Adam Enfroy is a blogger and an affiliate marketer who has recently been sending shockwaves on Youtube after showing how he was able to build his personal blog from 0 to 7 figures in less than 2 years. He shares his tactics for free on Youtube which has made him gain a huge audience in the blogging space on Youtube.
In this article, we are sharing an interview with Adam Enfroy whereby he shares his journey from college to getting his first job, quitting it, and up to how he built and scaled his blog to 7 figures and now heading to 8 figures in the nearby future.
Read to the end as he shares lots of important tactics that may be very vital for growth hacking a blog to million dollars in very few months.
Q: So let's start from the beginning. I think it's most interesting to start at college, so where did you go to school and take us through what you experienced?
So when I was 18 years old, I ended up getting into college at Michigan State University. And you know, at that point, I would say, "because college for me was like you say, the best of times and the worst of times." You get that newfound freedom, you get that excitement, you remember your parents leaving and driving away, leaving you behind, and you finally have that freedom and you're living on your own. I started doing well in college but I had no idea what I wanted to do.
I was always actually interested in things like film production and media, but I would say that college for me was actually kind of like a slow downward decline in a lot of ways. I started out well, getting a 3.6 year one, then a 3.0 year two, then a 2.0, but by my senior year. I was really struggling because I had no idea what I wanted to do and no guidance. My parents were really open to me trying things, but I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do with my life.. so I moved back home. I finally kind of kicked it into gear and I actually finally graduated from college in about six years. I had student debt. I had a degree I didn't really know how to use, and I had a solid problem with alcohol at that point in my life, so you know it was a difficult time for sure.
I always saw myself as being smart. Things came naturally to me in high school, but I knew I wasn't living up to my own expectations of myself pretty much.
Q: So from 18 to 24, there were a lot of highlights and a lot of low lights, and it kind of became more low lights towards the end there. So let's kind of move to the next chapter where you finished college. You finally got it done, got into some student debt, and ended up developing some habits.
So, I finished college and I got a degree in media arts and technology. It was kind of like some web stuff, some video stuff, but it was just kind of a piece of paper at that point, and I ended up moving back home with my parents — and then the bad habits continued.
I was just miserable because I didn't know what to do with it. I started working at a pizza place. I was making like $9 an hour for a couple of years and I remember thinking to myself like, “Well, I guess this is it, I'll just have an average life basically from that point.”
I was basically 24 to 26 years old, making $9 an hour delivering pizza. You know when you are 18, you feel like you’re on top of the world at college, everything is clicking, things are happening, and then it's like, wow, my life has completely taken a 180.
Q: So, there's a pivot point that usually happens to everyone. At the very least, you were aware that there was something you were looking for and that your full potential was not being realized, so what was the defining event?
I woke up one day and I was like "it's another day. I'm going to work, I'm driving and I don't want to be doing this anymore. So I started getting into personal development mainly because I knew there was a disconnect between this blueprint that I wanted for my own life and where I was at the moment. I listened to Tony Robbins and I learned about passive income. I knew what it was, but I wasn't actually taking any action on it.
I was still kind of stuck in that rut, so I finally decided to go to some personal development seminars, take some classes, and basically take some real action. So after going through these exercises, it made me kind of see what was possible. So after that, one day, I decided to run a marathon.
I got home from work at 5:30 p.m, turned on my Nike running app, grabbed my water, and ran. I was running around Ann Harbor, Michigan and I ran through downtown, I ran around by McDonald's, I ran down by the lake and I had no idea it had been like five hours for me to finish this and it was midnight and it was pitch black out and I was finishing the last mile running through the woods. My legs were on fire. So I almost felt like I wasn't a human being because I was like at this one point in time and I was just moving forward and I finished. I finished 26 miles and I lay down on the hill and I was like, okay, this is something. If I can do this, what else can I do?
So I kind of took that into my career, and that's when my actual career began, with me trying to make some changes and actually push forward to build the life that I wanted to build, which was primarily about, how can I make money, how can I get an actual real career going.
Q: So was this the introduction to your professional and entrepreneurial trajectory?
Yeah, I quit the pizza delivery job and took a marketing job that was paying $40 000 per year, and I did it for 2 years. Then I moved to a company called Homedics. I was their e-commerce manager and they're like a pretty large e-commerce brand. They're doing like 100 000 000 a year both online and in retail — in Walmart and Target. This was from 2016 to 2017.
So, I was working for Homedics and I was doing a little bit of everything. I was doing e-commerce marketing, email marketing, Facebook ads, PPC, SEO, all of it. And that's when I kind of got introduced to affiliate marketing as a business model — I had never heard of it.
My manager was talking about it as a thing that we wanted to do. So I'm like, "Okay, that's interesting." So I was on the brand side and we kind of started the affiliate program. But again I didn't really like that job though. It was kind of a stuffy corporate setting where it was like hard, you know, blinding lights on top, everyone was really quiet. It was not the best working environment.
