IGKing’s Epic $50K/Month Journey [2021 Edition]

[TheBragi]

Thanks for sharing. Definitely following this one. Good luck @IGKing

 

[Deleted Member 112605]

Finished the SEO course.

I posted this thread and nobody has responded to it yet.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/is-a-black-hat-link-building-strategy-even-necessary-if-you-dominate-your-on-page-seo.1300888/

 

[Sristy]

All the best for your journey..

 

[Santosh_San]

Interesting thread. Good luck for you . Keep us updated

 

[anon6881]

CPA offer promotion on Instagram. I promote CPA offers through various Instagram mediums. One of my favorite methods lately is creating landing pages for CPA offers and instead of taking time to grow pages and promoting the landing pages to the same audience over and over again, I like finding the shout-out rates of influencers and I have them promote the products for me. For example, if I'm running a CPA offer that has a $20 conversion, I need to have at least 10 converts on a $200 shout-out for me to break even. It's nice doing methods like this and finding influencers who charge $200 for the shout-out and then they have a really solid community of followers and I end up getting 40-50 conversions. It's good money and very little manual work

Really love your journey and I've been following the methods in your e-book, and I don't believe it mentioned this technique so I just had a few questions!

1. You mention that you don't have to grow a page any more with this, so does that mean the shoutout directly links to your landing page? Or do you instead still use a real-looking page, add the website in your bio, and have the shoutout just direct to your page? Which is more sustainable?

2. Follow up question. How legit-looking does your page look that is DMing influencers for shoutouts in terms of posts and followers? I'd imagine you'd need a decent following for a large influencer to be comfortable promoting your offer.

3. What network do you use for this? For example, OGAds doesn't allow direct linking to offers, so I wouldn't be able to promote a specific offer.

Thanks so much in advance! Good luck with the rest of your journey.

 

[ClarksV]

You are such a cool guy. How you get Ig clients for growth?

 

[videosocialmediawizz]

Good journey, following!
Good luck

 

[Deleted Member 112605]

I finished my 50 hours of learning.

I'm so glad I went through this. It was monotonous and painful at times, but I know this is the kind of necessary first step that I needed to take in order to start ramping things up.

This opened my eyes to a lot of things. During each course, I took notes that I figured I'd need to remember when handling each platform. I also took notes in a "master" sheet related to specific things about my business that I needed to change or update.

The only courses I wasn't a fan of was the Instagram Ads course and one of the Analytics course. Both were a bit too basic.

I swallowed my pride and accepted I still needed to learn some things about IM, and I'm really happy I did this. This was on my bucketlist for a long time.

50 Hours of Learning

Mailchimp Email Marketing mastery for E-commerce Stores - 4 hours
Google Analytics Advanced Training - Master Google Analytics - 3 hours
Advanced Google Analytics Course - 4 hours
Ultimate Google Analytics course - 4.5 Hours
Instagram Ads Masterclass - 4.5 hours
SEO 2021: Complete SEO Training + SEO for Wordpress Websites - 10 hours
Facebook Ads & Facebook Marketing MASTERY 2021 - 12 hours
2020 New Google Ads (AdWords) Course - From Beginner to PRO - 7.5 hours

The next two weeks I'm going to focus on changing things. I'm going to focus on making all the necessary changes that I need for accelerated growth. My business from A to Z (and all my underlying ventures) will be revised.

My plan is to start running ads around February 15.

In a non-cocky way, I think I'm going to crush the ads. I'm very confident that things will work out well once I start shifting around my business.

In a side note, I highly recommend people read https://www.amazon.com/Building-StoryBrand-Clarify-Message-Customers-ebook/dp/B06XFJ2JGR (no affiliate link). In terms of social media marketing, I think people generally suck at creating a good story brand. People are too geared towards the specifics of their industry and don't care about what the customer WANTS to hear. A big part of my reformatting will be focused around building a better story brand.

So there's that update. I'm still at around $10k a month because I haven't really done anything yet. I figured this month would be focused and geared towards learning. February will be geared towards shifting things around. March will hopefully be when I start blowing things up again.

1. You mention that you don't have to grow a page any more with this, so does that mean the shoutout directly links to your landing page? Or do you instead still use a real-looking page, add the website in your bio, and have the shoutout just direct to your page? Which is more sustainable?

2. Follow up question. How legit-looking does your page look that is DMing influencers for shoutouts in terms of posts and followers? I'd imagine you'd need a decent following for a large influencer to be comfortable promoting your offer.

