How Adam Enfroy Created An $800k Per Year Blog In Just Two Years
You often hear that making money from blogging takes a long time. In the past two years, blogger Adam Enfroy has shown that’s not exactly true.
His blog adamenfroy.com was started at the beginning of 2019. In just two years he has grown the blog to over 500,000 monthly visitors and generated over $800,000 in 2020 alone.
If you want to know how to grow a profitable blog in 2021, you need to study what made adamenfroy.com grow so fast.
There is a lot to learn about blogging on his own website. He provides in-depth useful content about what helped him grow his own blog.
But in this post, I’ve dissected his entire website to see what’s really made it grow so fast. Inside this post you will learn…
- Where Adam Enfroy generates traffic to his website from
- His best performing blog posts and what has made them rank so well in Google
- How Adam Enfroy makes money from his blog
- 3 top SEO lessons from adamenfroy.com
- The ROI of outsourcing blog content
Who Is Adam Enfroy?
Adam Enfroy is a 32 year old blogger born in Michigan, United States. He is known for starting the website adamenfroy.com.
Enfroy began his digital marketing career working in corporate digital marketing roles and started his blog while still working full time. He launched adamenfroy.com in 2019 and grew the site to over 178,000 monthly visitors by the end of that same year.
Website Traffic Data
According to Enfroy’s 2020 income report, he had 409,944 monthly visitors to his website in December 2020. Throughout 2020, he had a total of 4.8 million visitors to the site, a huge increase from 883,000 in 2019.
Enfroy generates the bulk of his traffic through SEO and claims to spend no money on advertising campaigns.
According to data from SEM Rush, in January 2021, 64% of traffic to adamenfroy.com is coming from search, less than 1% from social platforms and 0% from paid traffic.
The 64% from search traffic is actually a decline from 2020, when in November 2020, 73% of traffic was coming from search engines. The website took a hit after Google’s core update in December 2021.
*It should be noted that the true organic numbers are likely higher than those in this post. These numbers are from SEM Rush, who tend to underestimate organic traffic numbers. A 2016 study from Screaming Frog found SEM Rush were underestimating traffic numbers by 42%.However, accuracy has likely improved since then. SEM Rush did announce in November 2020 that they had improved the accuracy of their traffic analytics.
Top Performing Pages & Keywords
Business Ideas Post
Currently, the top traffic generating page on adamenfroy.com is titled ‘107 Best Small Business Ideas of 2021.’
This page generates 11.69% of organic traffic on the website and ranks for over 5100 keywords in the US. Worldwide, this one post generates over 48,000 monthly visits.
It ranks extremely well for some very high volume keywords in the US:
- 5th spot for ‘small business ideas’ which has over 33,100 monthly searches
- 8th spot for ‘business ideas’ which has over 40,500 monthly searches
- 3rd spot for ‘business ideas 2020’ which has over 9900 monthly searches
It looks like the post was first published in late 2019 and has been updated a lot since then. We can go right back to April 2020 on Wayback Machine and see the post was then titled ‘51 Best New Small Business Ideas of 2020.’
This shows how effective it can be to update existing content, rather than only focusing on creating new blog posts. Since April 2020, Enfroy has added an extra 56 business ideas to the post and the word count has increased from 7704 words to 9040.
Based on archives from Wayback Machine, it looks like the post had a major update in July 2020, going from 56 business ideas to 97 business ideas. This update coincided with a pretty significant increase in search traffic…
Aside from the extremely in-depth content, which has been continually updated, the post also performs well thanks to over 3700 backlinks from 355 referring domains.
The post has backlinks from Forbes (a no-follow link), Udemy, Mailer Lite and addicted2success.com. They are all considered high authority websites and having links from them helps Enfroy’s post to rank higher.
Enfroy monetizes this post through both banner advertising and placing affiliate links throughout the post. Inside the post, you’ll find affiliate links for products like Shopify, Adobe Photoshop, M1 Finance and Blue Host.
