If I Wanted to Become a Millionaire in 12 Months, This is What I’d Do

Summary

Neil Patel, a seasoned entrepreneur, shares his foolproof strategy to becoming a millionaire in just 12 months, even if you're starting from scratch. His blueprint emphasizes the importance of thinking long-term, building a dedicated audience, and leveraging your own platform to monetize effectively. Patel advises against the common pitfall of chasing short-term gains and highlights the compounding benefits of long-term efforts. By creating valuable content, mastering SEO techniques, and strategically using social media, anyone can drive substantial traffic to their website, enabling monetization through various streams like affiliate marketing, services, or digital products.

Highlights

• Avoid the trap of short-term cash; aim for long-term gains instead 🎯
• Owning an audience, like stars do, is key to financial growth 🌟
• Drive traffic to your own platform to control and monetize it 🕸️
• Using tools like Uber Suggest aids in SEO and content planning 🔍
• Select a domain and niche that aligns with your passions for success ❤️
• Consider technical SEO and backlinks for site authority 🚀
• Create content that fills competitor gaps for higher visibility 🌟
• Promote content on social media to maximize reach 📲

Key Takeaways

• Think long-term, not short-term, for sustainable success 🎯
• Build your own audience to leverage for long-term wealth 🚀
• Own your platform by driving traffic to your website 🌐
• Passion and niche focus increase your entrepreneurial success 💡
• SEO, technical cleanliness, and backlinks are keys to Google ranking 🔑
• Content quality and gap analysis boost your competitive edge 📈
• Engagement on social media helps expand reach and audience 🌍
• Email subscribers offer more value than social media followers 📧
• Diverse monetization strategies increase revenue opportunities 💰

Overview

Neil Patel's video provides a captivating blueprint for aspiring millionaires, focusing on starting without the need for a genius idea or hefty budget. Patel underscores the importance of thinking long-term to avoid burnout and create efforts with compounding effects over time. Key to this approach is building and leveraging your own platform, driving traffic to a personal website, and cultivating an engaged audience for sustainable wealth.

Patel shares insights on creating a successful website including choosing a niche you are passionate about, using tools like WordPress for easy setup, and engaging in effective SEO practices. He stresses the significance of creating quality content that stands out and fulfills search intent, thereby dominating Google rankings through optimized technical SEO and strategic backlink building.

Capitalizing on social media, Patel advises using platforms to expand outreach, build community, and drive traffic back to your site for monetization. He highlights the superior value of email subscribers over social followers for direct marketing. Finally, he elaborates on various monetization methods, from affiliate marketing to selling products or services, catering to different segments, and maximizing income potential.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Mindset Shift This chapter introduces the concept of becoming a millionaire in 12 months. The author shares insights from decades of building successful businesses, emphasizing that a genius idea or a massive budget is not necessary for success. Instead, a specific blueprint will be offered as the guide. The chapter also addresses a common mistake: focusing on short-term cash, which is challenging to achieve in a very short time frame. The chapter sets the stage for overcoming this obstacle and implementing a long-term strategic approach.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Long-term Strategy and Audience Building The chapter emphasizes the importance of long-term thinking and strategy in achieving sustainable success. It warns against the pitfalls of shortsighted efforts which might pay off immediately but have little impact in the future. Instead, readers are encouraged to focus on long-term efforts that not only benefit them immediately but also have a compounding effect over time, leading to more significant results.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Owning Your Platform and Website Traffic The chapter emphasizes the importance of building and owning your own platform for long-term success. By having your own audience, like celebrities such as Tony Robbins, LeBron James, or the Kardashians, you have a direct line to monetize your content. Using Cristiano Ronaldo's rapid success on YouTube as an example, the chapter illustrates that the key to this success is not necessarily the popularity of a platform like YouTube, but the existing audience and brand recognition that the individual brings to the table.
• 02:00 - 03:30: Building and Monetizing a Website This chapter emphasizes the importance of owning your audience for building long-term wealth, as opposed to relying on social media platforms. By directing traffic to your own website and collecting emails, you can ensure direct communication with your audience, making it easier to monetize. The chapter highlights that leveraging your audience effectively can make earning your first million dollars seem effortless.
• 03:30 - 08:30: SEO and Content Strategy The chapter titled 'SEO and Content Strategy' discusses the importance of building a large user base for a successful ad agency. It highlights a case in which a rapidly growing ad agency has attracted millions of visitors to its website. This audience falls within the marketing vertical, making them highly valuable. The chapter further explains how such web traffic can be monetized by selling products or services to the visitors.
• 08:30 - 13:00: Social Media and Email Marketing The chapter discusses the revenue potential through effective social media and email marketing strategies. By using a basic math formula, it illustrates the conversion of website visitors into paying customers. Using the example of neilpatel.com, the text explains that if 1% of a million visitors sign up for a $30 monthly product, it can generate $300,000 in recurring monthly revenue, quickly leading to million-dollar monthly revenues within a few months.
• 13:00 - 15:30: Monetization Models and Conclusion This chapter explores the significance of attracting visitors to your website, highlighting the success story of NP Digital that earns over 9 figures annually from its online presence. The process starts with building a website, an endeavor simplified by a proven method that anyone can follow. The initial step is selecting a niche of personal interest to enhance the likelihood of success. The text underscores the challenges of entrepreneurship, emphasizing that passion is crucial for dedication and energy investment, key elements for a prosperous venture.

