Subscribe Now For A Free Five Step Tutorial
Get a free five-part email course that shows you how to find, validate, and launch your side hustle idea — no experience required.
What It's About
A love of photography brings in passive income for a Canadian man.
Business Model
Affiliate
Skills Required
Research & Analytical Thinking
Complexity
Medium
Profit Potential
Medium
Words of Wisdom
There are plenty of sites with 30+ page reviews dissecting every menu item in each camera, but Itai’s reviews are 3 pages long max and only cover the essential things people want to know: what the camera can do, how easy it is to use, and how well it takes photos. Simplicity brought the readers to the site, and the no-nonsense approach to evaluating cameras kept them coming back. That's some smart differentiation!
Fun Fact
Itai is an enthusiastic photographer, he but rarely uses his own cameras anymore! He always has someone else’s that he’s reviewing, sometimes several with plenty of lenses, so his side hustle has made him more creative.
Notes from Chris
Episode 349
Today’s story comes from Itai Danan in Montreal, Canada. By day, he is a software engineer. His side hustle is Neocamera, a website and blog focused on digital cameras and camera gear. Itai researched digital cameras before a big trip and knew a great deal about the subject. He’d share information with his friends, who’d pass it on to their friends. After several years of that, he decided to put what he knew online and monetize the site using ads and affiliate programs. One of his first steps was to sign up for Adsense, which gives you a few pennies when someone clicks on an ad. The first milestone was to get it to cover hosting and domain costs—but then it grew into a real passive income source, earning, anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $1,000/month. This is all from startup costs of just $17 for a domain and $55 for a year’s worth of web hosting. Neocamera started as just 10 pages but has since grown to a lot more 40,000 pages with millions of visitors. Itai would add pages whenever he tried a new camera or new gear, or read a book on the subject. The site has buying guides, camera reviews, photography articles, search engines to find cameras and lenses, and tools to compare them all.MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Neocamera: Take a picture—it will last longer! And if you don't have a camera handy, here's a link to Itai's website
- Google Adsense: In the beginning, Itai used AdSense—ads targeted to site content and audience—to monetize his blog
- Google AdWords: Google's online advertising platform that places your ad in the 'Sponsored Links' section next to search results to boost website traffic and sales
- Cruise Vacation Turns Into Highly-Profitable Hustle:After searching for answers to questions about his first cruise, a copywriter decides to take matters into his own hands by creating an informative blog
- AdWords All-in-One Guide: Not sure what AdWords really is and what it can accomplish for you? This help page will answer all of your questions and then some!
- Essential Oils Podcast Produces $2,000/Month in Passive Income: A stay-at-home mother starts a podcast about essential oils and pulls her family off government assistance
- Weekend “Book Registry” Site Earns Passive Income from Amazon.com: After a discovering a trend on Pinterest where expecting mothers ask for baby books in lieu of greeting cards at baby showers, a developer in Pennsylvania decides to create a book registry website to cater to it bringing in a new stream of passive income
Quote of the Day
"Making money from the web using ads is very nice because it detaches your time from your income. You must of course put time and effort, but it is no longer the case of putting in an hour of work for an hour of wage. I took a full year sabbatical and, even though, I did not put any work on the website, I still got monthly payments. Now I can tell people that I make money in my sleep!"
—Itai Danan #SideHustleSchool
