Today we are bringing you a case study from Adam Enfroy, a blogger, Youtuber, and affiliate marketer who generated over $1 544 000 from his personal blog last year.
He started this blog as a side hustle in 2018 while working full time and since then he has generated $200 000 in 2019, $800 000 in 2020, and $1 544 000 in 2021. This made it one of the fastest-growing blogs.
In this article, we are sharing how he was able to grow this blog from $0 to $1 544 000 per year, his revenue streams, sources of traffic, and everything you might need to know in order to replicate his results for yourself.
Proof of Income
Before we get into the details, first we want to show you the proof of the $1 500 000 revenue stated above. Adams blog has 5 main income streams:
- Affiliate revenue
- Course sales
- Display ads
- Consulting revenue
- CPC Ads
Affiliate Revenue
Affiliate marketing is the primary driver of the majority of Adam’s income. The income is generated when someone Google’s a product, they click one of his pages to view the product review, then click on his affiliate link to purchase the product, then the seller pays Adam a commission as a percentage of the sale. This process generated Adam $897 000 in 2021.
Adam works with a bunch of affiliate networks and partners including:
- Partner Stack
- Impact
- BlueHost
- Other Individual affiliate programs
From the Partner Stack affiliate network, Adam made over $337 000. Partner Stack has a number of programs that Adam promotes and they generate between $20 000 to $35 000 per month.
He also works with the Impact Radius affiliate network which has a bunch of affiliate programs like Teachable, Canva, Leadpages, Squarespace, Liquid web and so many more.
Most of the affiliate programs on Impact Radius that Adam promotes are SaaS software that bring in passive income because their payments are based on recurring commissions. Loyal subscribers to these SaaS software who use his affiliate links help him earn commissions every month when they resubscribe.
So affiliate revenue is a strong driver of revenue for Adam’s blog.
"To make it with affiliate marketing as a blogger, you really need a sound strategy around transactional list posts in your niche. These could be lists of software, camping tools, kitchen gadgets, home decor, or anything. Having product reviews and list posts with a number of different products in the category with affiliate links is a good way to do it.
When you're starting your blog strategy, you should aim at having 80% of such transactional list posts and then 20% how-to and informational content. Between those two, you can get a good balance and make affiliate revenue.", Adam explains.
Course Sales
Adam launched a blogging course in June 2021 — exactly three years after launching his blog. He launched this as a request from many people who follow him on his social media where he updated them with his income reports from his blog.
Since the launch in June 2021, the course made him $472 000. The course sales have been pretty strong for him however there has been a refund rate of about 8 to 9%. These left him with around $421 000 from his course sales.
His course is a complete step-by-step system to start and scale a profitable blogging business. The course sales come from organic traffic that's from his own Youtube channel
Consulting Revenue
Adam also did a bit of SEO consulting on the side for the people that would contact him through his blog. He also did link building, SEO work, and content for some big brands but he totally stopped it. He generated about $66 000 in 2021 from providing consultation services.
Ad Revenue
Adams blog generates passive income from display ads. He uses the Mediavine ad network which made him $118 000 passively last year. The ad network generates between $10 000 to $13 000 per month.
Adam uses display ads to monetize the how-to/informational posts on his website whereby he can't really add affiliate links. Such pages receive a lot of traffic and monetizing them with display ads is the best way to generate passive income out of them.
Mediavine pays on a 2-month rolling window, so you actually get paid 2 to 3 months later. This means that Adam still has a lot of payments from 2021 that will come through in January, February, and March 2022.
CPC Ads Revenue
CPC Ads revenue is a new thing that Adam has begun implementing on his blog. He has partnered up with some major brands and offered them ad space on his site on a cost-per-click basis.
The ads are set up as HTML widgets and the clicks on each ad are tracked and the brands pay for each click coming from Alex’s site.
"Sometimes there aren't affiliate programs for some specific products or categories that you might write about in an article. What I am doing to fill in these gaps is by using cost-per-click deals or sponsored placements.