3. What network do you use for this? For example, OGAds doesn't allow direct linking to offers, so I wouldn't be able to promote a specific offer.

1. I have people shout-out my page (already legit looking) and then click on the link in the bio. If you can get the people to put your link in their bio for a bit, that works too.

2. The bigger the better helps in terms of DMs, but it's not a gamechanger unless the account you're targeting is massive. Most midsize influencers (under 500k) will still look at their requests regularly for business deals. If you're using a small account, leave a comment on their last post to check their requests. Sometimes they have business inquiry emails you can also send emails to.

3. I use various networks. I don't use OGAds. Typically you can find better priced similar offers at other places besides OGAds. Building good relationships with your affiliate manager helps a lot too.

 

[gytismkn]

Thank you for your motivation and I wish you luck on your journey.

 

[Jecpokoi]

Dude, i've made 20.000$/month full passif income with what I learned from you and your e-book. (during 2 years and a half)​

I'm so grateful !
I wish you the best​

 

[Deleted Member 112605]

Dude, i've made 20.000$/month full passif income with what I learned from you and your e-book. (during 2 years and a half)​

I'm so grateful !​

I wish you the best​

Ah fuck this makes me happy and sad at the same time haha

In all serious, that’s awesome man! Happy for you!

Now I gotta make more money than my own “students” lmao.

 

[Jecpokoi]

Ah fuck this makes me happy and sad at the same time haha

In all serious, that’s awesome man! Happy for you!

Now I gotta make more money than my own “students” lmao.

Seriously, you can't realize how much you've changed my life!
Also, I have never been an active member but I have taken the advice a lot and now I am so grateful. I don't know how yet, but I will contribute to this forum. Thanks again
Without this forum, I will never have known you

 

[anon6881]

I finished my 50 hours of learning.

I'm so glad I went through this. It was monotonous and painful at times, but I know this is the kind of necessary first step that I needed to take in order to start ramping things up.

This opened my eyes to a lot of things. During each course, I took notes that I figured I'd need to remember when handling each platform. I also took notes in a "master" sheet related to specific things about my business that I needed to change or update.

The only courses I wasn't a fan of was the Instagram Ads course and one of the Analytics course. Both were a bit too basic.

I swallowed my pride and accepted I still needed to learn some things about IM, and I'm really happy I did this. This was on my bucketlist for a long time.




The next two weeks I'm going to focus on changing things. I'm going to focus on making all the necessary changes that I need for accelerated growth. My business from A to Z (and all my underlying ventures) will be revised.

My plan is to start running ads around February 15.

In a non-cocky way, I think I'm going to crush the ads. I'm very confident that things will work out well once I start shifting around my business.

In a side note, I highly recommend people read Story Brand (no affiliate link). In terms of social media marketing, I think people generally suck at creating a good story brand. People are too geared towards the specifics of their industry and don't care about what the customer WANTS to hear. A big part of my reformatting will be focused around building a better story brand.

So there's that update. I'm still at around $10k a month because I haven't really done anything yet. I figured this month would be focused and geared towards learning. February will be geared towards shifting things around. March will hopefully be when I start blowing things up again.



1. I have people shout-out my page (already legit looking) and then click on the link in the bio. If you can get the people to put your link in their bio for a bit, that works too.

2. The bigger the better helps in terms of DMs, but it's not a gamechanger unless the account you're targeting is massive. Most midsize influencers (under 500k) will still look at their requests regularly for business deals. If you're using a small account, leave a comment on their last post to check their requests. Sometimes they have business inquiry emails you can also send emails to.

3. I use various networks. I don't use OGAds. Typically you can find better priced similar offers at other places besides OGAds. Building good relationships with your affiliate manager helps a lot too.

Appreciate the reply man, I'll definitely give this a shot myself. Since you mentioned you do grow legit-looking accounts, I just had another question about the nature of the offers and the type of account you grow to promote it.

Are the offers you promote niche-related? Or do they tend to be something way more generic, like the typical "Fill this out for a chance at a $100 Amazon gift card"? Or are they related to lead gen/pin submits with a specific niche, say like how there are currently some high paying Apex Legends offers at the moment? I'd assume the latter tends to perform better.

Are your accounts with these offers in the bio also niche related (ex. gaming)? Or do the accounts pertain specifically to the offer (ex. sign up for Apex)?

Finally, to my understanding, niche related offers tend to be country-specific, for example the Apex Legends offer I was looking at is only available to Germany. How do you deal with this? Do you find geography-specific accounts? Or do you just focus on USA?