Aside from the affiliate links, Enfroy also uses a lot of internal links from this post to other pages on his website. This strategy helps add authority to other pages and will help other pages to rank higher in future.
Leadership Qualities
As of February 2021, Enfroy’s post titled “11 Leadership Qualities: A List of Skills to Make A Good Leader” is his second top-performing page.
The page currently generates 8.14% of his overall search traffic in the US and ranks for over 1500 keywords. This post is just short of 2000 words and contains several images.
In the US, this post is ranking in third position of Google for the keyword ‘leadership qualities’ which has over 40,500 searches per month. It also ranks in 4th spot for the keyword “qualities of a good leader” which has over 12,100 monthly searches.
What’s impressive is that Enfroy’s page is outranking both Forbes and Brian Tracy for ‘leadership qualities.’
The Enfroy article has over 3200 backlinks from 292 referring domains, which is higher than both the Forbes and Brian Tracy articles.
It’s interesting to note that Enfroy’s article doesn’t contain any affiliate links. Because this is more of an informational post rather than transactional, he instead monetizes it through banner advertising.
Income Report Analysis – How Enfroy Monetizes His Site
The adamenfroy.com website made $812,718 in 2020 according to his end of year income report.
In the report, Enfroy also claims to have gained 93k backlinks in 2020 and had a profit margin of 88%.
Affiliate Marketing
From the $812k, affiliate marketing was Enfroy’s number one source of income. He claims to have generated $601,698 from affiliate marketing alone in 2020. Throughout his website, Enfroy has links to over 124 affiliate programs.
In his income reports, Enfroy includes a list of affiliate programs he’s associated with. You can also see which affiliate programs he recommends joining in this post.
The Blue Host affiliate program appears to be one of his favorites, appearing on over 70 pages throughout the website.
Advertising
Across the adamenfroy.com website, you’ll see banner ads displayed throughout blog posts.
According to his 2020 income report, Enfroy joined the Mediavine ad network in July 2020. Since joining Mediavine, Enfroy’s website generated over $69,000 in ad revenue.
Top Blogging Lessons From Adam Enfroy
There is a lot to learn from someone who has grown a blog from scratch to over $800k per year in just two years.
Enfroy offers a lot of actionable advice for bloggers wanting to build an income on his website. And you can learn even more by reverse engineering his website using a tool like SEM Rush or Ahrefs.
Focus On Content & Backlinks
Enfroy has been able to grow his blog so quickly by posting regular content on the website and also acquiring a lot of backlinks from other websites.
In 2019, Enfroy published 85 articles on his own blog and 82 guest posts on other websites to get backlinks. And in 2020, he published 87 articles on his own blog and 70 guest posts across other websites.
The guest posts that Enfroy has published on other websites have allowed him to build a high domain authority. And having a high domain authority helps his own website to rank higher and faster.
In this post, Enfroy talks about how he wrote 8 guest posts in 15 days for other high authority websites. This resulted in his domain authority going up 12 points and a 372% increase in organic traffic.
By attracting so many backlinks to his posts, Enfroy has been able to outrank much more established sites that even have higher domain authority. One example of this, is his post titled ’11 Best Graphic Design Software 2021.’
This post ranks #1 in Google for ‘best graphic design software,’ a search term with 13,700 monthly searches globally.
Currently in 2021, adamenfroy.com has a domain authority of 41 according to Moz, but is outranking pcmag.com (DA 92), adobe.com (DA 97) and techradar.com (DA 92).
Enfroy has been able to outrank these giants largely because his post has so many backlinks to it. Currently, his post has 14.1k backlinks from 303 referring domains. While pcmag.com in second position has only 8k backlinks from 205 referring domains.
We can see that Enfroy has steadily grown both referring domains and total backlinks to this post over the past 12 months, with a big spike in backlinks coming around September to November 2020.
Interestingly, the influx of backlinks between September to November didn’t have such a positive impact on organic traffic.
