Greg Elfrink

I used to be an oil field roughneck drilling for petroleum in the Arctic Circle of Alaska. For years, I wanted to work online and become a digital marketer. It was one of my biggest dreams. While I never went to college, I did self-teaching buying courses, reading blogs, and inserting myself into communities with real entrepreneurs doing real things. During my last year before Empire Flippers I was also doing freelance writing on the side for various SEO agencies. This led to a huge portfolio of writing samples that I gave to EF when I did apply for their content manager apprenticeship back in 2016.

I had signed up to the Empire Flippers newsletter thinking that this was the company that could make me financially independent. Originally, I assumed that meant the sites I was building at the time I would sell for a good multiple on the marketplace eventually. Of course, life has a way of changing your directions sometimes. When I saw the position open up for the content manager apprentice, I threw my hat into the ring and didn’t expect to get a call. Turns out I was completely wrong and ended up working with Empire Flippers. It’s been an awesome ride because now I get to help grow this brand that helps other people become financially independent or live life in a way that makes them happy. It’s super fulfilling. The thing that makes me love our company so much is that we’re all in it together, and that includes our customers.

I’m responsible for the Marketing department. I handle anything that can grow our brand awareness, generate more leads, or get more appointments for our sales team. I have an amazing team working with me here that helps get that done – from email marketing, design work, paid traffic, content marketing etc.

Outside of Empire Flippers, I moonlight as a poet and a novelist. If you’re friends with me on facebook, you’ve probably already seen that! I’m a huge literature nerd and enjoy writing novels for fun.

I’m a content guy at heart. I would look for a big content site with nice amounts of traffic coming ideally from Google organic and Pinterest organic. These two traffic sources are the most hands off in my opinion, which works well with me. Ideally, I would want a huge content site with top notch quality content that is monetized in just one way – whether that is affiliate or display ads. Also, it would be nice if the site had somewhat poor design. This way I could have a ton of easy wins by doing some conversion rate optimization and leveling up the overall design of the content site. Since it would had a fairly strong domain authority already, I would do a bunch of keyword research around the niche and try to add 100-200 articles to the site in the coming months.

Content sites are pretty hands off when you want them to be, or you can scale them aggressively if you have the time. The other great thing about content sites is that they can serve as a launch pad for almost ANY other monetization out there. Want to start an Amazon FBA business? Buy a content site within that niche, source your product, and point those Amazon affiliate links to the FBA product and you not only get to double dip but to leverage your content site to give you algorithmic spikes in Amazon’s search engine too with all the added sales.

I’m a big fan of Ahrefs, I think Tim Soulo and the team over there are doing a great job with their tool. It is by far my favorite SEO tool. As far as content goes, I try to read people that I know are for fact doing what they teach. People like Matt Diggity, Authority Hacker, Fat Stacks Blog, Scott Voelker, Ecommerce Fuel etc.

Outside of business, I highly recommend the Sam Harris Waking Up podcast and Freakonomics. I binge listen to these all the time and I think they help people just consider reality with a bit more of a critical eye. Freakonomics especially can have some obtuse subject matter, like the ROI of lawn care for instance, that can get the creative juices flowing.

I think college is wasteful for almost 100% of people that pay to go get a degree. People disagree with me on this all the time, but outside of something like a doctor’s, engineer’s or a law degree or something else that truly requires it… I just don’t see the point of paying for it. I have many friends in my writing circles that paid to go to college when they could’ve just spent those years writing their novels, doing workshops etc and saved a ton of money. The way college is promoted nowadays where it’s “expected” is the greatest marketing funnel ever in my opinion in that people think you might actually be a bit crazy if you tell them you’re not going to go buy this product after high school.

(A lot of you are probably shaking your head at me… see… nobody agrees with me on this!)

It’s not really “one” experience as I don’t find as much value from just going to a place and seeing something famous. It is more of the overall feeling of being lost, wandering through worlds not your own, and everyone around you saying things in languages you can’t comprehend. It is humbling to me of just how many realities spread out across our world, and how few I can know because of my limited language ability or cultural upbringing bars me entry to that reality. Though, I got to say, it’s kind of funny to have friends where the only way you can communicate with them is through a Three Stooge’esqe body language conversation.

Cliche answer but I love Tyrion Lannister. Varys is also one of my favorites because Varys is truly loyal to the people that helped him. In the books when he kills Kevan Lannister and Kevan says he thought Varys was loyal, Varys responds back that he has always been loyal to the true heir of the throne and had never once betrayed them – and it was all true. Everything he was doing was just a long game of sowing chaos to make it easier for the Targaryen’s eventual reconquest.

I would probably take John Gaska. He typically has a bunch of gadgets with him and I’m sure one would save us somehow. At least he would have multiple batteries I can charge my phone with to extend the amount of hours I have left to play RISK on my phone.