I only worked there for seven months before deciding I needed to change. I went to one of those float tank things and I was laying in the dark in this pod and I thought to myself, I'm like I need a major change in my life. I was living in Michigan. I was 30 years old. It was like negative 20 degrees outside. I'm like I need to make a major change.
So I started applying for all kinds of different jobs. In Austin, San Francisco, and New York, I was like, "I don't care, I just need to get out of here."
I remember I applied and the job was at BigCommerce. It was for an affiliate marketing manager. It was through working at this new job as an affiliate manager that I really started to actually see passive income in action. I was managing 4 000 affiliates at once.
I was seeing brand bloggers make anywhere from $2 000 up to $50 000 a month promoting BigCommerce, the e-commerce brand. And that kind of opened my eyes to that, yeah. On the one hand, I was working as an affiliate manager, seeing how people negotiate with affiliates and how much money is made in this space, and on the other hand, I was working really closely with our SEO director, who was on the cutting edge of SEO for a tech company, creating content, doing outreach, writing and organizing content, the headings and the structure of posts.
So I was like, "This is really interesting too, If I know how to rank content and I know how to make money with this content and it's the startup cutting edge technology world, maybe there is actually something to this. Maybe I can do something new that hasn't been done before."
Q: What motivated you as their affiliate manager to follow that path of success and generate more revenue for yourself after watching affiliates generate huge sums of money?
Yeah, seeing the affiliates of BigCommerce making money while you are just paid as their manager really crushes you. You're like, "Wait, how are some of these affiliates doing so well?" I knew affiliate marketing was powerful like it could be something, and then you're like, these random people, brands, and websites I've never heard of are generating multiple six-figures in revenue for themselves just through BigCommerce. I was like, "Wow, that seems insane". Even a tenth of that would be absolutely insane for my life, and that was where the seed was more than just planted. So there was kind of a strong driver there.
I was making $120 000 a year, a good salary after taxes, that's probably $80 000 to $90 000 and then you cut that down monthly and you're making $7 000 or $8 000 dollars a month. At the same time, I was paying $2 000 in rent, a couple of thousand dollars for all bills, car payments, and all that, and by the end of it, I was not saving anything.
So I was working for someone else's future, still stressed to the gills. The numbers were good, everything was good and the company was growing. It was in this pre-IPO phase, numbers were growing every month. But to do it, I was killing my physical body, and with the stress of that I just had to do this.
So for me, learning all this blogging stuff, the affiliate marketing SEO, and then being in this basic rat race that I couldn't see myself out of, that's when I decided to start the blog.
Q: So the blog was started in 2018 right after you had already seen through the BigCommerce affiliate manager position that passive income was possible. What were the initial steps that you took after starting your blog?
Yeah, I started but I didn't know what I was going to do with this blog. So I put it at my name adamenfroy.com, because it was just a personal brand, almost like a digital resume. I knew that that was not going to change. I didn't know what niche I was going to be in or whatever, but I could see that maybe I can do a couple of guest posts on BigCommerce and I can have my name in the author bio and link to this new blog of mine.
So a lot of other people were linking to their websites in these guest author bios. That was a sophistication of our link building that I've learned a lot since then.
So I started the blog on Squarespace, which was not the smartest idea actually. It was just that I needed to take action. I just made the blog and then I started publishing a few posts.
I remember the first one was on human nature and personal development and I spent like 2 weeks writing it. And of course, no one read it because blogging doesn’t work that way anymore. But I was writing these different posts just testing, tweaking things, and slowly building up a PR and a few links here and there but I didn't really know what I was doing yet.
I knew what affiliate marketing was though, so I started adding links to my articles. I started seeing some early links get a little bit of success, like trickling in impressions in Google Search Console basically. I was like, "Okay, something's happening."
So I started writing some affiliate articles about things I knew like the best email marketing software, web hosting, and e-commerce platforms because that's where I was working. I started with that affiliate strategy in mind and then I had to get off Squarespace because I was struggling with simple SEO tasks in Squarespace.
I talked to a developer friend of mine and said, "Hey, can you just set me up for the WordPress site?" So I switched to WordPress and officially launched the actual blog with the old blog posts in January 2019.
Q: So what happened in the first 6 months after you launched your blog with WordPress?
I started seeing a little bit of trickling of early traffic, like some search console impressions, a few views, a few visits, and single-digit views. I remember I would look at my Google Analytics on my phone before work and I'd be like "I got five visitors this morning." That's cool.
That was something — it was more than zero. And that's when I really accelerated. I was like, "Okay, I've learned what they're doing in the startup world from a content perspective and how to scale these efforts.
