Welcome to the Scaling Success Stories series!
If you’re new to this series, I ask online entrepreneurs questions regarding growing and scaling their business.
This is the series description:
You can get your fill of online business tips by reading the other interviews on the Scaling Success Stories page.
Interview with R.J. Weiss from The Ways to Wealth
It was my pleasure interviewing R.J. Weiss from The Ways to Wealth. R.J. started in online business having NO skills and through hard work and a lot of learning, produced a successful and profitable business. A CFP, R.J. uses his knowledge to provide tailored advice to his readers from his perspective, instead of a full team of writers. He’s also scaled a business using Upwork to hire freelancers.
Check out what R.J. had to say to my questions!
1. Why did you start an online business and how does your passion still drive your business’ growth today?
Like a lot of people from my generation, I read The Four-Hour Workweek when it came out and couldn’t really get the idea out of my head of running a location-independent online business.
Of course, at the time, I had no skills that would be useful for running an online business. However, I slowly gained experience, both on side projects (a lot through failures), as well as taking over the marketing for my employer.
The drive to start an online business intensified once I had kids.
My wife and I discussed the kind of childhood we wanted our kids to experience and having an online business helped give me the flexibility to accomplish many of our goals.
2. At what point did you realize that your business was “taking off” and that you could really make money from it?
The first time I saw major growth was in January of 2017. Three months earlier, I had left my job in the insurance industry to pursue The Ways To Wealth full-time.
The site was doing well and growing at a good rate, but it still wasn’t enough to cover my living expenses.
Fortunately, I had saved a bit of money in anticipation of this phase.
In the back of my mind, there was still doubt as to whether this was going to work.
But then in January 2017, the site exploded, thanks largely to a few viral pins.
Also, while I had started advertising on Facebook in October of the prior year, by January I was finally over the learning curve and my paid traffic was doing very well.
These two factors were paired with the overall interest in personal finance peaking in January.
After that month, there was no more doubt. This was going to work. I had made the right move and it was time to scale up and grow.
3. At what point did you realize you were living the life you wanted to?
In January of 2017, while The Ways to Wealth was experiencing its first big spike, my wife and I took our kids to Hawaii.
On our first day in Honolulu, I woke up at around 3:30 a.m. local time and took my laptop to the balcony to check on the site.
I didn’t have email or a web browser on my phone, so I hadn’t checked how things were doing since we left Chicago the previous day.
It turned out that the site had recorded its highest-revenue day ever — while we were on airplanes.
It was a feeling I’ll never forget, as a goal I had for years was looking more and more like it was coming to fruition.
4. One of the biggest fears of outsourcing is trusting the people you hire to run your business the way you would. How did you overcome this and where did you find the right freelancers and employees to help you grow your business?
When I started The Ways To Wealth, I did everything.
From writing to creating visuals to uploading posts.
Now, I work with three independent contractors: an editor, a writer, and a graphics person — all from Upwork.
In addition, I outsourced tech support and Pinterest marketing to agencies.
Looking back, the fear of outsourcing came from getting over the limiting belief that I was the best person to do a particular job. Just because I could do something doesn’t mean that I was particularly good at it.
The team I work with now is way more skilled than I was in their areas of expertise.
Editor’s note: This is a great example of outsourcing to strengthen your weaknesses. Jeff Proctor and Kelan Kline also outsourced in this way.
5. A common myth is that as you grow and scale your business, you have to sell your soul to make money, especially when you venture into paid advertising. How do you debunk this myth in your business?
This myth held me back on a previous website.
I started another financial blog in 2009 and built it over the next two years to over 100,000 unique visitors a month.
At the time, I believed placing just one ad on the site was selling my soul. Which should come as no surprise, since I didn’t allow myself to envision a business that was profitable, I ended up selling the site.
Over the years, I continued to read personal finance blogs.
And it wasn’t hard to notice that the finance blogs I read year after year made money. They were not selling their soul to provide value to readers, but instead doing the exact opposite.
6. Why do you think most people fail to grow their businesses and what advice would you offer them to keep pushing, despite all the setbacks?
