How I Made $156,000 From One Blog Post (With $688.71 Ad Spend)

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

Then I got this message:

9-figure Founder of AppSumo.com

Here’s what happened…

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

I had spent three years trying different marketing tactics:

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:

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):

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:

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:

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

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

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:

I even emailed HubSpot’s 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):

Three things made this email successful: 

This is when the word really started to spread.

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

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).

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:

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:

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:

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:

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):

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:

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:

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:

Then Noah Kagan from AppSumo ($100M+ company) sent me this 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:

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

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

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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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

Total ad spend = $688.71 to get 364 clicks.

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:

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 help with this).

But here's what happened after I was done:

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 ($156,000 after bonuses) to execute my content marketing strategy for AppSumo.

$0 TO $100,000 PER MONTH 

IN 12 MONTHS

After executing my content strategy, AppSumo started to see repeatable and predictable revenue growth from their content 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:

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: 

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 :)

A 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.

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?