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 Russell and Maleah Barbour from Unconventional Prosperity and Stock Millionaires
It was my pleasure interviewing Maleah and Russell Barbour of Unconventional Prosperity and Stock Millionaires, popular blogs that help people pursue work-at-home careers and be more knowledgeable about the stock market, respectively. Russell is a former Ph.D. research scientist that had more student loan debt than he could pay off and had an unconventional (pun intended) start to the online business world.
Check out what Russell, on behalf of the team, 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?
We started our online businesses in 2013 while living in Seattle, Washington. We were struggling to make ends meet due to student loan debt. My regular job as a PhD research scientist did not provide an adequate monthly salary to meet our financial obligations.
We were desperate to make more money to stop our credit card debt from increasing.
We stumbled across affiliate marketing and blogging by accident.
Through learning to trade stocks, we noticed that a course we had taken offered an affiliate program where they would pay us a commission for every sale that we referred to them. We loved the course and it seemed like an intriguing concept.
After that, we started a blog on WordPress.com with the idea of writing a single review post about the stock trading course that we were promoting. The review was terribly written, and our idea of promotion was to spam Twitter endlessly!
I remember saying to Maleah (my wife)…
What have we got to lose? Let’s just try and make $50 extra a month from this blogging thing and see if it works.
Little did we know where blogging would take us.
2. At what point did you realize that your business was “taking off” and that you could really make money from it?
I vividly remember sitting in a coffee place in Seattle and an email appeared on my phone. It said
New Subscription: $44.95 Commission.
I had never earned money while drinking coffee and it was an amazing feeling!
That was my first ever affiliate commission and I will never forget it. I remember thinking that the potential for scaling this income stream was huge – I had barely put in any effort so far and within a few months we were earning several hundred dollars a month just from a one-page review post.
I was still working a demanding full-time job at the time.
This new stream of income was my glimmer of hope to escape and become financially free. I worked on the blog for a year or so and slowly started to gain momentum. I think when I hit $1,000 per month, I started to realize that a full-time income from blogging was within my grasp.
I quit my job and focused on blogging, real-estate investing and a technology startup (that ultimately failed miserably).
I started another blog and it started making some money. Suddenly it seemed like our blogging income went from $800 to $,5000 and then $10,000 per month.
They say that growth can happen quickly once you have all the systems in place. That is when I realized that we really had a business that could be grown to provide income for our family.
When we hit $15,000 a month, I started to re-invest the profits into growing our blogs. Never in a million years did I think it was possible to earn significant income from blogging. Passing that 5-figure per month mark is when we really realized that the business was starting to take off.
3. At what point did you realize you were living the life you wanted to?
I think when we realized we could live anywhere that we wanted to is when it really dawned on us that we had achieved our goal of financial freedom.
Sure we aren’t rich, but we have escaped the slavery of the modern day workplace.
When we were able to meet all of our monthly expenses on a consistent basis, we started to feel that life was working out. Money had been a big source of our stress in the past, so it was a relief to not have to worry about it.
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?
We did not outsource any of the work for the longest time.
This was a big mistake!
We actually found the best freelancers in our Facebook blogging groups.
These groups are amazing resources. We built relationships with freelancers that also have blogs.
Because many of them have become our friends, we have had no problems trusting them to go into our blogs and do coding or other work for us. We have had so many great recommendations from other bloggers that have hired freelance writers and people to handle social media.
Everyone that we have hired to help us has been amazing.
Editor’s note: I enjoyed writing for Russell and Maleah on Unconventional Prosperity discussing proofreading and after the article was published, someone pointed out a typo. I quickly learned that my talents were best reserved for virtual assisting and not proofreading. Don’t provide a service/product that’s not up to snuff 🙂
In her interview, McKinzie Bean mentions how she also uses referrals and Sarah Titus mentions how she only hires from within her audience.
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?
We are as honest as possible with our reviews and blog posts.
We will not promote anything that we don’t believe in just for an extra buck.
Many bloggers are very misleading and pretend that you will get a special discount if you click through their link and purchase (bloggers promoting Bluehost seem to be particularly bad for this!).
Integrity is so important when it comes to growing your business and we prioritize it.
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?
I think that most people fail to grow businesses for a few different reasons. Often, they take on too much debt.
I see many people failing to reach the right customers and provide them with value.
Testing different strategies is crucial to success. You just never know what will work until you try it!
For every one product that turns out to be profitable to promote, there are probably five others that I tried and made nothing on. Working on getting the product-customer fit is crucial to growth. This is where I recommend spending most of your time to grow your business.
It takes a certain amount of faith to pursue a business venture because most of the time is spent failing miserably to get traction. You have to keep the ultimate goal in mind and enjoy the baby steps on the way to the big goal.
Editor’s note: I’ve learned the same thing with affiliate marketing. I promoted certain offers and got nothing but crickets, but when I started communicating the value of Six-Figure Blogger, that seemed to resonate with them as this was an area where they were looking to grow in their business. I’ve been making consistent commissions because I found the right fit for my audience.
7. How important has niching down been (no matter how hard it hurts) to your business’ growth and profitability?
Niching down has really helped our profitability.
I am a huge believer in improving our strengths and becoming the best at those things. So, we pick a product we love and almost solely promote that.
This has helped us make more money from our blog that some bloggers that have 10 times more traffic than us.
It is better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.
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?
I attribute our success to never giving up.
It is such a slow journey to making money blogging and I am constantly surprised that we are doing well.
Patience is not my strong point, so it is a miracle we have gotten this far.
I do think that our focus on promoting high commission products that we love will take us to the next level as well. We have always struggled to get the huge amount of visitors to the sites that other bloggers have been able to achieve.
Improving our traffic will hopefully take us to the next level as we have primarily focused on conversion rates and maximum revenue per visitor for the last few years.
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?
Honestly, we are horrible at systems.
The only system I have is to find what is working and then focus exclusively on growing that aspect of the business. I will put all my time, energy and sometimes money into growing the income from a particular stream.
My usual system is to find a topic or affiliate program that is very popular with my audience. I then have freelance writers work on producing articles around that product or topic.
10. If you could speak face-to-face with yourself when you first started your business, what pearls of wisdom would you impart?
I would tell myself to think more long-term.
Forget trying to get fast results and build a solid quality base.
I would make sure that the old me would focus on quality posts, networking with other bloggers and to pay attention to details that took me 5 years to figure out were important.
About Maleah and Russell Barbour
Russell and Maleah Barbour are the owners of the personal finance blogs, UnconventionalProsperity.com and StockMillionaires.com. They make a full-time living blogging and traveling around the US trying to find a place to settle down and call home.
Conclusion
Thanks for participating in my series, Russell and Maleah!
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 Russell and Maleah Barbour?
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!