Ask most bloggers how long it was before they started making even $100 a month, and most will tell you something like six to 18 months.
That’s a lot of time to put in for little return, and to be honest, after the initial few weeks, when the excitement is gone, it’s emotionally difficult.
Self-doubt creeps in, especially when people in your life start asking you why you’re putting in all this work for nothing.
You’ll start to question yourself and your goals. And it’s here that a lot of people quit.
One of my favorite podcasts, The Tropical MBA, has the “1,000 Rule,” which says:
“You’ll be doing worse than you were at your job for 1,000 days after you start your muse business.”
I think that’s fairly accurate.
While I was able to grow The Ways To Wealth relatively quickly, it was the culmination of years of trial and error.
And even then, for the first six months, I didn’t break even.
So my advice is to go into your online business being prepared for a long road ahead. A road that’s definitely worth it at the end, but a long one.
Editor’s note: Kara Fidd and Melissa Stephenson mention that you don’t achieve success overnight.
7. How important has niching down been (no matter how hard it hurts) to your business’ growth and profitability?
When I looked at the personal finance blogosphere, I didn’t see many blogs competing in the space I wanted to (which I’d define as financial bloggers whose main source of revenue is affiliate marketing) writing in one consistent voice.
Furthermore, there are even fewer blogs in this space run by someone with experience as a financial planner.
Most blogs I compete with are multi-author blogs.
They have a team of writers, which allows them to produce content at scale. While that’s a good business model, I felt that the benefits to remaining single-author for me outweighed the alternative.
This has been important to my business’ growth as I feel I’ve been able to develop a better relationship with my readers.
They know what to expect when they read an article, they know certain terms and themes that are interwoven throughout the content, and I’ve been able to inject a lot of personal stories to learn from as well.
8. What do you attribute your success to and how do you explain it? Do you think the same strategies will help you reach your next monetization goals? Why or why not?
It sounds cliche, but not giving up.
It was a long road between the day I first wanted an online business and the day I ran a successful one.
There were a lot of failures, which were not easy to go through.
While the ability to not give up helped me get through the beginning, I’ll need to grow a lot more to take The Ways To Wealth to the next level.
It’s always interesting for me to look back at a specific point and realize how little I knew or what I would do differently knowing what I know now. This is because I’m always trying to learn something new.
And it’s this commitment to learning which is the overarching strategy that’s going to help me reach that next level.
9. To scale, you really need to have a systemized business. What steps have you taken to build those systems and how do you optimize them?
For The Ways to Wealth, there was life before Trello and life after Trello.
Life before was chaotic. I would have dozens of things I would be trying to accomplish with my team, and it was all scattered throughout Upwork conversations, emails, and chats.
In life after Trello, things are much more streamlined.
There are checklists, lists of projects, we move content through a pipeline, and conversations are located in one place and threaded.
And this is where hiring someone with more experience than me in producing content really helped. My editor set up this Trello board quickly after we started working together.
10. If you could speak face-to-face with yourself when you first started your business, what pearls of wisdom would you impart?
Focus on SEO sooner!
When I started, I focused heavily on both Facebook paid traffic and Pinterest.
It wasn’t until the middle of 2018 that I started to get really serious about SEO and committed to making it my number one driver of traffic — which it is today.
About R.J. Weiss
R.J. Weiss is the founder and editor of The Ways To Wealth, a Certified Financial Planner™, husband and father of three. He’s spent the last 10+ years writing about personal finance and has been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, MSN Money, and other publications.
Conclusion
Thanks for participating in my series, R.J.!
As you can tell, it’s NOT EASY growing and scaling an online business, but there are some things you can do to aid you in the process.
Inspired by R.J.?
Now, it’s your turn!
I assembled the Scaling Blueprint to show you how to…
- Outsource Effectively
- Systemize Your Business
- Shatter Your Revenue Goals
After working with six-figure and seven-figure clients, I know the difference between how they function.
Let me help you start scaling successfully.
Cheers to future success!
