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From Blogging to Growing an Agency to $85,000 a Month with Nat Eliason of Growth Machine

Episode #065

Nat Eliason (@NatEliason) knows exactly what he's good at. He puts SEO-focused content marketing at the center of every business he builds. When friends started asking for help growing their own businesses through search-optimized content, it was just the validation he needed to start Growth Machine. In this episode, Nat talks about how he hit profitability immediately and grew revenue to $85,000/month in under a year.

  1. 3

    Hey Nat, do you also hire the content writers on weworkremotely.com?

  2. 2

    Great interview. Dense with content. One of the very best. Thanks for coming on Nat!

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    My Main Takeaways:

    • Nat started a startup in college, but it failed after a year partly because he had no idea about marketing. So he then started a personal blog (writing about his interests) to get learn content marketing. This lead to him getting an internship with Zapier. Then he scored a few other marketing positions, where he learned a lot from experts, and managed to produce very good results in terms of growth, for these companies.

    • Eventually his blog grew to a sufficient enough size that he was getting 200k monthly visitors, and he turned it into a lifestyle business where he travelled the world just writing articles.

    • Nat had bad experiences starting an information business for his marketing clients, because the clients would not take the necessary actions. So he decided to just do the marketing all for them, himself. This way the clients were sure to get results. This was where Growth Machine was born.

    • Nat says that he focuses on growing sites through one specific channel… that’s SEO/content marketing.

    • For his personal blog, he doesn’t focus on SEO. He focuses on writing things that are interesting to him, and afterwards he sees if he can tweak the post to target any popular search terms.

    • The “key” to SEO: Write the most useful article on a given topic on the web. To do this properly requires quite a lot of time and energy, you can’t just knock an article out in one sitting. This has to be a full time job or part-time job at the very least.

    • Nat says that it’s better to either go all-in with content marketing, or not to do it at all, because you cannot half-ass it.

    • Nat learned a lot about SEO through trial and error, and by reading Brian Dean.

    • When learning SEO, it’s better to just learn from one good source, and then start experimenting with what you’ve learned there.

    • Nat’s blog post on a “5 Day Water Fast” accidently ranked number 1 on Google, he wrote it for fun, and didn’t know much about SEO at the time.

    • If you have a non-SEO blog, you have to work to get traffic to every new and old article that you write. However, if you have an SEO focused blog, then the articles you get to rank just keep getting traffic automatically, until somebody makes a better one.

    • Nat wrote an article on “lasting longer in bed” in one sitting while tipsy on wine, and he published it the same night, and it got to the front page of reddit, and received about 3,000 visitors daily.

    • Leverage your audience: Nat wanted to make an app to leverage the traffic he was getting from his “last longer in bed” article, but he didn’t know how to make an app, so he emailed his email list asking if anyone knew how to make an app, and someone reached out to him saying that they would do it for $4,100 and information on how how Nat will market the app. Nat accepted, and the app (at the time of this interview) generates between $3,000 and $7,000 per month over the two years it has been out.

    • Write content for the lowest common denominator (i.e. don’t write 20,000 word ultra in-depth guides this is for the 1% nerdy readers, instead write about 2,000 max simple but helpful guides that will appeal to 80% of people).

    • Leverage your network: Nat got his first customers for Growth Machine through his network. People were reaching out to Nat requesting consulting work, but Nat counter-offered with his agency services, and he netted $13,000 per month by the first day, which was enough validation for him to fully start his agency. Then Nat hired some contractors to his agency to do the work.

    • No-one bats 1,000: Nat was not able to help grow one of his first customer’s SEO presence because the customer was in a highly competitive niche.

    • Nat had to hire people so that he didn’t get crushed under the stress of the workload.

    • Nat hires people from WeWorkRemotely.

    • Have premium pricing or face being just another commodity.

    • Get really good at something interesting and freelance for a while and save up enough money to invest in something bigger, like a team to do the work for you.

    • Don’t hold on to your money at the expense of time. Instead, invest money wisely to free up time.

    • Try to make your business profitable as soon as possible.

  4. 1

    @nateliason, great interview and great information. This podcast helped motivate me to start my own blog that will be up and running later this week! It was great to hear from someone real that was able to take their successful blog and morphed it into a bigger business. Great ideas, thanks again!

  5. 1

    Got Daaang!

  6. 1

    This is a really insightful perspective. Thank you Nat and thank you Courtland!

  7. 1

    Thanks for the interview, @nateliason !

    I run a code screencasts membership site that's now enough to cover my rent. It's growing, and I can now reasonably spend about $200USD/month on marketing (content, ads, whatever). For any tactic that worked, I'd be more than happy to take 85% of the new revenue it generated and pour it into more marketing.

    How would you recommend deploying that level of money to speed up growth? Given that the flywheel is already up and starting to turn, would your advice still be to wait and save, as you suggested in the podcast, or is there a way to spend it productively?

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.