Back in 2014, Mark and his business partner were running a digital marketing agency when they realized something — they didn’t like working with clients.
So taking what they’d learned on their own projects and seeing what worked for clients, they began a two-year process of building niche sites to replace their client income. Their goal was to build a portfolio company that owned upwards of 100 niche website — and you’ll learn how this turned out in this episode.
During this time they also decided to begin documenting what they were learning, so they started Authority Hacker, a website (and now podcast), showing others how to build profitable websites.
Most recently, the Authority Hacker team spent 18 months building a site in the software review space. After scaling the site to $15,000 a month in affiliate revenue, they sold the website for mid-six figures.
Now, let’s hack…
Mark Webster
Highlights from the interview
- [06:46]: Mark discusses how his empathy and desire to help people lie at the core of his business success. He genuinely cares about what people want and need and takes the time to understand people in order to sell to them effectively.
- [10:25]: Mark explains how he and his partner founded Authority Hacker back in 2014. At the time, they were running a digital marketing agency, helping other people’s businesses grow. At one point, they lost a client because they’d delivered far more leads than the client could handle. This was when they started considering working on their own projects, rather than someone else’s. Authority Hacker started as a way for them to document their experiences and share their knowledge along the way. Within about two years, they’d sold off the agency to focus solely on their own authority sites.
- [20:49]: Mark explains how the community has been an incredibly important part of Authority Hacker’s success. 93% of people who’d refunded their courses did not join or participate in the exclusive communities associated with them. So, Authority Hacker puts a lot of emphasis on persuading people to participate and engage with them.
- [25:52]: Which is more important for launching an infoproduct — having an audience, or having a product idea? Mark feels that you can really do it either way. You could create a great product, then build an audience around it, or you could build the audience first and then market a product to them. He leans toward the audience-first approach, however, because that makes it easier to create and tailor the right product for those people.
Resources and links from the episode
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