So for the first 3 months, I was still writing everything myself – I religiously worked on this blog. I worked 50 hours at my job and then I spent nights and weekends basically creating this content. I wanted to standardize these posts. I'm like "I'm going to write a bunch of them and I need to make them quickly." I needed to have them in a standardized way and then shift my focus to link building. I knew if I was going to be in this highly competitive niche, I really needed to work on authority.
So for the first 3 months, I didn't hire anyone; I was just grinding it out myself, publishing a lot of affiliate posts, a lot of how-to and informational content, but shifting like 80% of my focus to link building to build real relationships in the blogging niche, get backlinks, and all those things.
Q: So at what point did you make your first writer, and how did you implement the link-building part of the business?
So, around month 3, I hired my first writer, and that's when I could really focus on link building and outreach, accelerating the publishing schedule, and publishing a lot more. I was still publishing two or three blog posts a week.
My link-building strategy wasn't anything crazy, I was just sending 5 or 10 outreach messages per day. I was doing these things, but I was kind of doing them with the latest tactics that I learned from my job — from the actual startup world. Things like how to exactly format content for Google, how to add affiliate links into content, how to do link-building, how to do outreach, and essentially, how to do blogging in the 2019-2020 way and not from people who taught it in 2010, because the world has changed so much since then.
Q: So tell us about the initial results after launching the blog.
Yeah, eventually it started actually working. The 5 visits became 10, then 15, then 20. Then I was getting 1 000s of visitors to the blog every month. Within 7 months, I was making as much as my full-time salary. I had decided to quit my job at BigCommerce if the blog starts making as much as $120 000 per year and I had promised myself that when I make $10 000 a month with the blog, that's when I'll make the leap and leave the job. So by month 7, it was making that and that's when I left.
The leap of faith of that was interesting because the blog seemed like it was making $10 000 a month, but it was actually making like $5 000 to $6 000 — I attributed it wrong initially and overcounted.
But after quitting, the next month, I made $22 000. This was because I had spent all my time growing it. So it's like the leap of faith worked.
Q: So this is interesting, so what happened after you started making all this money passively? Let's say from month 7 to month 12 of the blog.
So I left my full-time job in month 7. I remember walking out of the building. Actually, I was nice and I gave like a four-week notice because my job was pretty important and I didn't want to leave them high and dry.
I left my job and I remember actually walking out. I had to come back. At one point, I actually got physically stressed when I walked back into the building. I didn't realize how bad it was but after that, I went back, I packed my things up in Austin because I no longer had to work and live there.
I moved my things back to Michigan, where my family's from, and packed my stuff in my brother's house, then I started traveling.
I went to Spain, Italy, France, and Ireland. I flew to Japan and lived in Kyoto for 3 weeks. Then I went to Australia and stayed in Sydney for a couple of weeks and then went to Thailand afterward. I literally lived in like 7 countries and in 13 Airbnbs in a row over the course of like 6 months.
So life was completely different. A year ago, I was basically slaving at the job thing and then at this moment, I was making $20 000 to $30 000 dollars a month. So I could definitely afford to travel.
Q: So from month 6 to 12, your income went from about $10 000 to between $20 000 to $30 000. So we believe this was 2020 — actually February or March of 2020 and we all know what happened in the world during that time. But tell us what happened to the blog though?
So I moved back to Michigan because I was kind of done traveling. 6 months of solo traveling was kind of a lot. So I was like all right, "I'm gonna go back home." and I moved back to Michigan because that's where my family and friends were all from. Then I remember it was winter time and the COVID hit. We were put into lockdown and I was literally kind of just stagnated. I was still working on the blog and thinking, "It's it is what it is".
I was basically working on stuff at home but being in the software niche when COVID hit was actually really interesting. The search volumes for things like Zoom webinars, video conferencing, and other things that I was writing about were striking highly.
I remember this webinar post I had on the best webinar software going from making $2 000 a month to $25 000 a month in just one month because everyone was searching for all this software and webinar stuff during COVID.
So that ballooned and then another post on podcast hosting struck highly. It started making like $8 000 a month and with very little work at this point, because I put in the work upfront. Now I was focused on adding affiliate links to these software posts and generating affiliate revenue while living at home during the pandemic. It was maybe 10 hours a week working on the blog.
Yeah, what was interesting was that in 2019, the blog made $200 000 and by the end of 2020 it made $800 000 that year — all thanks to the lockdown and the software posts I made on the site a long time ago.
Q: So at this point, you were making tons of money from blogging and 2020 was going along great with the blog, what drove you to get on Youtube and start teaching blogging?
I remember I was making $80 000 a month on autopilot not doing much, and I was like, okay, “what's next? Well, for 3 months, I was kind of under lockdown in 2020, and I was like, this is got kind of boring there was no progression here. I was worried that the only way I'm gonna go is down again. I knew affiliate marketing and SEO really well, but I didn't know the information side of the business.
