Meet Adam Enfroy, a renowned content marketing influencer. Adam started out as a blogger in 2019. His self-described strategy of “scaling your blog like a startup” led him to quickly amass over 100,000 monthly visitors on his blog adamenfroy.com which he is now managing full-time.
Since he is a digital nomad, we finally caught up with Adam while he is traveling through Europe. When we talked, he’s blogging and shooting travel videos for his Instagram.
Cloudways: Hi Adam, let’s start with a conventional question – Who is Adam Enfroy?
Adam Enfroy: I would like to describe myself as a blogger and world traveler, which is still a little hard to believe as it’s all so new. I’m actually conducting this interview from Annecy, France and have no plans on where I’m going next. It could be Italy or it could be Thailand. Who knows? I’m extremely lucky to be able to make that choice and live spontaneously because of my blog’s success.
On my blog’s My Story page, I delve into my past since childhood and how I got to this point. It certainly wasn’t easy – I dealt with a lot of hardships in my teens and early twenties. But I was lucky that I got into digital marketing at the right time, and meet a lot of smart people to learn from.
Before taking on my blog full-time, I had a pretty quick career trajectory in digital marketing. I started out as an SEO Specialist at a small agency in Michigan. Next, I moved to a national e-commerce brand to manage their digital marketing.
In 2018, I moved to Austin, TX and started working for BigCommerce as their Affiliate Manager (then, Head of Digital). One unique strength I have is that I’m an Affiliate Manager turned Affiliate Marketer, so I’ve seen both sides and know what it takes to be successful.
Cloudways: Today, you run a leading website that aims to help beginners in setting up a blog. How did this all happen? What led you to start such a great initiative?
Adam Enfroy: When I started my blog, I scoured the Internet for blogging advice and kept finding the same ideas: write about your passions, maintain consistency, write quality content, promote your content, and make passive income in 2-3 years.
Yet 95% of bloggers are failing. I couldn’t find any actionable advice on how to grow a new blog from zero in 2019. Nothing went deep enough for me.
So I took everything I learned about SEO over the years and put it to work. When I first started my blog, I wanted to give readers and email subscribers the ability to watch my progress as I grew a brand new blog in 2019.
I stopped writing and started scaling my blog with startup growth tactics including outsourcing certain components of content creation and scaling my backlink acquisition.
As it stands today, my blog is a little over 8 months old, getting 105k visitors/month, and brought in over $24k in August ($12k from affiliate revenue).
I lay out all the steps of this process in a free 7-day email course you can find on my website.
Cloudways: Events and Meetups have now become an integral part of marketing strategy and networking for companies and individual affiliates. What events would you like to recommend for affiliate marketers to attend? Do you have any personal favorites that you never miss out on?
Adam Enfroy: I spoke at Affiliate Summit last year which was fun, but I don’t really attend many large events. So much of what SEO, content, and affiliate marketing has evolved into can be done via email, Slack, or Trello.
I’d say find people in your niche that you like, and meet them in person for coffee or in a video chat. You’ll get a lot more out of small groups and personal connections than large industry events.
Cloudways: What is one key thing that you want new entrants in Affiliate Marketing to do? And what is the one don’t that you want them to refrain from?
Adam Enfroy: Start building your Domain Authority (DA) from the start by guest blogging and getting backlinks. Without DA, your site simply won’t rank on Google. Many new affiliate marketers I see want to avoid SEO and go straight to paid traffic or social media. While those channels seem faster, real success comes from mastering SEO.
Second, write less and start treating your blog like a business. Especially if your blog is a side hustle, you need to maximize the effective use of your time. And you can’t do that as a tortured writer writing everything yourself slowly over time. If you can outsource certain components of your blog from initial content creation to design, you can focus on networking and building your blog like a CEO, not a writer.
Cloudways: Hosting is an essential part of Affiliate Marketing. How important is the role of Managed Cloud Hosting providers for the online marketing industry?
Adam Enfroy: As someone obsessed with site speed, I can attest that managed hosting is crucial for online marketers. Plus, as site speed is now an SEO ranking factor, a web host that loads your files quickly with less time to the first byte is more important than ever.
Cloudways: How should an affiliate marketer leverage content and take advantage of a well-crafted content strategy?
Adam Enfroy: A well-crafted content strategy starts with keyword research. The players making real money write long-form, high-quality articles tailored for specific target keywords and match reader intent.
On my site, there are two main types of keywords I target.
First, there are affiliate-specific posts where I want to rank for certain keywords to generate affiliate income. These are typically lower-volume, high-intent, long-tail keywords.
For example, I just created a new post for the best landing page builders. While this post won’t get a huge amount of traffic, it has a higher chance of generating affiliate revenue because the keyword has high search intent and there are a lot of affiliate links on the page.
The second type of keywords are high-volume, lower-intent keywords – think 100k+ searches/month. For example, something like my article How to Make Money Online. While these may not generate immediate affiliate revenue, they bring a ton of new readers to your blog and can increase the size of your email list.
Any blog’s content strategy needs a mix of both long-tail, high-intent keywords and high-volume, lower-intent keywords.
Finally, make sure to use tools like Ahrefs to find the target keywords, LSIGraph or Clearscope to find semantic keywords, and properly use H2 and H3 headings to tell Google what’s important. You can check out my best landing page builder post to see how to properly format a list post for affiliate revenue.
Cloudways: Let’s step away from work. What do you do to relax and unwind?
Adam Enfroy: I’m a big fan of long-distance running and try to run 5-6 times a week. Running outside in new places helps turn off my mind so I can be more “in” the moment – it’s definitely a form of meditation for me. To make it more fun, I have just started posting videos of me running around the world on my Instagram, like this one.
I’m also a huge fan of podcasts. The main ones I listen to are The Joe Rogan Experience and Hardcore History. Anything related to science or history that has a chance of blowing my mind will probably be listened to.
Oh. And coffee and wine are good too.
Cloudways: Who do you consider your best buddies in the affiliate marketing industry?
Adam Enfroy: Ryan Robinson is an amazing blogger and all-around great guy. We just started a new financial and investment site together called Money Talk which I’m really excited about.
I am also a good friend to some amazing people in the content marketing niche, like Shane Barker, Tracey Wallace from Eterneva, Levi Olmstead from G2, Alex Birkett, Mark Lindquist, Kevin Jones, Nigel Stevens from OG Marketing, and a whole lot more people I can think of.
Cloudways: With so much on your plate to offer, what are your future plans?
Adam Enfroy: It may sound selfish, but honestly for the next few months, I want to find ways to work as little as possible. Building my blog as a side hustle with a full-time job required 100-hour workweeks for seven straight months. The burnout was real and I just was able to quit my job in July. So for the next few months, my goal is to have at least 90% of my incoming emails simply say, “You earned a commission” while I travel through Europe and SE Asia.
Later this year, I’m planning to launch an online course that goes super-deep into my 7-day email course and the exact steps to start and scale a new blog. I’m also pushing out a lot of 360-degree travel videos on my Instagram.
Cloudways: Please provide us with an image of your workspace
This is my apartment for the next week or two in Annecy, France
Cloudways: Last question. Who should we interview next in this series on Affiliate Marketing Experts?
You should interview Shane Barker – he’s a smart dude.
