram.

Nothing worked.

Then a good friend (Justin) told me about a new strategy he was using to land clients like Dan Kennedy, Russell Brunson, Stansberry Research, and Agora Financial.

The strategy was simple:

  1. 1
    Write one blog post.
  2. 2
    Do everything you can to get it in front of your Dream 100 clients.

My Dream 100 clients were SaaS companies.

Not small startups. The heavy hitters like HubSpot, Intercom, Salesforce, MailChimp, and Shopify.

I wanted to make them my clients.

To get started, I built my Dream 100 list (here’s a sample of 10 from my list):

dream 100 list

Then I had to come up with a blog post topic that would capture their attention.

To get some ideas I asked Justin: "What are your top sales-generating blog posts?"

He sent me links to two blog posts:

  • The first was a case study reverse engineering the media buying strategy of a multimillion dollar financial company.
  • The second was a case study breaking down his agency’s media buying strategy for direct response marketers.

I picked topic #1.

But instead of writing about a financial company, I wrote about one of the hottest SaaS companies everyone was talking about: HubSpot.

Every SaaS marketer knew HubSpot was good at content marketing.

But no one could tell you exactly how they did it.

So I wrote this on Medium:

hubspot blog post

Then I tagged HubSpot’s two co-founders in the blog post, like this:

hubspot blog post co-founders

Dharmesh Shah loved it, and shared it with his 50,000 followers:

dharmesh shah medium share

As soon as I got this one strong piece of social proof from an influencer, I started sending emails like this to my Dream 100:

dream 100 email to ActiveCampaign Director of Marketing

I even emailed HubSpot’s VP of Marketing:

dream 100 email to HubSpot VP of Marketing

After sending emails to my Dream 100, I started building a list of 100 SaaS influencers to promote to.

Here’s an example of an email I sent to Sean Ellis (Founder of Growth Hackers):

dream 100 influencers email to Sean Ellis

Three things made this email successful: 

  1. 1
    I used the name of another influencer I knew the person I was sending to would recognize in the subject line, and first line of the email.
  2. 2
    I used a screenshot to prove this influencer had already shared it.
  3. 3
    I personalized the last line of the email.

This is when the word really started to spread.

Noah Kagan from Sumo, and Sean Ellis from Growth Hackers shared it:

noah kagan twitter share
sean ellis twitter share

By the time I’d sent all the outreach emails, 5,000 people had viewed the blog post (it has more than double that amount of views now).

hubspot blog post traffic

5,000 views isn’t a lot compared to other “viral” content on the web.

But the QUALITY of the traffic was AMAZING!

At the top of the blog post I made sure every word of every sentence talked directly to my target reader:

  1. 1
    I called out exactly who the blog post was written for.
  2. 2
    I told people why they should read it, with an interesting data point.
  3. 3
    I told an interesting fact related to the data.
hubspot blog post introduction

You don’t need to follow my exact formula for your introduction, but if you want people to pay attention to what you write, remember this:

  • The purpose of the 1st sentence is to get people to read the 2nd sentence.
  • The purpose of the 2nd sentence is to get people to read the 3rd sentence.

Follow that mantra and you will impress your reader so much that they want to click your call to action (CTA) at the end.

Here’s what my CTA looked like at the end of the blog post:

hubspot blog post call to action

The top CTA helped me grow my email list (I had 0 people on my email list).

The bottom CTA helped me add leads to my agency’s sales pipeline (I had 0 sales pipeline).

The result? People were reading the content and converting.

I got my first 1,000 true fans:

hubspot blog post email leads

Note: Not every single email lead came from this one blog post.

I used to think Facebook Lead Ads were the holy grail.

So I tried running Facebook ads direct to my growth hacks spreadsheet.

It cost me $8.52 per email lead (which were mostly junk leads):

facebook lead ads conversions

In hindsight I should’ve just spent $0.50 to $1 to send people to my blog post.

Why? Because if you do it right, people who read your content are:

  • Pre-qualified to buy from you.
  • Cheaper to acquire as leads.

Luckily, I didn’t need to spend any money on ads for this post.

That’s because I wrote about a topic my audience had a level 10 interest in.

And I attracted the right reader by promoting to my Dream 100, and influencers my target reader followed.

I was getting so many inbound leads I had to hire an assistant (Page) to do all the pre-qualifying needs analysis calls for me.

Here’s what my sales pipeline looked like:

rocketship agency sales pipeline

As I was working on turning my needs analysis calls into sales proposals, the CMO at HubSpot ($9.6B market cap) wanted to find a few minutes to chat:

hubspot cm twitter message

Then Noah Kagan from Sumo.com ($100M+ company) sent me this message:

noah kagan hubspot twitter message

HOW I TURNED ONE TWITTER MESSAGE INTO SIX FIGURES

I asked Noah who he wanted me to write the blog post on.

This is what he said:

noah kagan blog post topic twitter message

I had no idea what company people wanted to read about.

So I ran this poll inside a SaaS growth hacks Facebook group:

facebook poll blog post topic

I let Noah know the winner was Intercom. Then I researched and wrote the blog post, while Noah edited for 100% accuracy.

I thought maybe I had just gotten “lucky” with the HubSpot blog post.

So I was determined to make this next one with Noah even better.

I set a goal for myself: Make this Noah’s most shared blog post EVER!

To keep myself accountable I told Noah:

noah kagan best blog post twitter message

If you check Noah’s archives on OkDork, you’ll see he’s been blogging since 2005:

okdork blog post archives

If you know Noah, you know he's a genius content marketer who consistently puts out high quality content.