 

[Sebastian324]

Ah fuck this makes me happy and sad at the same time haha

In all serious, that’s awesome man! Happy for you!

Now I gotta make more money than my own “students” lmao.

Sounds like you need to raise the prices for that ebook lol

 

[elassar]

following

 

[buzymoney]

Hey everyone,

My goal is to make $50,000 USD a month in 2021.

Currently, I'm at about $10,000 USD a month. I need $40,000 USD more.

Background:

In 2020, I set out a goal to make 100k in non-Instagram related ventures. Shortly after I set up that goal, my Instagram ventures began growing exponentially, and all my free time was diverted back to Instagram. My journey thread ended up being uneventful, but I was making close to $25K a month with my Instagram ventures on autopilot, so my incentive to make $100k somewhere else wasn't necessarily appealing.

However, a few months into 2020, I essentially stopped working. I worked hard enough to put my business on autopilot. I became disillusioned with internet marketing. I became uninterested in my own business and "working" in general.

For those of you who don't know, I've been on this forum for a long time. I joined when I was 14 years old, and I have been doing some form of internet marketing for the past 10 years. My first 5 years were relatively unsuccessful when it came to making money. My last 5 years have been relatively successful. But once I started hitting 5 figures a month on autopilot, it felt like my work was done. In my mind, I "won" internet marketing, and the rest of my life was smooth sailing.

I moved to a different city. I pimped out my crib. I bought a Mercedes. I adopted a dog. I traveled a ton (my best guess is about 28,000 miles in 2020 in the United States alone, during COVID). My focus was anywhere but internet marketing.

However, I felt this weird feeling inside. The more I ignored my business, the more I felt depressed. A part of me felt like I "gave up" on everything I worked so hard for once I started seeing some success.

I started thinking pretty irrationally too. I thought to myself: "You can make 5 figures a month on autopilot and work zero hours a week, but if you work 50 hours a week, you might only make a few extra grand a year. There's no reason to work. Those extra hours aren't going to be worth it."

Obviously, that above paragraph is the dumbest thing ever. My mind wanted to take the road of least resistance and attempted to validate every lazy thought that came to my mind.

So I then got into a slump. I was making money, but here's what was going on in my mind:

Thought 1: Depression. You gave up on something you worked hard on.
Thought 2: Inadequacy. You're not good enough to blow up your business even more.
Thought 3: Laziness. Why work or improve your business when you're already making money?

And this thought cycle repeated itself over and over again.

Realization:

I finally had enough of this thought cycle. My autopilot income fell to about 10k a month (still nothing to complain about) due to my inaction. I spent a lot of time talking with friends and colleagues about my scenario. I ended up reading 30+ books, and one sentiment from the "10X Rule" by Grant Cardone stuck with me: You're being unethical with your life if you aren't living up to your full potential when it comes to making money.

If I spent 0 hours a day working on my business, that horrible thought cycle would spiral out of control. When I actually started getting things done, I felt great about myself. I never thought about my laziness being unethical, I thought I "earned" this time off, but in reality it was driving me nuts. I'm a very competitive person. I want to live up to my fullest potential, and taking time off my business was not ethical.

Granted, I've had several other realizations in the past few months that have re-inspired my desire to grow my income, but I'll leave those out for the sake of brevity.

Look, I'm not saying I'm at rock bottom. I'm still making about $10k a month. I'm very grateful for my situation. I'd rather be at $10k a month trying to make it to $50k a month than be at $0 a month and try to make it at $5k a month. I feel like this journey to $50k will hopefully launch me into another realm of determination. It will aspire me to work as hard as I did when I was hungry 7 years ago, when I was a broke university freshman.

$50K a month is also crazy money for 99.99% of people. Me included. I think I could've made this goal "get back to $25k a month", but I don't think that would've challenged me that much. Another interesting takeaway from the 10X Rule book is to set crazy high goals (a lot of business books usually tell you to set easily attainable goals so you stay motivated). The purpose behind the "crazy high goals" is to aspire you to take an insane amount of action. The theory is: You're more likely to make $30K a month if you set a $50K goal instead of a $30k goal because your actions will be more extreme at the $50k goal than if your goal was at $30k a month.

So I said "Fuck it", let's do 50k a month and actually try to make $50k a month.

BUT HERE'S THE ISSUE...

It's time to learn:

For some magical reason, I managed to grow my Instagram business without knowing much about necessary Internet marketing skills. I felt limited in my ability to grow in 2020 because I didn't know much besides Instagram.