If I Wanted to Become a Millionaire in 12 Months, This is What I’d Do Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 If I had to start from zero, this is exactly how I'd become a millionaire in 12 months. After decades of building successful businesses, I know exactly what I would do to go from zero to a million dollars as fast as possible. And the crazy part, you don't need a genius idea or a massive budget to do it. You just need this blueprint. Let me break it down for you. First, let's talk about the biggest obstacle you need to overcome if you want to become a millionaire. The biggest thing that people make a mistake on is they focus on short-term cash. It's really hard to make cash in 30 days, 60 days. You got
• 00:30 - 01:00 to think long term. When you're shortsighted, what you'll find is you'll put in a lot of effort, get very little results, and get burnt out. And you start thinking about what can I do today? And a lot of times that effort that you put in to make money today won't really matter 6 months from now, year from now, 2 years from now. So instead, what you want to do is focus on long-term efforts because that way, not only will it help you in the short run, but those efforts that you focus on in the short run will have compounding effects in the long run. And the best
• 01:00 - 01:30 thing you can do to take that long-term approach is to build an audience. In essence, you're owning your own platform. Think about it. Facebook, Instagram, Google, they're all examples of platforms. When you have your own audience, kind of like a Tony Robbins, LeBron James, or Kardashian, you can continually go after that audience and monetize them. See, when Christian Ronaldo got onto YouTube, he instantly had millions of followers. It was one of the fastest growing accounts. You know why? It wasn't because YouTube's a popular platform. It's because Cristiano
• 01:30 - 02:00 Ronaldo owned his own audience. He had loyal followers that would move with him no matter where he went. Long-term wealth comes from leveraging an audience, not short-term money grabs. However, if you rely on social media platforms, that means you truly don't own your audience. That's why you want to direct traffic to your own website to even landing pages where collecting email addresses so you can have direct communication with people and sell them. If you do this easy thing with your website, making your first million dollars becomes effortless. My ad agency, NP Digital, is one of the
• 02:00 - 02:30 fastest growing ad agencies out there according to AdWe. One of the reasons we're are such a fast growing ad agency is because we built up such a massive user base of people coming to our website each and every single month. I'm not talking about a few hundred thousand visitors. I'm talking about millions. And these are millions of visitors in the marketing vertical which is a very lucrative audience. And when you get people going to your website, you can end up monetizing them. You can sell them products like bags or purses or clothes. Or you can even sell services
• 02:30 - 03:00 like I do, such as consulting. I want you to think about this from a basic math formula. At neilpotel.com, we generate over a million visitors a month. We sell products for $30 a month and upwards. So, let's say you can get 1% of that audience to sign up. From a million visitors, that's roughly $10,000 people a month. At $30 a month, that's roughly $300,000 a month in reoccurring income. After $3.5 months, you're already at a million dollar not just in annual revenue, in monthly revenue.
• 03:00 - 03:30 That's the power of getting visitors to your website. That's why my company NP Digital does over 9 figures a year in revenue. But before any of this, you need to actually build a website. And as hard as most people think it is, I have a tried and tested method to build a professional website that literally anybody can do. The first thing that you need to do is choose a niche that you're passionate about. This increases your chance of success. Look, being an entrepreneur is not easy. If you hate what you're doing, you're not going to put in the time and energy to succeed. But if you love what you're doing,
• 03:30 - 04:00 you're going to put in the effort even when you're not seeing results. That's why you need to be truly passionate about whatever you're doing. Now, once you have whatever you're passion about, you want to make sure it's a large market. You can go to Google Trends, type in any keyword related to your market. If it's getting a lot of search volume, kind of like the term marketing, that means you're on to something. And you can compare it to the term marketing. You can also look at other publicly traded companies within your industry to see what their market cap is. The market cap tells you how much that company is worth. The more they're
