How Nate McCallister Earns +$45k/Month Sharing Awesome Business Tips
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Nate McCallister is a natural-born entrepreneur. He caught the bug for online business when he started flipping regular household items and seeing success.
He quit his day job and dove headfirst into selling on Amazon, but he quickly branched out and started to grow multiple income streams.
Over the course of his online business career, he has provided services to other Amazon sellers, blogged about selling on Amazon, built up a +54k-member Facebook group, written a book about affiliate marketing, launched a YouTube channel, developed software... and the list goes on.
Keep reading to learn all about Nate, his main site, EntreResource, and how he brings home more than $45k per month from his many ventures.
In this interview, Nate tell us about
- How he got started
- His website and YouTube channels
- Where his income comes from
- His top marketing strategy
- His thoughts on email, SEO, and link building
- How he approaches content creation
- His traffic stats
- The tools he uses every day to grow his businesses
- One of the challenges he's faced
- What he considers his greatest accomplishment
- The biggest mistake he's made
- His advice for other entrepreneurs
Contents
- Meet Nate McCallister
- Why He Created EntreResource
- How Much Money He's Making From EntreResource
- Nate McCallister's Top Marketing Strategy
- The Importance of SEO
- His Content Creation Process
- Achieving Current Revenue Levels
- Nate McCallister's Traffic Stats
- His Top 3 Tools
- His Biggest Challenge
- Nate McCallister's Greatest Accomplishment
- What He Wishes He Knew When He Started
- His Main Mistake
- Nate McCallister's Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
Meet Nate McCallister
My name is Nate, and I got my first taste of self-employment success by selling products around my house on Amazon.
While finishing my degree in economics at the University of West Georgia and working full-time as a shift manager at a Yarn Mill, I found the time to buy anything I could find that would make a profit on Amazon.
After graduating, I decided to quit my job and pursue Amazon selling full-time, but I quickly got bored of selling and wanted to expand into different income streams.
I started blogging about selling on Amazon, providing writing services for sellers who had been suspended, and selling lead lists of profitable items to other sellers.
At the moment, I have many different streams of income beyond Amazon. My passions include coaching my son’s baseball teams, spending time with my wife, and playing piano.
Why He Created EntreResource
A huge part of my learning process when I first started selling on Amazon was blogs and Facebook groups.
After reading so many different blogs, I became inspired to write my own and document my journey into self-employment.
Thus began EntreResource.
FBA Today is a Facebook group that I run with +54k members. It started as a group exclusively for people who had bought ungating services from me.
After the group reached several hundred members, I decided it would be great to let in other sellers who could help contribute their expertise and engage with the community.
My journey on YouTube has been the definition of trial and error. I admit that I’m not nearly as good at the process as I am at writing.
I currently have two channels: EntreResource and Evergreen Affiliate Marketing; however, I only create content currently for the latter.
Outside of EntreResource, I’m a partner at OAChallenge.com, a program that helps Amazon sellers learn the art of online arbitrage.
How Much Money He's Making From EntreResource
Although I have multiple income streams, I’m only going to talk about EntreResource here.
- EntreResource software products = $56k per month in revenue. I take home about $15k of this per month after paying affiliates and my JV Partner.
- Affiliate products (specifically from EntreResource.com organic) = $30k to $40k per month in average profit. My profit margins are about 90% on this since I do hire writers for about half the content, and I have costs for my software and hosting.
- Adsense revenue = Under $100 per month. I do not use Adsense. If I’m being honest, I have no idea even where this little bit comes from.
- Amazon Associates = Under $100 per month. I’ve never made this a big focus either. Most of what I sell is intangible. If it’s physical, it’s usually just a book or other low-cost item that pays me very little.
- Sponsored ads/emails = $0 to $2,000 per month. This is money I can make if I have the time. I’m currently training someone to sell ad space and email promotions.
- Courses = $0 per month from EntreResource itself. None of the courses I offer are part of the EntreResource.com umbrella. They are on ThriveCartMastery.com and OAChallenge.com, but those are treated separately.
- Amazon book sales = About $1,200 per month across Kindle, print, and Audible. The only book I attribute to EntreResource.com is Evergreen Affiliate Marketing.
- Miscellaneous = $0 to $1,000 per month. I occasionally consult and offer one-off services for people I know well and have specific things I can help with.
Nate McCallister's Top Marketing Strategy
It’s definitely email marketing. There’s nothing more lucrative than email. Every other strategy I implement revolves back to email. It is the meta of my businesses.
I grow my email list mostly through lead magnets on my website and my Facebook groups. Customers are also a huge part of my list. If someone buys something from me, they are usually 5-star email subscribers who engage and buy again.