Not only did I have to beat over a decade of his blog posts.

I also had to beat marketing experts Noah had asked to guest post before.

Experts who had 100,000+ email subscribers to promote to.

At this stage, I only had 262 email subscribers.

Here’s a look at the email I sent, and the stats on my email send:

Unfortunately, getting 62 people to the blog post from my email wasn’t going to generate thousands of shares.

And I didn’t have any fans on my social media accounts.

So I had to start getting creative.

That’s when two content promotion ideas came to me in a dream:

okdork blog post promotion ideas

My second idea had the potential to make the post go viral.

Here’s how I set it up at the end of Noah’s blog post:

okdork blog post twitter share embed

I embedded a Twitter Card at the end of the post, and gave people an incentive to retweet it.

Then I started running ads to the blog post with my own money.

I spent $335.37 on Facebook ads to get 214 clicks:

okdork blog post facebook ads

And I spent $353.34 on Twitter ads to get 150 clicks:

okdork blog post twitter ads

But that was just the number of paid clicks I got.

I got close to 10,000 people to see my Facebook post, and 29,425 people to see my Twitter post using a new content sharing strategy.

It’s one of the steps in my 20-point content promotion framework:

1. CMM
2. CP
3. A-CP
4. MM
5. CTI
6. IDE
7. RSH
8. WTE
9. EDT
10. PBH

11. EML
12. Viral Supernodes
13. D100OUT
14. IOUT
15. POUT
16. MBS
17. AC
18. AA
19. L/C/S
20. PA

I don’t have time to go through the whole framework right now, as this post is already getting too long (continue reading below for deets on how to get this).

But here's what happened after I was done:

okdork blog post results

Noah sent me this video testimonial:

One week later I was on an all-expenses paid trip to Austin, TX.

I lived in the AppSumo office for six months, and got paid six figures to execute my content marketing strategy for Sumo/AppSumo.

$0 TO $100,000 PER MONTH 

IN 12 MONTHS

After executing my content strategy, Sumo/AppSumo started to see repeatable and predicatable revenue growth from their content channel:

$100,000 per month content marketing channel

I started getting soo many clients requests, I had to create a client waiting list with companies like HubSpot, Shopify, Drift + others on it:

HubSpot

hubspot job offer image

Drift

drift job offer

Nathan Latka

testimonial nathan latka

Shopify

testimonial shopify image

Ryan Levesque

testimonial ryan levesque image

In fact:

I had soo many leads, I started a small private group and started giving away $1,000-$8,000 monthly retainers to writers I vetted: 

content lead peter
content lead dan
content lead stephen

As you saw, I did this with no existing audience (email list or social media fans), no brand name, no funding, and no successful client case studies... I got clients from scratch!

I'm literally a nobody online. I have:

0 Lamborghinis
0 Jets
0 Rented Mansions
0 Social Media Presence
0 Side Hustles
0 Books Authored

0 Motivational Videos
0 Slick Hair Cuts

Zero.

You may have not even heard of me before reading this :)

CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY THAT WORKS (EVEN IF YOU HAVE NO AUDIENCE, BRAND NAME, FUNDING OR CASE STUDIES)

You might have noticed what I don't do... I don't:

  • Churn out weekly content for SEO.
  • Post daily on social media.
  • Build complex marketing funnels.

I'm a business minimalist that uses one content sales funnel with a handful of "greatest hits content."

I send traffic to my content sales funnel, then rinse and repeat to get predictable, repeatable sales results (with the minimum amount of work and content possible).

Watch this video to see an overview of how everything I do works together:

Would you like a simple content sales funnel like this to grow your business? 

If you do, you might like this:

UNCUT VIDEO For Ambitious Entrepreneurs & Business Owners:

HOW TO GET $3,000 - $15,000 PER MONTH CLIENTS USING SIMPLE BLOG POSTS

$20,000 per month samcart

Sales processed through SamCart over February

Did you see the video above?

That was from a live training I did recently in March at the 5-star Amora Luxury Hotel in Sydney, Australia.

A small group of business owners paid $2,000 for a ticket to learn the exact methods I used to turn a handful of blog posts into a few extra clients, and make my first $22,851/month profit after refunds.

Note: This was when I first started a new business and launched a new content marketing campaign with five blog posts.

Everyone who paid the $2k and was willing to hop on a plane to Sydney, Australia got the full recording.

I thought you might enjoy it too... so...

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In fact, this page is not even published on our blog.

Why?

I can't go around publicly promoting a deal on something some of my highest level clients paid $2,000 for.

That is why I vote we make a win/win deal on this page.

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Basically, in 56 minutes you'll learn:

  • How I find content topics with a real-life example of how I quickly got a new business making $20,000 per month profit with five blog posts.
  • The step-by-step writing process I use to create slam dunk content every time and get over 10% of traffic to convert into leads, consistently.
  • The content conversion strategy I used to get a client bringing in over 10,000 email leads every single month (after six months).
  • The one content distribution method I use to get 100-1,000 leads a day (without SEO or paid traffic).
  • How I use small budget content distribution ads to get a consistent, steady trickle of leads for my own business daily.
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grant horejsi

Did a bastardized version of what you teach and still got great results. 3 new deals in the pipeline which 1 has closed ($15k) and the other deals bring the total over ($50k) but coin flip if they close.

Grant Horejsi (Outbound View)

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