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There are (more or less) two ways to grow/build/scale an online business.

The first way is organic, meaning you build an online brand via social media, videos, podcasts, articles, blogs, newsletters, and/or other pieces of free content. Over time, you build an audience who likes and trusts you, and then sell them stuff that can solve their problems.

The second way is via cold outreach, meaning you pay money to get customers immediately, via things like running ads, paying a sales team to do a bunch of cold calls and/or cold DMs, paying a tech team to send out cold emails, and/or various other ways.

Organic and cold outreach both work, and both work well (provided you do them correctly). You can build an online business organically, or build it via cold outreach, or you can do both.

That being said, each option has huge advantages and disadvantages, so it’s important to understand these so you can make a proper decision.

At the end of this article, I’ll give you my opinion as to the “best” way to do this.

Organic Advantages

1.It’s super cheap, almost free.

You don’t have to spend any money (or hardly any). You just film yourself with your iPhone, or record yourself for a podcast with a microphone you get on Amazon, or just write articles or blogs and upload them.

Cold outreach costs a shitload of money but with organic, you can build six-figure business on nothing but content.

I did this. I built my dating brand for men to a six-figure annual income before I ever spent one penny on any advertising.

2. It’s extremely high profit / high margin.

Since you don’t have to run ads, manage a sales team, and you (often) don’t have to pay commissions to any salespeople, the profitability of organic online businesses is insane. The vast majority of whatever you sell goes right into your pocket (as either gross profit or real profit).

A profitable organic business makes you feel very rich.

3. It’s fun for certain personality types, especially if you’re passionate about your topic.

Certain types of people LOVE creating content. They love doing videos on their topic, or podcasts on their topic, or writing about their topic, and they’d almost do it for free.

I’m one of these people when it comes to writing.  I could honestly write books every day on my business, international, or dating topics for the rest of my life and I’d be as happy as could be. Other people love doing videos (I do not, but I don’t mind it) and/or doing podcasts.

If you like creating content about your thing, organic is a good move.

That being said, other people HATE creating content and want nothing to do with it; I know lots of these people. So you need to know which category you’re in.

Organic Disadvantages

1. It takes a long time to get to real money.

While there are occasionally exceptions to this, building a business that generates reliable, real income every month on nothing but 100% organic traffic takes quite a while. You will have to spend months and perhaps even years of your life creating content that you put your heart and soul into, then watch with sadness as your video, podcast, or blog only gets 25 views.

I’ve said that if you want to build a 100% organic content business you’re going to have to crank content for at least 18 months straight before you expect any regular, reliable income. You’ll make some money sooner than this, but it won’t be anything you can rely on every month.

This was certainly the case for me back in 2009 when I started my first blog. Wrote 3 blog articles per week, every week, for a year and a half before I got any reliable, consistent income.

From there, the income really took off, so it was worth it, but the reality is that most normal humans don’t have the willpower, emotional control, or outcome independence to spend hours a week cranking content for a year and a half while getting near-zero payment for it.

Again, I will admit there rare some odd exceptions to this rule, where some nobody starts a YouTube channel or something and instantly skyrockets to 100,000 followers in just a few months because the algorithm happens to love their content or because an unexpected news event happens to give them a bunch of SEO juice they weren’t expecting, but I’ve found these situations to be the exception rather than the rule.

Speaking of the algorithm…

2. In most cases, you are an absolute slave to the whims of left-wing rulers of social media sites and social media algorithms, none of which is in your control.

If you make a brand on Instagram and suddenly start to kill it, that’s great, until Instagram changes the algorithm and your traffic drops by 80% in one week.

Or you’re kicking ass on YouTube and suddenly YouTube makes a change in their ad policy and you lose 95% of your ad revenue in one month.

Or you spend years of your life building a up blog on WordPress, Blogspot, Typepad, Medium, or Substack, make it into something amazing that makes real money for you, and then one day the owners of that platform decide you’re not politically correct anymore and delete your entire blog and ban you from the platform with no explanation.

And on and on… I’ve seen all of these things happen to numerous people over the years and I will continue to see it as the West continues to collapse.

If you’re an organic-based business, you have to be careful, almost to the point of ridiculousness, to ensure that A) no one platform can shut down your business and B) that you can make money no matter what changes to the algorithm any social media platform makes.

This is a huge pain in the ass to manage, trust me.

3. Once you’re at higher income levels, the income is often very inconsistent.

If you only want to make $85K or $100K per year, then this isn’t a problem. But if you want to make big money, organic income (usually) becomes a problem because you can’t rely on the same amount of income every month. Some months you’ll make $250,000 in profit and other months you’ll make next to nothing and can’t pay your bills.

