It's been a while since I shared any real information about my personal affiliate portfolio. I used to share the information every month, but then I stopped including my personal sites in my income reports. Then I stopped income reports altogether.
I never wanted to permanently stop sharing though. I've contemplated in the past having monthly or quarterly updates where I let you know the status of my portfolio, what I've been working on, and what else is new, but have always put it off.
Part of the reason is that I've been so busy growing HPD, that my updates would be pretty boring.
Site A is on autopilot. Very nice.
Site B is doing ok. I built some more links this month. Very nice.
Wouldn't exactly be the most exciting update post would it?
Another reason is that I recently sold a lot of my bigger earners, so right now my portfolio is in a status of “New sites coming soon!”, which again, wouldn't make for a very insightful update post.
So right now we're in a pretty cool situation.
I have more time and resources than I've ever had recently, and I'm keen to dig my teeth in and build out some new sites. I also want to be able to demonstrate to people not just that our sites work, but to be able to walk them through the process.
Couple that with the fact our membership forum is now live and taking on members, and we've got a great little combination going, which allows me to room to create something pretty cool.
Starting from May 1st, I'm going to be much more aggressively building out my niche site portfolio again and will be sharing weekly over-the-shoulder videos in our membership area walking everyone through what I'm doing.
I'll pick up one of our Aged Sites and one of our Ready Made sites, and will get to work right away. By the end of May, both sites will be on their way to success (though still some way off of course) and you'll be able to follow me.
The weekly videos I share will also be supplemented by a monthly Q+A webinar, which means you get the opportunity to ask me questions as we go. We'll put recordings up in the forum as well though, for those who join later the community later or can't make the live sessions.
Here's the catch though, you'll need to be a member of our forum to follow along with everything. I will only share a few things outside of the membership (such as quarterly updates and some free webinars)
Why? Several reasons:
1.) When you're paying for something, you're much more likely to take action and follow it.
I don't want to go to the effort of sharing everything I'm doing with you if you're not going to take action on it. This project has massive potential to help you earn anything from your first dollars to your first thousand dollars, but only if you take action.
2.) I can share a lot more detail behind closed doors.
Let's face it, when you have a public case study, your sites get spammed, get exposed to negative seo, or get copied. Not only that, but your site also succeeds faster, because people link to it and share it. Either way, the integrity of a case study gets diluted when it's public.
3.) It makes the whole thing more formal and professional.
I love sharing stuff for free and I will still share the highlights from my projects with the public, but being able to do something as part of a paid community where everyone is committed just has a much better vibe.
4.) Accountability
This project isn't just going to be about me either! One thing we've been talking about is setting up accountability groups. In a nutshell, you get grouped up with a few other members to hold yourselves accountable. Whether you want to do weekly Skype meetings, open an email thread, or just check in with each other's progress, the idea is that you're going to be held accountable and not going to be out there on your own.
You'll have the whole HPD community to leverage, but will also be able to form tighter groups too, which we will help facilitate.
Also, the benefit of joining a group rather than 1 on 1 pairings is that if someone drops out, the group continues.
To start the ball rolling, for the month of May you can still join the membership at our Founder's Price, which is $49 per month. You will be grandfathered into this price and will never have to pay a dime more.
At the end of May, the price will go up to $59 per month and who knows whether it will rise again after that (hint, it will).
Remember, anyone who buys one of our sites will also be given one month free access to the membership, which makes the next few weeks the perfect time to join the HPD community.
You don't need to buy a site if you don't want to though. The forum is here so that we can serve our existing customers sure, but it's also a way for us to lower the bar to who we can help.
We want to help as many people get started with sites as possible, and we want to help our existing audience scale up as much as possible. Can't think of a better way to do this than to get you all in a community where we can grow and learn as one.
Hi Bryon, I joined to watch you do this several months ago, but at some point you stopped making videos on the site stand mixers site and I never could figure out what was going on. Do you plan on staying with podcasts or will you be doing videos. I had planned to let my membership lapse as i do not like podcasts, but if you are going to share by video, then I won’t.
Hey Deborah,
The podcasts aren’t related to it because they are public facing. I’ll be doing new videos soon. I didn’t want to just do a video every week for the sake of it with no real update, and we’ve been doing a lot to these sites in the background.
I noticed this was an old post from May after I posted, but I am glad to hear you will be making videos again. Its the stuff you do in the background that I would be interested in knowing.
Yes, I’m with Deborah too. At least we would expect to see the monthly
click rate and a summary of what have been done to it lately. Right now,
we’re lost in the dark, can’t follow you anymore.
Ok yeah good point, thanks Eric. I’ll do an update this week.
Nice one Dom
Seriously considering this. Do you have a figure on expected additional expenses?
Probably under $500 per month initially. It’s hard to say. Most things can be done cheaply but I will be outsourcing a lot of it.
Great idea Bryon! I was looking for a coaching, accountability and mastermind group. Your idea is everything wrapped into one. I’ve listened to alot of podcasts and read alot of blog posts about successful people and they all believe that coaches, mentors and mastermind groups are highly beneficial not just for the tactical “how to” stuff but it’s good for your mindset development as well.
Are you also going to include the 6 figure challegne?
What happend to the dual niche site, did they ranked to nr1 are these the site you sold.
I sold one of the dual sites and the other is making about $1,000 per month. I should talk about that one more in the future, but I won’t include them in this case study, same as the 6 figure site (still going, but not working on it actively).
While I will be building a portfolio from scratch, I do still have about 5 sites lying around, making me money. I can’t include them though because I want this $0-$10k to be a pure “from zero” experience that others can mimic.
Sure is great stuff, agreed. But $49 a month is maybe a bit of a stretch unfortunately (though I don’t doubt it’s worth it). Especially just starting out, all my additional income is already going towards subscription tools and the outsourced work I feel I can’t complete. When I start seeing some returns on my 2 sites, I will no doubt sign up.
Thanks for all the information you’ve provided us Bryon, and your team.
While I may be biased, if you were going to spend money on anything it should be your education. When I first started I paid a similar fee to a membership and did everything else with a budget of $0.