This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hello, what's up, and welcome back. You're listening to Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau. Really fun and interesting story for you today. It's all about how a digital marketer created something for himself and then decided to try selling it to other people.
He now makes more than $3,000 a month from this project. When I first started writing my blog way back in the dark ages of 2008, one of the strategies I used to reach new audiences was guest posting. That's where I'd work with other bloggers to craft an original article or post for their site. When guest posting is done properly, the article is not super promotional. It's providing real value for the readers of that blog. It's also exposing your blog to those readers. It really
is good for everyone involved, at least when it works well. I've gotten away from doing that for several years now for a few different reasons. Mostly, I've just been busy doing lots of other stuff, but I'm not totally surprised that all these years later, it can still be an effective strategy for reaching new people with a relevant message. Today's story is about how someone streamlined that process and then ended up turning it into a $3,000 a month additional source of income. I'll tell you about that in just a moment.
Serial hustler Adam White had several projects competing for his attention. There was his day job as director of digital marketing for a charter bus company. There was the film he was making at night and the young adult novel he tried to make progress on each morning before work. Well, by now you know how it goes. Busy people are good at side hustles because they know how to make their time count.
As part of his job, Adam spent a lot of time doing promotion through guest posts on business blogs. There are a lot of different blogs out there and he had a hard time keeping up with them. Some accepted guest posts and others didn't. The ones that did usually had certain requirements that had to be followed, which weren't always consistent. Then, after submitting a post, Adam had to remember to follow up if he didn't hear back within a reasonable period of time. Adam was a systems person, so he started to compile detailed notes on
all the blogs that accepted posts as well as a system to track his submissions. Before he knew it, he had hundreds of blogs covering lots of different categories. Thus was born the hustle idea. Why not offer his guest post tracker to other writers with the same problem? After putting together a simple sales page, he asked a friend to write about it in an online business forum. Right away, more than 10 people signed up paying a $49 fee. Before
the end of the week, another 10 payments had come through. Adam officially had a new project. The interesting thing about this hustle is that it essentially promotes itself. To market it, Adam writes guest posts about writing guest posts, which is kind of matrix-like, of course. Each one typically brings in another batch of customers right away, just like he saw with the first one, as well as an ongoing stream of customers who find the post over time.
Now, 90 days in, guest post tracker was bringing in more than $1,000 a month, which was awesome. But as I said, Adam is a systems guy. He's smart. By systematizing the process and repeatedly testing, he got it up to $2,000 a month. Six weeks after we first talked, he wrote me again to say this kind of process work had helped even more, and the site was now up to $3,000 a month. In fact, his biggest challenge is time. With the day job, the film he's making,
the novel he's writing, the guest post hustle takes a backseat to each of those commitments. But still, as you know, it's a side hustle. He can work on it when he's able, and money often arrives, even when he's not doing much for it. So the idea for this hustle is really smart, very creative. But let's focus on how he went from $1,000 a month to $3,000 a month, because that's the kind of lesson that can apply to a lot of different hustles. This idea is already taken. But once you have something that's working
a little bit and do some basic A/B testing, it's really not unusual at all to double that initial figure and then triple it like Adam saw. And A/B testing, I use that phrase, that's almost entirely what Adam did to figure out what worked best in terms of presenting this information, pitching the offer, the price point, all that kind of stuff. And the way A/B testing works is you have two versions of something. So you have two versions of an offer page, two different prices, maybe different images. It could be any kind of variable. And then over time, as people come
to the site, you show some of the people one version, and you show some of the people the other version, and you track their response and see which conversion is higher. So for example, you might have two headlines. Headline number one, headline number two, and half the people who come to the site see headline number one, half see headline number two, and you see which percentage of visitors click through and then make a purchase. And if it's significantly different for one headline, you know that headline is better. So at that point, you might turn off the test and just stick with that headline for everyone. Or you
might come up with a third headline to then test that one against the winner of the first test. Now, that's just one example, you can do this with lots and lots of different variables, as I said, in some cases, you may see that actually increasing the price of your product and changing nothing else at all, will actually increase conversion, which is pretty amazing, because then you're selling something to more people, and you're charging them more money for it. Now, in other cases, you may raise the price, and the conversion rate may drop a little bit. But depending on how much you raise the price, you may actually be making more money from it. So there are many, many different experiments you can do simply by comparing two different sets of data, and seeing how people respond. One core principle
of this kind of testing is that the data doesn't lie. And you may think that you know what's best. And you may look at two headlines and say like, well, I know this market, I know what people would respond to, because I know what I would respond to. And then you test it, you could very well be completely wrong, which is the beauty of this kind of testing, because it shows you things you wouldn't see otherwise, which of course, allows you to make more money. A lot of our listeners are using Shopify to build their websites, they make it very easy to do this. They have some built in features and also some add on features,
add on services, you can get to help with it. If you already have some other platform, they may do that as well. And in fact, if you go to the show notes, I will include several links about how to do this kind of A/B testing, so that you too can hopefully see the kind of results that Adam has. So congratulations, once again, Adam, great idea, really fun. And I love how you were able to go from that initial success all the way from $1,000 a month to $3,000 a month. I look forward to checking back when it's $6,000 a month. And I also
hope you're able to finish that young adult novel. Cytosoul School listeners, it may not happen exactly like that for you, but you really can A/B test your way to the bank. Remember, inspiration is good. Inspiration combined with action is so much better. If you want to check out the show notes for today's episode, as I said, I'm going to include several links about A/B testing. We'll talk about it some
more in future episodes. But if you want to get a head start and go and geek out on it, it's very easy to learn the basics. If you want to check out the show notes for today's episode, just go to sidehustleschool.com. As I promised, I'm going to include some information on A/B testing there. We'll continue to talk about it in future episodes. Be sure you're
subscribed in iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Cytosoul School, and I'll be back tomorrow with another story.
