Financial Blog Sprouts into $35,000/Month Money Tree

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

What's up everyone? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau. Hope you enjoyed our special Halloween episode yesterday about the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers. These guys in Brooklyn, New York are making tens of thousands of dollars each Halloween season from their artisanal pumpkin carvings.

So many opportunities out there these days. Today, we're gonna talk about a financial block and this financial block sprouts into a pretty lucrative money tree. And by way of entries to that story, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that investment advice is irrelevant for a lot of people. Now, I know this is contrarian, but bear with me. If you don't have any money to invest, why do you need to hear about the next hot stock you should buy?

You really don't. And also, if you don't have much money in the first place, the way you're gonna get out of that situation is not by investing in the stock market. That is something you do long-term, perhaps for your retirement, perhaps for your kid's college fund, but if you're not actually making much money right now, that's the problem you need to solve first. And that's a problem that is much more relevant to a lot of people out there. So in today's story, this is also relevant, two friends start an investment blog.

They start this little stock market investing blog and membership site, and it doesn't work very well. Then they ask themselves, they go away and say, "What might be better?" After making a not so subtle shift to focus more on what their generation really needs, they start seeing improved results. How much improved? Well, after earning a grand total of $29 in their first year, not that big of a year, $29, they're now making $35,000 a month. I don't know what the math on that is, but it's like a lot of percent increase.

They do this largely through affiliate commissions and selling guides, and obviously they've been able to correct their initial mistakes, which I always think is interesting because very few projects, like right from the beginning, get everything right. The magic or the value or the special sauce, whatever you wanna call it, that often comes in taking a close look at why you started your project, what the initial results were, what you learned through the process, and how you might actually do it better. So I am always impressed when someone starts something and it doesn't go well, they take another look and they decide to make some changes. So stay tuned. I'm gonna tell you exactly how these guys did it, all about this financial blog that sprouts into a $35,000 a month money tree.

But first, a quick thank you to our sponsor. [Music]

Ben Huber, a registered nurse from Virginia, was worried about money. He began to invest into stocks and poured over everything he could to learn about assets, liquidity, and other investment topics in between shifts at the hospital. He knew he wasn't the only millennial who was concerned about finances. More specifically, one friend, Jeff, felt the same way.

And from these worries, a business idea sprouted. Ben and Jeff took it upon themselves to create Dollar Sprout, a blog that gave them a platform to share their analysis and perspective on the stock market in a more accessible way. They wanted to experiment with monetizing their content, so they first set it up as a membership site that readers could pay a monthly fee to access. This first iteration was not a hit. They found themselves competing with large banks and advisory services with lots of money to spend.

So it wasn't really feasible for them to stand out. They knew they could offer value to their readers, but it would be an uphill battle. Unfortunately, it took them the better part of 12 months to learn that lesson. But when they did, they doubled down on a new blog format that focused more on personal finance. This new iteration of Dollar Sprout had allowed them to reach more people.

Their target audience was still millennials because as they'd learned, a lot of traditional investment advice doesn't apply if you don't have a lot of money. It began churning out content that appealed to that group with posts like 10 Ways to Make Extra Money and 20 Ways to Save Money. Once they did, they soon started seeing consistent monthly traffic. It had been tempting for Ben and Jeff to give up after not seeing results for so many months, but they both knew that success wouldn't happen overnight. It helped that they loved what they were writing about, and they kept a laser focus on their traffic experiments so they could ramp up what was working and quit what wasn't.

And in the long run, the more time they invested in their side hustle, the more it started to pay off. So how did they go from earning a grand total of $29 in their first year to earning $35,000 a month in 2018? Well, first they invested about $200 into web hosting and registering for an LLC, and then they sat back and waited for their bank accounts to grow. Actually, it wasn't quite like that. They made some strategic decisions.

When they first launched Dollar Sprout, they had that subscription-based model, which didn't work, but once they switched models and began to bring in traffic, they started to partner with advertisers that paid them a commission for every purchase or click that came from the Dollar Sprout website. Their other main source of revenue now comes from templates and worksheets that they've created. They have an ultimate finance workbook and a daily expenses tracker. These tools bring in a large percentage of revenue, and since they've already been made, the income is passive. Ben and Jeff only started making money in August of 2016, but by the end of the year, they'd made about $4,000.

Their breakout month happened in January 2017, conveniently a great time for people to think about their finances, and they made $7,000 in revenue that month alone. By the next year, they eclipsed $12,000 in monthly revenue, and in September 2018, they made over $36,000. Ben says that the key to their success, especially since it took them a while, was avoiding shiny object syndrome. They held out for consistency as they put in work to watch their status escalate as their traffic grew. They're now cashing in on that consistency, especially as they've both turned their side hustle into their full-time job, and they're hiring employees to help them keep up with demand.

They've got to keep watering the money tree. [Music]

Okay, a few comments here, and first of all, congrats to Ben and Jeff. Now let's talk about credibility. A guy who needs to make money should not be running a stock market advisory block. That's my first thought, and as mentioned in the introduction, the role of stock market investing really isn't relevant for most people who don't make a lot of money, at least not in the short term, so it makes sense that the switch to focusing on earning slash saving money was much more successful.

There is both a lot more credibility there, and it's also much more relatable. A lot of their target audience of millennials really needs help in earning and saving money, and once they're earning more money, do they need to know where to put it? Well sure, perhaps, but that's almost a secondary need, whereas the primary need is, I need to make more money now. They also moved to a better business model because the membership site for them wasn't working, but once they started partnering with these affiliate offers as well as creating their own products, that's what's allowed them to grow their income, in addition to bringing in lots more traffic because of the good content, the relevant content that they're creating. I also appreciated that their website is nice and clean.

It definitely looks different than a lot of personal finance blogs, which are just crowded with so much advertising and so many different things to do that it becomes overwhelming, whereas the Dollar Sprout website has obvious links and lots of different clear ideas for readers. The text is large by design. It's very browsable and clickable, but without being dumb. If that makes sense. There's clearly some method behind it which respects the reader on the other side of the screen, which I appreciated.

And last but not least, not all affiliate links are created equal. I haven't seen like a breakdown of how much money they make for each affiliate program and so on, but I would be surprised that the income is distributed equally. Normally in these cases, you're gonna make a lot of money from a couple of different programs and a small amount of money from all the others. So over time, you wanna figure out for yourself if you're pursuing this model, then do more of that and do less of everything else. All right, my friends, I hope you enjoyed this.

I hope you're doing something for yourself today. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/670. I'll link up everything I mentioned and I'll be back again tomorrow. Be sure you're subscribed.

Much more is on the way. Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]