The Long Game of Selling Online

How Juggernaut climbed from 0 to 12 million visitors

December 15, 2010. I’ll never forget the day Juggernaut Training Systems first exploded into the ‘triple-digit club’ for daily website visits. We had been working and writing so hard for 18 months to reach this milestone. Looking back on it six years later, we had no idea what we were doing then. But with a thousand articles and 12 million+ visitors since, we did something right.

There’s something exhilarating about living amongst the exhaustion that comes with building a brand from absolutely nothing. My partner at the time, Chad Wesley Smith, had the secret sauce; it was just a matter of time until he put all the pieces together.

Like most 23-year-olds starting their first business, we made more mistakes than anything early on. But we learned quickly — mainly because we were too scared to have to find jobs at some other strength training facility. About one year into our business, Chad did something that changed the trajectory of Juggernaut forever. He created a training program, tested it on our athletes, and wrote an ebook about it.

The book exploded.

Our business made more money in 30 hours off of Chad’s book than we could generate from months of training sessions.

We were on to something. So we continued to write.

We began to build out a long-form article library. Chad preached his proven strength training methodologies, and I shared insights from my nutritional research. With each article, our community grew, and so did our online programming revenue. By March 2011, we had clients across dozens of countries around the world and had articles featured in international publications.

Strength, In Numbers

In July 2011, we realized that the future of the business would not reside within our 6,000-square-foot facility in Orange County, CA. It would reside online. Juggernaut wouldn’t reach the atmospheric 500,000 monthly visitor figures for another couple of years. But during those years between 2011 and now, Chad has made a million great decisions, recruited a stable of brilliant authors, and most importantly, put in endless hours of hard work.

This story is a real-life example of how selling content is a slow but proven process. It can be the most profitable but also the hardest commodity to sell as an eCommerce business. Neither businesses nor expertise are built overnight — they’re forged one paragraph, one minute of video, and one post at a time.

Note: I ended up parting ways with Juggernaut in late 2011 to start a full-service creative agency, SOUTH. Chad and I have remained close friends. We still work daily with Chad as Juggernaut continues to grow their digital presence and platform.