As for unique marketing strategies, I like to use email opt-ins in Facebook groups. This method has worked like gangbusters for me for nearly 5 years. I wrote about it for Social Media Examiner a few years back.
The Importance of SEO
SEO is extremely important. With the rise of tools like Surfer SEO and people spending big money on SEO pros, I have to put in great effort to keep my pages ranking. Overall, my strategy is to write content that attracts my dream customer and then build links selectively to the posts I see as most valuable.
Link Building
Compared to other bloggers who are getting similar traffic and revenue as me, I’m likely one of the worst link builders. It’s just so tedious and time-consuming. I finally bit the bullet though and hired a full-time link buildingspecialist.
This guy is working with me at my office in person. I don’t trust outsourcing it to agencies. I don’t trust their methods and feel like I can pay up to $30/hr and get more links of higher quality than I’d get paying for these agency services.
His Content Creation Process
I have two core types of content: search intent and what I call “general shareable content.”
The search intent content is stuff that I know can drive a lot of organic sales, while the shareable content is stuff that I know readers will love, BUT it will need to be delivered to them by social shares and my email lists.
For search intent, I use Ahrefs for the keyword research and then Surfer SEO for optimizing it. I will outsource search intent traffic often but never outsource shareable type content.
For shareable content, I just sit down and focus on making the content as insightful, interesting, and helpful as possible. Nothing fancy on those except grinding out and putting in a lot of effort to impress my readers. My goal is to make confusing concepts easy for anyone to understand. I feel that is my #1 job as a blogger.
Achieving Current Revenue Levels
I was one of the lucky entrepreneurs who found success quickly thanks to Amazon FBA and my service-based businesses early on. This was total luck, and I was smart enough to capitalize on it, thankfully. I've tried many other businesses and my success rate is far from 100%.
My blog took about 3 years to really start driving lots of sales organically. Now that my DR is over 50 and I understand SEO better, I can drive sales much more quickly with new posts.
Nate McCallister's Traffic Stats
I get about 50k to 70k users and 150k to 200k page views per month currently.
His Top 3 Tools
Although I use a lot of tools (probably too many), I’d have to say the top 3 most useful are Ahrefs, ClickMagick, and Surfer SEO.
Note: The most valuable is, of course, ConvertKit, but email marketing software is a no-brainer so I didn’t want to waste one of the 3 on it.
Ahrefs is the most powerful tool on the planet for researching blog topic ideas, tracking competitors, and growing backlinks. I use it for nearly every post I write and can’t imagine running my blogs without it.
To oversimplify it, ClickMagick is a link cloaking and click tracking software. It lets me track and change URLs at scale. This is wildly helpful in affiliate marketing because the affiliate URLs change so often. If I’ve put a URL in 100 different locations, which is not uncommon, and the company changes my URL, I’m screwed without Clickmagick. With Clickmagick, I always use the same cloaked URL and then can change the destination and apply to every link mentioned.
Surfer SEO is a tool I just started using this year and I can’t even imagine how much larger my blog could be if I had it when I started. It has many functions, but my 2 biggest uses for it are the content editor and a tool called “Grow Flow.”
The content editor lets me optimize blog posts so they’re better than the articles that are currently ranking on Google for the terms I want to rank for. Grow Flow gives me a list of tasks to do to my sites each week which has dramatically increased my website's growth.
His Biggest Challenge
In terms of earning more, my biggest hold-up is focus. I chase new ideas before finishing old ones too often. I’ve had about 5 different business ventures that could have been my “one thing” if I committed to them but that has never been my style.
I enjoy the thrill of doing and learning new things. I’m ok with leaving money on the table in exchange for fulfillment and a drive to keep working.
If things ever tanked, I could suck it up, though, and focus on something less appealing for a while.
Nate McCallister's Greatest Accomplishment
My book Evergreen Affiliate Marketing is my greatest accomplishment (and if you're not familiar with evergreen marketing definitely check out our full guide). It’s such a process to finish a book, but once it’s completed, there really is no better feeling. It provides credibility and lets me help more people in a different way.
People who read my blog come and go, but people who read my book really get a MASSIVE amount of my experience and advice for under $20 in a few hours.
What He Wishes He Knew When He Started
I wish I had known not to take myself so seriously. I used to let a negative comment throw me off for an entire day or two.
Now, I know that I shouldn’t expect to be perfect and that even my best work will have problems and/or people who want to point them out.
His Main Mistake
My greatest mistake is probably waiting too long to outsource tasks. I did a lot of stuff that could have been delegated. My value is from creating content, not handling support emails.
Nate McCallister's Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
Be patient. The results are slow but worth it.
Cherish the small wins and trust the process.
Blogging is not a get-rich-quick strategy. Understand that before you start, and remind yourself when you want to give up that someday, it will pay off, and you can flip your site for 24x-36x of your monthly profits!
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