It’s murder on cash flow and requires very sophisticated financial planning that most business owners aren’t capable of.

Again, there are exceptions to this and not all organic companies have this problem, but most do, including very internet-famous people I could name who have millions of followers.

Cold Outreach Advantages

1. Once you figure out your funnels, the money is consistent and very much in your control.

Once you find a cold outreach funnel or system that works for you (which takes time, money, and effort, which we’ll get to in a minute), the money you make is very consistent, month in and month out (unlike organic)

Also, 90-100% of your income is under your control no matter what social media platforms do or don’t do.

This is huge. Guys with cold outreach companies don’t give a shit about algorithms, content, or getting banned (with some exceptions). They just keep running their ads and/or keep paying their outbound sales teams and keep making that cash every month.

2. It’s much more easily scalable.

How do you scale your YouTube channel from 50K followers to 100K followers in four months or less, guaranteed, without spending any money on ads?

Well, you can’t. You just do the best you can and cross your fingers. You might double your followers in four months, but you probably won’t no matter how good you are.

How do you scale your cold outreach ad revenue from $50K per month to $100K per month?

Easy. Double or triple your monthly ad spend. Boom, done, more money in your pocket, just like that.

It’s true that your revenue increase isn’t a one-to-one relationship when you scale your ad spend (you get diminishing returns), but the numbers do scale, and scale instantly, very unlike organic.

3. You don’t ever need to create content if you don’t want to.

For those personality types who hate creating content, this is a huge win.

My business buddies who have profitable cold outreach companies never need to take any time in their week to make any videos, podcasts, or write any blog posts, unlike me. And they love that. They just manage funnels, spreadsheets, and A/B test stuff.

Cold Outreach Disadvantages

1. It costs a lot of fucking money… and money you might not ever get back.

Very unlike organic, cold outreach requires huge cash outlays every month and is very infrastructure-heavy. This makes it difficult for people with zero cash to start or even scale.

Worse, many times you’re shelling out huge (to you) amounts of cash with no guaranteed return. Your ads or funnel might suck and you may lose it all, meaning you have to change a bunch of things, then spend another several thousand dollars hoping that this time it will work.

This shit can be very painful, especially when you don’t have a lot of money to spend or you’re going into debt to do it.

2. It requires a lot of painful, difficult, irritating, up-front work.

Building funnels, landing pages, opt-in back-end systems, ads, sales systems, CRM systems, sales SOPs, automations, Zapier connections, payment tracking systems, commission tracking systems, dashboards, and all of this other crap takes a lot of damn work, and most of it isn’t very fun.

I’m in the middle of creating four new funnels myself and I’ve been blowing my brains out on this stuff for weeks on end.

And remember, while you’re working on all of these things, you aren’t getting paid. You only get paid after you launch them AND they work. Which they might not.

It’s true that the organic guy is also not getting paid while he starts his business, but at least he’s enjoying himself, having fun, talking about stuff he loves, and getting positive feedback and interaction from what little audience has.

None of that is true while you’re building cold outreach systems. It’s a huge, irritating, difficult slog which has virtually zero creative outlet value.

And it costs money. Sometimes a lot of money.

3. It’s lower margin/profit.

Unlike organic, with cold outreach you have to pay for media buyers, ads, appointment setters, salespeople, marketing people, social media managers, and numerous sales systems that require technical people to manage, which you’ll also pay for.

This means you need to sell much more of your stuff to make the equivalent profit than you would with organic (which hardly requires any of this infrastructure).

So Which Is The Best Model?

If you love creating content, are passionate about your topic, and don’t have a lot of money, go organic. Just realize you’ll have to be very patient.

If you hate creating content and/or aren’t super passionate about your topic and have some money to spend, go cold outreach. Just realize you’re going to be working very hard for a few months and spend a hunk of money you may lose.

The ideal scenario is what we teach in the 90 Day Business Builder. Start with marketing to your network first, doing as much outreach as you can yourself without having to pay anyone, while building content in the background to at least get that started.

The outreach will get you clients now, the content will get you clients later.

If you want to make the big money, then you need to do what I’ve done, which is to do both. Build a brand around your niche that you can rely upon for the long term (not when you get started, but later for the long term) while also having 1-3 cold outreach funnels that bring in reliable income every month regardless of what your brand does.

Having a great online brand makes your funnels much more effective and profitable, and having your funnels builds your brand because you’re adding more people into your ecosystem constantly, so having both really compliments each other.

To repeat though, if you only want to make around $100,000 a year or so, you don’t need both, and one or the other will get that done, as long as you really focus on the option you choose.

 

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