Failed Dropshipper Now Earning $100K/Month

Neil Shap is the co-founder of an agency called Linx Digital…

We specialize in direct-response video ads on Youtube, TikTok, and Meta.

📝 In a recent interview, he reveals…

We are currently doing around 6 figures a month, with about 40-50% profit margin.

Neil studied aerospace engineering in 2016 and learned digital marketing while in college…

When I finished school, the aerospace industry in Canada wasn’t doing too well, so jobs in that field were tough to come by, I decided to give this online world a fair shot.

I started off doing SEO for my own private affiliate sites. It made a little bit of money ($400/month) and I was hooked. Not to say that was a lot of money or anything, but that first success kind of taught me that making money online was possible and wasn’t just a thing that was something theoretical.

He also tried dropshipping and lost $2k doing that 😭

But…

what that process did teach me was how to run facebook ads.

Then…

I had a friend that was looking for someone to help run Facebook ads for one of his clients.

I took the project on and did a decent job… We slowly realized that the ads management service we were providing was valuable to businesses and decided to approach it as a team.

Great example of how just trying things and being willing to fail can lead to eventual success 💪

Neil struggled with affiliate marketing and dropshipping but learned valuable skills from those efforts.

🗣️ To get traction and spread word for the ad agency…

We posted on all of the places that had what we thought had our ideal customers and tried to have genuine conversations with them. We posted in relevant Facebook groups, private Slack channels, conferences and events.

Then once we did a good job, a good portion of new business came from referrals. We also would bid for projects on platforms like Upwork.

Nowadays…

The main marketing channel for us is our organic Youtube channel [20K subscribers]

We use this channel to give tons of information out for completely free.

As a result we have now become the leading authority on Youtube ads and some of the other platforms.

🤑 Monetization…

If a brand wants to work with us, the cost is $5k/m + a percentage of ad spend.

We also have a stand-alone course ($1497) that teaches people how to run their own youtube ads. We recently also launched a tiktok masterclass that teaches people the basic of running tiktok ads.

He adds…

One of the reasons for our success is that we were providing a service that was very new and had very little competition in.

Back in 2018-2019, there were very few people doing Youtube ads and this helped us stand out and get those first few clients.

Hmm.

What’s the equivalent of that for 2024?

I hear about AI and automation non-stop nowadays but that’s all still very new, so likely lots of opportunities there.

Accordingly, here’s the top ten from Upwork’s most recent in-demand skills list 👇

1. Data Analytics
2. Machine Learning
3. Data Visualization
4. Data Extraction
5. Data Engineering
6. Data Processing
7. Data Mining
8. Experimentation & Testing
9. Deep Learning
10. Generative AI Modeling

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