I didn't know much about:

- Analytics
- Google Ads
- SEO
- Facebook & IG Ads (I typically have had someone else handle IG ads, I usually handle organic/viral growth)
- Email Marketing

I had basic Wordpress skills, basic coding skills, basic marketing skills, and obvious Instagram skills, and that was enough to make $25k a month.

Now... I figure if I could consider myself an expert in analytics, ads, SEO, and email marketing, I should have no excuse on why I can't scale this up to $50k a month (and beyond).

So, I need to learn those things, because I've had shitty luck trying to have other people do those things for me. I spent a good percentage of 2020 trying to find someone to grow my business for me while it was runnning on autopilot because I always knew that this stuff was necessary.

I went to uDemy, and I signed up for 50 hours of courses in all of those topics so I can develop my understanding on how to properly grow my business. I figure if I have a steady enough base understanding in all those fields, I'll be able to further develop areas that are necessary and adapt them to my business.

So in January, I plan on being a novice in Google Analytics, Google Ads, SEO, Facebook & IG Ads, and email marketing.

Here's my current course load (obviously not affiliated with any of these classes):

50 Hours of Learning

Mailchimp Email Marketing mastery for E-commerce Stores - 4 hours
Google Analytics Advanced Training - Master Google Analytics - 3 hours
Advanced Google Analytics Course - 4 hours
Ultimate Google Analytics course - 4.5 Hours
Instagram Ads Masterclass - 4.5 hours
SEO 2021: Complete SEO Training + SEO for Wordpress Websites - 10 hours
Facebook Ads & Facebook Marketing MASTERY 2021 - 12 hours
2020 New Google Ads (AdWords) Course - From Beginner to PRO - 7.5 hours

And here's how I plan on breaking up this material over the next 3 weeks (I cleared out my schedule for this week, so I specifically overloaded this week).:

Week 1 (January 11-17): Analytics (11.5 Hours) and Mailchimp (4 hours) - 15.5 hours Google Ads (7.5 hours) - 23 Total Hours
Week 2 (January 18-24): SEO Training (10 Hours) and Instagram Ads (4.5 Hours) - 14.5 Total Hours
Week 3 (January 25-31): Facebook Ads (12 Hours) - 12 Total Hours

And that's all I specifically have planned at the moment. I have a ton of other ideas for future months (like obviously running ads, doing SEO, email marketing, etc), but I'm sure I'll be able to have a clearer understanding of what I should be doing after I finish up these courses.

So that's it for now.

Follow this journey if you'd like. I intend on being faithful to this journey unlike the one I did last year.

I'll post profit updates and answer any questions that come into this thread.

Hope you guys all have a kick-ass 2021!

IGKing

Depression when you getting 25k a month?

 

[SonOfBhw]

Depression when you getting 25k a month?

Depression does not care if you make money or not until you have inner peace.

 

[SonOfBhw]

You are making a 25k/month and still selling an ebook? And congratz as you have already achieved the networth which many people still dream and good luck for 50.

 

[buzymoney]

You are making a 25k/month and still selling an ebook? And congratz as you have already achieved the networth which many people still dream and good luck for 50.

Maybe he is just another guru.

 

[Deleted Member 112605]

Sounds like you need to raise the prices for that ebook lol

Nah. The average price (including coupons) has always been around $20 because I'm not a big fan of "gurus" selling their secrets for $xxx+. I've always tried to keep things realistic.

Maybe he is just another guru.

I've been pretty open about how my eBook started. I'm pretty "anti-guru". Here's an excerpt from a thread I posted a while back.

I didn’t plan on ever launching a BST back when I originally read @euphorix’s thread. I didn’t have any products or services to sell. At the time, I was way too busy with my current Instagram adventures to sit down and write a guide.

And also, I didn’t want to be a fucking “guru” that sells guides on how to be successful.

That’s so cheesy.

DAMN IT.

You are making a 25k/month and still selling an ebook? And congratz as you have already achieved the networth which many people still dream and good luck for 50.

The eBook is a hobby. It's a relatively small fraction of my income, and I enjoy the community I created and the people that I've helped. It's one of the few "rewarding" aspects of my career.

Depression does not care if you make money or not until you have inner peace.

My mental health and well-being improved dramatically after I read "The Power Of Now". I highly recommend that book.

I don't know if I'd truly considered myself "depressed" at the time I was making the most money. I just felt aimless and lost.

--------------------------



This thread took a weird turn.