How to Make a Million Dollars with Marijuana Websites

How to Make a Million Dollars with Marijuana Websites

How to Make a Million Dollars with Cannabis Websites from CannabisNet on Vimeo.

Sure, you could go out and grow a bunch of weed and sell it to make a million dollars, however, what if I told you there was a different way you can make bank with cannabis without ever touching the plant?

Did I peak your interest?

Understanding the cannabis industry to create opportunity

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the cannabis industry is here to stay. While there still are laws on the book that stifle progress, the industry itself has grown to such a size that to get rid of it would be too difficult to execute. There are now a lot of communities, states and even countries that depend on the revenue generated by the cannabis industry to simply return to the “old ways” of doing things.

However, despite the exponential growth of the industry, the market is being treated very differently than other industries. While you can no longer advertise tobacco products, their POS [Point of Sale] are still very prevalent within the global marketplace. You can walk into a pharmacy and buy a pack of smokes.

However, cannabis doesn’t have this luxury. The sale of the product is restricted to one licensed location that usually requires very special parameters to even exist (restrictions on locations, community backlash, regulatory hawks, etc.).

This means that in order for a cannabis business to be successful, they rely on alternative methods to drive in traffic to their restricted locations. The question is, what are they doing to make this happen?

How Cannabis Businesses ‘Get the Word Out’

Currently, marijuana based businesses depend heavily on the digital advertising sphere to generate interest and/or traffic to their establishments. Considering that there are even limitations on the means of advertising within the online environment, such as not really being able to effectively utilized Social Media Advertisement tools, they are forced to rely on pre-established platforms for advertisement.

I have worked with a major cannabis business that generate millions of views per month, however, their Facebook ads account was banned because of their “relation” to cannabis; despite the fact that they don’t directly deal with cannabis itself.

Now, what I mean by pre-established platforms are websites or individual social media accounts that have a large following within their network. By tapping into these pre-established platforms, the cannabis businesses can generate traffic to their own sites without facing the risks of getting banned.

Some businesses go a step further and buy out these platforms in order to leverage the traffic and interest and quickly build up their digital presence.

This…is where the opportunity lies.

Making a Million with Marijuana

High Times is probably one of the most known cannabis publications out there. It’s been around for decades. They are buying out Green Rush Daily for $500,000 in cash and $6.4 million in stock. Green Rush Daily has been operating for 3 years and generates roughly 9.4 million page views a month.

High Times itself is being currently acquired for $250 million by Origo Acquisition Corp, a company that focuses on worth-while acquisitions that can be flipped for profit at a later stage.

These kinds of deals are occurring all over the digital sphere.

Therefore, those skilled with the art of “growth hacking” can generate a unique opportunity to flip websites or social media accounts to established businesses within the cannabis industry. Of course, this is easier said than done, however understanding the notion of where the cannabis industry is heading…this is definitely something that has the potential to generate millions for those savvy enough.

If you’re not thinking of “selling”, you can make your money through advertising. Shout-Out Marketing is a very lucrative industry that pays more over time. Let’s say you have a cannabis-related Instagram account with 100,000 people following it…you can easily reach out to cannabis businesses and offer them the opportunity to advertise through you.

For a 100,000 followers, you could easily get $100-$250 per shout-out post [depending on how active your followers are].

Websites that generate 1 million monthly views can charge anywhere between $500 and $5000 in advertisement. This goes for people who have large ‘ethically generated email subscribers’ as well. By “ethical” we refer to people who have ‘double-opted in’ your list.

This means that your emails will always reach their inbox and you won’t get flagged for spam. This is a gold mine for cannabis businesses.

Start a Cannabis Website Today

There is a lot of money to be made if you know how to grow a website over time. I managed to grow one of my client’s social media accounts to 600k followers with less than $6,000 USD. It took me roughly 6 months to achieve this and currently my client continues to generate between 1,000-3,000 new followers a week because of my efforts.

If I would have created the account on my own dime and owned it, I would have been able to sell it off for two or three times the amount invested. Granted, this is a social media account. If I had 600k subscribers on a website, I could easily sell it for $50k-$100k without a problem.

Yes, building a website is expensive and time consuming, but if you know how to flip them correctly, you can easily make a million without ever touching the plant yourself.

(For another reference on how valuable web traffic will be in the cannabis space, please check out our article "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Oaktree, click here.)

How to Make a Million Dollars with Cannabis Websites from CannabisNet on Vimeo.