• 04:00 - 04:30 worth, the bigger the market. Now, to make a website on WordPress, it's actually really easy. You can go to wordpress.org. They have a whole repository of themes that you can just choose from and upload it to your instance. And best of all, if you use a hosting provider like Bluehost, you can click one button after you sign up and it'll install WordPress for you, and you just select a theme, and you're off into the races. You also have to select a domain name, which is the trickiest part. Not because it's hard to decide what domain name you want. It's hard to
• 04:30 - 05:00 actually find a domain name that you want that's also available. That just takes some time by typing in some words and eventually coming up with something that you like. Just make sure your domain name is short, to the point, and is catchy. And of course, use a dot domain. People aren't used to typing.org.ai.io or any of those other extensions. If you want step-by-step instructions on how to set up a WordPress site and blog, just check out this URL. Now that you've created a blog, you need to focus on creating content around whatever vertical you're going after. Make sure that content is
• 05:00 - 05:30 unique, fresh, and it's really in-depth. If you're not sure on the type of content you should be creating, you can go to neilpel.com/ubersuggest. Type in any keyword. It'll show you all the content that's popular around that subject or on the web. You can use this as an example of the type of quality content that you want to create. You just got to make sure that your article talks about something that's fresh that they don't talk about and is better than theirs. Because if it's not fresh or better than theirs, why would people read your article versus theirs? And you may think this is hard, but it actually isn't that
• 05:30 - 06:00 hard. Cuz most people, they write content and they leave it there and it starts getting old after years. After you built a website, you need to ensure it shows up at the top of Google search so visitors can find it. Here's how. To rank at the top of Google, there's three main areas that you need to focus on. The first is content. The second is technical SEO. How clean is a code on your website? And the third is links. The more people linking to you, the higher you're going to rank. So, let's go over the first one, content. We already discussed that you need to create content that's better than the competition and it's talking about stuff
• 06:00 - 06:30 that's new. Because if you're not talking about stuff that's new, you're not going to do well. The second is technical SEO. This is how clean your code is and search engines can understand it so that way they can easily rank you. Because if your code is messy, it makes it hard for them to understand your web pages, which means they're not sure where to rank it for and for what keywords. So, you want to go to ubersuggest.com, put in your URL, and go to the site audit report in the lefthand navigation. This report breaks down all the technical errors that are off on
• 06:30 - 07:00 your website, and it not only shows you what they are, but it prioritizes which ones you need to fix first, second, and third to rank higher. And it even shows you how to fix each and every single error. The third thing you need to focus on is backlink. The more people linking to you, the higher you're going to rank. Links are like votes. So when you have election like the presidential election, in most cases, the candidate with the most votes wins. And the reason I say most cases, in different countries, the rules are different. For example, in the United States, they do it on a state-by-state basis. So if you win in
• 07:00 - 07:30 one state, you get all the votes from that state. And the more websites linking to you are like votes. the more relevant they are, the higher you're going to rank. The higher quality they are, the higher you're going to rank. For example, if I told everyone to vote for a specific candidate, it's not going to do as well as, let's say, Bill Clinton or George Bush or Barack Obama saying that you should vote for someone. Why? Because they're more wellknown in politics than I am. But if I give marketing advice, it carries more weight than Bill Clinton or George Bush. Why?