Organic traffic actually fell sharply in December 2020 (although this may have been a result of Google’s algorithm update) but then increased again in January 2021. Still, there hasn’t been any significant increase in traffic since the huge surge in backlinks.
Despite 82% of backlinks being no-follow and 55% of backlinks coming from websites with a domain authority between 0-20, the sheer volume of links has helped the page to rank so well.
Update Top Performing Content
Neil Patel and other SEO experts talk about the importance of updating old content. Google likes to see fresh content on your website and a quick update can help your posts rank higher.
Using Wayback Time Machine, we can see that many of Enfroy’s top performing posts have been updated over time. In a guest post he wrote for App Sumo, Enfroy recommends that bloggers keep adding to old posts.
I’ve already mentioned his post on business ideas, which grew from ’51 Best New Small Business Ideas of 2020.’ in April 2020 to 107 Best Small Business Ideas of 2021.
Simply updating your page title like this also helps to improve click through rates. Generally, people will be more likely to click on a post that has 107 ideas vs 51. And people are also more likely to click on a post with the current year in the title.
Enfroy’s post titled ‘105 Best Affiliate Programs of 2021’ has also undergone updates over time….
This post started out as 97+ Best Affiliate Programs of 2019 in April 2019. Back then, the post had a word count of 7746 and has since grown to 9459 words.
Through these updates, Enfroy’s post has been able to climb to the second position for the search term ‘affiliate marketing’ in the US. He’s only trailing behind Hubspot, who have the first spot.
Outsource Content Writing
In his first year of blogging, Enfroy published 85 posts on his own site and 82 guest posts on other websites. That’s a total of 167 posts. Many of which are 1000 – 10,000 words.
And not to mention, Enfroy was still working in a corporate job and providing consulting services to other businesses.
To write so much content on your own, while also working a job would be near impossible. That’s why Enfroy suggests outsourcing content writing using a service like Fiverr or Upwork. He outsources both his own posts and guest posts, allowing him to get far more content published.
When publishing consistent content is one of the key factors that drive organic growth, it makes sense to have other writers create content for your website.
Enfroy says that by outsourcing content writing, it allows him time to focus on developing important relationships, building backlinks and growing his email list.
What Is The Cost And Return Of Outsourcing Content?
You might wonder whether it’s worthwhile paying a freelancer to write content for your blog when you could do it yourself. Costs to hire a good writer can be high, usually at least $0.10 per word.
In his August 2020 income report, Enfroy says he published six posts on his own blog and spent $1354 on blog content for the month. It’s possible that some of that money was spent on updating old posts or writing posts for upcoming months. But we’ll assume it was for the six posts it August.
That means he spent $225 per blog post.
Between 2019-2020, Enfroy published 324 posts across his own blog and other websites as guest posts. And during that same time, the blog generated over $1 million in revenue.
That’s a total revenue of $3086.42 per blog post. If we assume each blog post cost an average of $225 for a freelancer to write, that’s an ROI of 1271% for each post. Of course, there are other expenses involved in running a blog so his true ROI is not quite this high.
But also remember that each of these blog posts will continue to generate revenue for Enfroy for years to come. That $3086 per blog post could potentially grow to $7000 per blog post by the end of 2022.
It goes to show that if you know how to choose the right articles, take care of backlinks and then monetize your traffic, then it’s well worth paying a freelancer to write your content for you.
Summary
Adam Enfroy’s story should be an inspiration for anyone starting a blog in 2021. It shows that it’s still possible to build a very successful blog in a relatively short time.
Not only did Enfroy build his blog to over 500,000 monthly visitors in less than two years, he achieved this in one of the most competitive spaces on the internet.
What you should take away from this is just how powerful SEO and blogging can be. Adam Enfroy is not spending any money on advertising to bring 500k monthly visitors to his blog. Google is sending him all this traffic for free because he has produced quality content.
If you’re trying to grow your blog, you should take some time to analyze the Adam Enfroy blog using an SEO tool like SEM Rush, Ahrefs or Ubersuggest. Look at his top keywords, pages and where his backlinks have come from.
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