What's interesting is, I've always wanted to teach every step of the way. So I started a Youtube channel and did blog income reports, I showed how I made $10 000 in one month, and also did some consulting.
I knew that the next thing was to earn from the teaching side but I was like, "I need help with this thing. This is something I don't know,". I had built an email list, with probably 40 000-50 000 people on the email list. I was ranking for some blogging terms on Youtube but I didn't have a product to sell yet.
This was when I met my partner Colin and over the next 7 months, we worked on building a training program for blogging. We did a beta group and we vetted the content and filmed it.
It was like it was pulling teeth to get a 10-minute video done and you know all this stuff progressed and then the blog just kept growing. It just kept humming along. Traffic kept increasing, commissions kept increasing and it was just going up and up.
Q: So when did you launch the blogging course and what were the results of that?
We launched in June 2021 and it was like a defining month for me. The course launched and made over $250 000. I also got married and I moved to Florida.
Tons of life changes happened in that span of time. It was a pretty defining moment because we didn't realize what a blogging business or what a personal brand could actually be. I was stuck in affiliate revenue and SEO, then we got into the course business.
Q: So how have you been able to handle both scaling your blog and training new students?
Am doing both, scaling the blog and then teaching the steps that I’ve used to build and scale it. That's kind of the progression we've been doing from June 2021 to now. 2021 finished at about $1 500 000 million in revenue for both the blog and course, and the crazy thing is that the backbone of it is still the blogging business. But from 2021 to now in 2022, we're focused on reaching $4 000 000 in revenue this year, which is twice what was already doubled from the year before. This is all based on the exact stuff we're doing, learning, failing, losing money at, and then ultimately teaching the things that end up working.
Q: You have taken your blog from 0 to 7 figures in 3 years and you are looking forward to earning generating $4 000 000 in 2022. So what are the unique ways you have learned on the way on how to monetize a blog?
What l have learned as we got from zero to 7 figures is revenue streams. We're finding all these different unique ways you can make money with a content-driven business. It's not only just affiliate revenue, but there's filling in the gaps with sponsorships, CPC models, ad revenue, course sales, and how you're selling a course in email funnels and pop-ups and all these different things and learning as we go.
Q: We have seen that you have grown big on YouTube in the blogging niche. How important is your youtube growth in terms of the blogging business?
So if we look at my schedule in 2022, I'm spending most of my time on YouTube now. Right. So the blog, you know, as we grow and scale this seven-figure team to an eight-figure team, everything that we do is to put people and systems in place.
We can create more content, get more eyes on our stuff, and make more money, and to do that you know it's okay, the blog is kind of taken care of, the content management is good, we've trained, we've hired, we've done these things now, it's like now I'm exclusively mainly working on youtube as the traffic teaching and teaching and coaching and being on video and all of these things, so we learned that not many people are teaching this method of making you aware is to build an audience through YouTube and a blog, thereby creating a personal brand engine, which is essentially a hybrid unkillable business for yourself.
So that's the kind of power we have got from Youtube, and that's where we're at right now, with a $4 000 000 target this year and a 2-3 year vision to get to over $10 000 000.
Q: So with all this progress, how have your goals been changing to take you to higher levels?
I remember looking back on and the goals have kept changing over time. I remember I first wanted to make $500 with my blog a month and then it was $5 000 and then it was $10 000 to quit my job, and then it was $50 000 and then it was $100 000. Now we're at a consistent baseline of $200 000 to $250 000 a month with the blog alone and it's like well we need to get to $800 000 a month today.
So much of the vision and the mission changes as it gets more because of the utility in life of growing. Going from, say $250 000 to $300 000 a month is extremely minimal. It's very minimal but the exciting part is the growth. What it is who you become along the way, even at a small level like going from like $8 000 to $50 000, it's all about who you become along the way that’s more powerful and so valuable.
Q: So right now it looks like you have hit the goal of being a pretty much successful blogger. How are you pushing yourself to go further?
It's really important to know that there is no finish line. When you get to a goal, you feel good and accomplished for a little bit, but then you know you build a new goal and it's really important to have gratitude for what you currently have. I don't have to worry about work and all of that, which is wonderful, and the money helps, but there is no finish line to this thing. If you stop pushing, you get significantly less happy. And so we passed all of these old gurus that I learned from in a relatively short period of two or three years. It's like, okay, we're making more than all of these people who taught it ten years ago, and we did it faster.
So it's very exciting, you know, I didn't think this would happen, but it's exciting to continue learning and teaching as we go.
Conclusion
That's the end of the interview with Adam Enfroy. He has shared his journey and important lessons he has learned on his way to becoming a millionaire blogger. If you want to get to learn more about Adam’s world, you can just check his Youtube channel here where he delivers blogging content consistently.