• 07:30 - 08:00 Because I know more about marketing. So links are very similar. If you're a marketing business and you get other links from other marketing and business sites, that has more weight than, let's say, getting a link from joetheplumber.com. So, you want a lot of links, but relevant links. And you want to make sure that these links are seen. So, when you get a link from a site like CNN or New York Times or Fox News or BBC, the sites get a lot of traffic and there's a good chance that someone's going to click on one of those links. Now, the way you build backlinks is you go to uberys.com, you go to the
• 08:00 - 08:30 backlinks report, and then you go to the backlinks opportunity report. You put in three competitors. This shows you all the people linking to your competitors, but not you. And it shows you the pages they link to your competitor's sites. So this way you can figure out what content they're creating that's helping them generate these links. Best of all, you can produce better content than them. And then hit up those same people linking to your competitors and say, "Hey, I noticed that you're linking to A, B, and C competitor. My content breaks down one, two, and three that theirs doesn't. Check it out. If you like it, feel free and link to it." See, when someone links to not one, not two,
• 08:30 - 09:00 but three of your competitors, it means they're competitor agnostic. They don't care who they link to in the space. They don't have any loyalty to one person. So, if you hit those people up and you have better content, why wouldn't they want to showcase it to their visitors versus something that's not as good? As you do this more and more over time, what you'll find is within 3 months, you'll start getting better rankings on Google. Within six to nine months, you'll start climbing to the top for longtail phrases that aren't as competitive as terms like credit cards, right? Which would take forever to rank
• 09:00 - 09:30 for. And all these visitors add up. And now it gives you a monetization opportunity. After ranking at the top of search, you'll need this if you want millions of consistent visitors to your website. Look, we talked about how you need content to get people to your website. If you don't have content, it's hard to rank. The key though with content isn't just about writing quality content. It's about filling in the gaps. What are your competitors getting traffic for that you're not getting traffic for? This is called content gaps. So, in Uber Suggest, you can actually go to the competitor analysis
• 09:30 - 10:00 report. It'll show you how much search traffic you get versus your competition. The reason you do this after you build links is when you're first starting off, you're not really getting any traffic. So, your competitors are ranking for everything and you're not ranking for anything. But as you're starting to get rankings and traffic, what you want to do is look for the gaps. And this report shows you all the traffic that your competition is getting for keywords that you're not ranking for. You can even see the pages that are ranking on your competitor sites for these keywords. These are the content gaps. You want to
• 10:00 - 10:30 create content related to these topics because you haven't covered these topics on your website yet. And by creating content around them, it'll give you more opportunities to generate more visitors. And the more visitors you have, the more revenue you can make. Again, when creating content like this, make sure your content's better than the competitors. If it's not better, you're not going to rank higher than them. And of course, hit up all the people that link to that article, cuz Uber says shows you that. And reach out to those sites and ask them to link to you. But you can't stop here. If you want tons of
• 10:30 - 11:00 traffic to your website, you also need to promote your content all across social media to maximize your reach and blow up your business. The strategy that I love is when I create content, I love reposting it on platforms like X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to maximize my reach. These platforms have billions of users. So, why wouldn't you want to leverage them to get more visitors to your website? Now, it's not just about posting the content on these platforms. It's about engaging and building a community on these platforms as well. Because the more you participate, the easier it is for you to
• 11:00 - 11:30 build up a audience. And what I like doing is I like first posting on X and using it as a testing ground because it's much easier than most platforms and you can quickly see what's getting engagement, what's not. Then take your winners and then post it on all the other platforms because X will give you feedback on what's working and not. And you can post three, four times on X around the same piece of content to quickly see what resonates with people and then you have the copy to use on the other social platforms. Now with Facebook, LinkedIn and X, it's easier to post the link. With Instagram, you can