What we are really getting into in 2022 is, selling spots in articles, selling banners, selling ad space, and being more of a media company. We shall also sell spots in emails and youtube videos.", says Adam.
This is an interesting revenue model when you have really tapped out other monetization formats. A single post can actually have a mix of multiple revenue streams in order to further increase the revenue.
Expenses
Adam owns an S corp company in the USA with a physical address office. He employs freelance contractors to help him create articles, do web development, video editing, and graphics designing. He has a team of 5 people and he is looking to expand in 2022.
Being an S corp owner means he is a solopreneur and the wage bill indicates his own salary that he pays himself from the business’s income. He pays himself a wage of $306 848 per year with a 401(k) contribution and health insurance. So at the end of the day, the expenses on wages all go back to his account.
His annual expenses for 2021 were as follows:
- Wages: $306 848
- Payroll taxes: $13 533
- Health insurance: $14 559.19
- Contractors: $241 914.83
- 401(k) employer contribution: $38 500
- Payroll processing fees: $90
- Advertising: $5 300
- Accounting: $8 819.25
- Office and Administrative expenses: $21 801.45
- Software subscriptions: $23 096.21
- Web hosting: $5 339.12
- Travel: $6 151.85
- Charity contributions: $2 500
Total expenses: $688 453.83
Net Income: $822 398.07
From Adam’s total revenue of $1 544 000, he had total expenses of $688 453 leaving him with a net profit of $822 398. Being an S corp owner, the $306 848 that was indicated as the wage expenses goes back to his personal account leaving him with a net income of $1 129 246. That's good enough because it leaves him with a profit margin of over 66%.
Traffic
Adam’s blog traffic is primarily organic traffic from Google search, Youtube, and backlinks. The blog ranks for over 350 000 different keywords on google and it is mainly centered in the software and make money online niche.
In 2021, he had a total of 4 700 000 sessions with an average of 450 000 sessions per month. However, there were some dips and inclinations during the year due to Google algorithm updates.
There were 5 google algorithm updates throughout the year, from the June, July, and November core updates and the April and December product review updates. There were constant algorithm changes but the blog’s traffic managed to stay relatively consistent throughout the entire year.
Email Subscribers
Adam uses Convertkit for email marketing and he has about 59 000 email subscribers. Every month he gets an average of 2 000 new subscribers. Email subscribers helped him especially when he had launched his course. He sent out a ton of emails promoting the course and the first buyers were from the email list.
He has had a total of 1 600 cancellations so far and to him, he takes that as a positive gesture because he pushes them to surveys whereby they give information on how they could have been served better. They also help him to naturally clean up the email list.
He has boosted the growth of his email list through Youtube and organic traffic that goes to specific blog posts. On his blog, he mostly uses exit intent pop-up forms to collect emails.
"We sent 4 million emails in 2021, the average open rate was at 20.96% which isn't bad and the click rate was 3%. So we're really growing our email list consistently and we're seeing the increase over time. In 2022, we're hoping to get maybe another 20 to 30 000 people in the email list.", says Adam.
Conclusion
As a result of this, Adam was able to make $1 544 000 in total revenue and over $1 129 000 in net income in 2021 as a blogger.
"Making a $1 129 000 salary completely changed my life. I was making $42 000 a year as a digital marketer just about 7 years ago and now I make 25 times that amount every year. That has given me the freedom to do things that I would never have been able to do before.
Before I was saving around $500 a month and now I can save like $50 000 a month and put that money in investments, mortgage, and actually build wealth through this business because of such high-profit margins.
In January 2021, I was still living in Michigan, so I moved to Florida and bought a house. I got married in June and had a big wedding in Turkey with my wife. Those were some more typical wedding expenses and house expenses. I also bought a house in Turkey as well and I've saved a bunch of money for retirement. All this is because of this blogging business.", Adam concludes.
Adam started this business 3 years ago and it's paying dividends today. We hope that you have picked a thing or two from his case study and some inspiration to go start and crush it with your affiliate blog site. You can check out more about Adam on his website adamenfroy.com.
