What It's About
A resource blog for lovers of a great power ballad!
Business Model
Skills Required
Complexity
Profit Potential
Words of Wisdom
Over time, Bobby learned more about how to make his site rank in Google. One of the most important things in regard to that is to have links from other websites. He contributed to other sites, which allowed him to link back to his own site. This led to higher rankings and more affiliate commissions.
Fun Fact
A Gallup poll conducted all the way back in 1997 determined that there were over 16 million guitar players in the USA. It’s safe to assume that number is much larger now. With so many guitar players around it’s easy to see why GuitarChalk.com can make a lot of money from what is largely a hobby niche.
Notes from Chris
Episode 839
Bobby Kittleberger loves to play guitar. Although every guitarist wants to rock the stage like Slash or The Edge, only a few can live out that fantasy. For Bobby, thrashing out in front of thousands of fans wasn’t part of his life’s plan. Instead, he pursued a career in IT as a systems administrator for a law firm. But, he never let go of his love of guitar... He played often and would geek out over new equipment and tech. On top of that, he taught part-time and sometimes even wrote his own music. One day in 2012, while jamming away at his day job, Bobby felt the urge to start strumming to a different beat. That desire was driven by a friend of his who had been making a little money online. Bobby knew nothing about this brave new world. But what his friend was doing to earn a few dollars was so simple, it seemed anyone could do it. It involved writing movie reviews on a personal blog and referring visitors to Netflix subscriptions—in exchange for a small commission. Like a classic three-chord song, the process appeared easy to replicate to a different market. Instead of movies, Bobby decided to build a website around his favorite hobby… playing guitar! Since he was starting from ground zero, he kept things simple and created a site on Blogger.com. He called it Guitar Chalk, a play on the old chalkboard in a teacher’s classroom. A good guitar teacher will advise students to start slow and build up their skills before tackling the third solo in November Rain. And that’s what Bobby did with Guitar Chalk. His end goal was to build up enough traffic through Google to make affiliate commissions on Amazon.com. But to start, he began writing about the basics of guitar playing. Just like playing the guitar, one has to love the process of learning itself to get to the point of being good. Bobby found a lot of similarities between that and working on the site. He discovered he enjoyed the process of building out the pages of a website. He found himself learning new skills, and not so much caring if the site was successful. Any good music career has ups and downs, and Bobby’s time with Guitar Chalk is no exception. For one, his revenue is anything but steady. Some months he earns a lot, others not so much. Although, when averaged out it does equate to $7,000 per month—a figure Bobby would like to turn the volume up on. His search rankings also fluctuate quite a bit. Old content that used to do well fades out and falls in Google rankings. Bobby’s plan for the future is to refresh some of those old articles in hopes of better performance. No matter, the crescendo to this whole project for Bobby isn’t the money, although that’s great. The process itself has given his life a creative purpose outside of his day job. It’s improved his well-being, and every day he looks forward to putting a little work into Guitar Chalk.MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Guitar Chalk: Fine-tune your mad guitar skills over on Bobby's website!
SEE ALSO:
- NYC Jazz Musician Builds $40,000/Year Blog: A musician finds financial freedom by growing a blog and starting an e-course teaching other people how to play jazz
- Musician Turns Drum Lessons Into Six-Figure Podcast: It starts with a drum set that his brother’s band left at his house for a month when he was a teenager—and it develops into a lifelong love of percussion and a major moneymaker
- Lawyer Earns $400/Month With Stock Music Side Hustle: An online music marketplace offers a young lawyer an opportunity to fulfill his dreams of having his music heard, and also provides him with a new source of passive income
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