• 11:30 - 12:00 actually post a story and tell people to swipe up to go to your website. With Tik Tok, you can drive people to your bio links, right? And you can do the same with Instagram and have people go to your latest blog post cuz people are clicking on these bio links across all social platforms. But if you're not doing this with your website, you're leaving so much money on the table. What I recommend doing is offering lead magnets, which are PDFs, quizzes, and action plans to capture emails and build long-term engagement. If you just look at neilpel.com and you look at our quiz,
• 12:00 - 12:30 anytime you move your mouse cursor to the very end of the browser, it'll pop up and you go through it, you'll see how I offer an action plan and I collect an email in exchange for that action plan. And doing this is really easy with Mailchimp or any other email tool out there. These providers make it really simple to collect emails and they even offer you the design templates that you can put on your website through plugins that allow you to collect emails with a click of a button because WordPress integrates with all the major email providers through a simple plug-in. Look, email subscribers are more
• 12:30 - 13:00 valuable than social media followers. And if you believe that you should focus more on social media followers than email subscribers, check out this chart. It shows you the value of email subscribers versus social media followers. Sure, it's harder to get email subscribers, but they're worth so much more money. Why? Because when you send them an email, there's a good chance that they'll see it. When you post content on social media, the chances are majority of your followers won't see your content. Finally, to monetize your traffic to your website and make your first million dollars, you should do this. One of the easiest ways
• 13:00 - 13:30 that you can monetize your own website is through affiliate marketing. There's a lot of sites out there like Commission Junction or ClickBank that'll show you all the companies that have products in your space and you can promote their products and every time you generate a sale, they'll pay you a commission. The best part is is when you link to these products within your blog articles, you're generating revenue even when you're sleeping because you're constantly getting website traffic. But you shouldn't stop there. You should sell your own products directly or even your own services because there's many ways you can monetize and it doesn't have to be limited to one. At
• 13:30 - 14:00 neilpel.com, we sell tools like Uberess and Answer the Public. We also sell consulting services for SMB businesses through our NP Accelerate division. And at NP Digital, we also help both enterprise and SMB companies grow their traffic. So, as you can see, we're monetizing in many different ways. We have tools, we have services, and we do this in multiple countries and languages. This all helps us make money in many different ways. Because when people are sleeping in the United States, I'm making money in countries
• 14:00 - 14:30 like Japan and Singapore and India where people are awake and can still buy our services and our products. Make sure you have different monetization models focusing on different price points because not everyone has a ton of money. Some people can afford a Ferrari. Some people can only afford a Toyota. There's nothing wrong with either car. Just have options for both. A Toyota may not be as expensive, but you can sell it in quantity. A Ferrari may be expensive, but you can't sell it in quantity. It's still worth having multiple options. Here's the key. When you have traffic,
• 14:30 - 15:00 your goal should be to monetize 1% of your traffic. If you can get a million visitors or even a h 100,000 visitors and you can monetize 1%, it'll add up over time. Whether you're selling something for $30 or $5,000, there's many ways to make money, but you just got to monetize your audience. And the way to monetize is by having multiple options for people. That's how you get your conversion rates not to 1% but to 2% 3% so you can make even more money and ideally come up with something that's reoccurring so you can keep
• 15:00 - 15:30 cashing checks because you're continually giving value to people each and every single month. It's much easier to make money from your existing customers than it is to make money by attracting new customers. And that is exactly how I'd make a million dollars in the next 12 months even if I was starting from zero. Follow this road map, test, iterate, and improve every single day, and you'll be on track to becoming a millionaire in no