What It's About
A family builds a home for themselves on the road.
Business Model
Skills Required
Complexity
Profit Potential
Words of Wisdom
Building sites was a great learning tool for Sharon as she was able to take a more business-minded approach with them. Most importantly, she began to understand how to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) combined with affiliate marketing. When she applied what she had learned through the niche sites to her travel blog, things really started to pick up.
It was then that Sharon learned a valuable lesson: it’s far better to concentrate on ONE of them and get that working great than to be everywhere. Sharon’s one thing is SEO. In her view, it’s essentially market research. You have to understand what people want and need and then use SEO to give it to them.
Fun Fact
Sharon just completed a survey amongst bloggers. She found that 32% of bloggers who have been blogging for less than 6 months are making at least $200 a month, but 66% have made nothing. According to Sharon, that 66% were probably focusing on the WRONG things.
One respondent making $20,000 a month has been blogging for less than a year. The average amount of time, however, that bloggers making $20,000 a month have been blogging is 3.45 years.
Notes from Chris
Episode 903
How much money can someone really make blogging? Would you believe a monthly profit of up to $50,000 was possible? For today’s side hustler, Sharon Gourlay of Australia, that figure is real. Granted, $50,000 was Sharon’s best month, and it came from growing a multitude of blogs over several years. But as we dive into Sharon’s story, you’ll get a sense of what’s possible with a blogging business if you focus on the right things. In 2013, Sharon was a part-time graduate teacher and full-time mother to a one and three-year-old. She was stressed, way too busy, and watching every cent her family spent. She wanted something better for her life. Tired of being so tried, Sharon decided an online business was the answer to many of these problems. She had been reading family travel blogs at the time and noticed that some of them seemed to be working well. If they could do it, she thought, so could she. So she embarked on a quest to monetize her blog, WheresSharon.com. She had started the blog 8 years earlier while traveling on a break from work, but by her own admission, it was poorly written. It had been more of an online journal, and page views had dwindled to zero. So she got busy researching what to do with it. Startup costs were minimal—about $60 to cover her website hosting and domain name. She worked on the site with every spare moment in her hectic schedule. At this time, Sharon also started Digital Nomad Wannabe to track her journey from “having no idea” to building a successful online business. By mid-year, Sharon convinced her husband that the family should become digital nomads, and they left Australia on December 31, 2014. The two blogs and her husband’s online product were bringing in roughly $1,000 per month. About 18 months after getting serious with her websites, Sharon gave birth to her third child. By then, their online income was enough to support a higher cost of living, and they were able to move back home. She took advantage of Australia’s paid maternity leave, but even while taking that four months off from blogging work, her income kept growing. At that time, Sharon was making $8,000-$15,000/month from affiliate links on her travel site alone. Meanwhile, expenses for the website were less than $100 per month. As mentioned earlier, Sharon’s best month was $50,000 in profit. This was when she had started selling a course on DigitalNomadWannabe.com. Then, toward the end of 2017, Sharon actually sold her travel blog as well as a couple of the smaller sites she had started in 2014. Thanks to SEO and affiliate marketing, the sites were generating passive income, which is exactly what buyers want. Even though her travel blog may seem like a personal project, she was able to sell it for more than three times her annual profits. With the proceeds from the website sales, Sharon’s family bought a house in Melbourne in 2018. She says: “It gives me immense pride that I have been able to build this business out of nothing. I love that we now get to live a life structured how and where we want and not held back by money or traditional jobs. Both my husband and I are at home full-time with the kids. We travel when we want, and the kids go to the school we want.” Sharon continues to launch new sites. Her latest is called Dive Into Malaysia. Although still relatively small for now, she can see it becoming her biggest project yet.MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Digital Nomad Wannabe: Take a trip over to Sharon's website to learn more about her tips for living a digital nomad life
- WheresSharon.com & Dive Into Malaysia: Learn more about the other two websites that Sharon runs, here!
- WordPress: Sharon used WordPress to set up her blog, and here you can learn how to install your own WordPress site in 5 minutes
- The Sisterhood of the Traveling Digital Nomads: A German chemist goes nomadic and builds a community for women who work remotely
- Management Consultant Creates Astute Traveling Videos: Travel videos on YouTube seemed like a crowded market, but this rewards-loving consultant finds a way to stand out
- Bucket List Becomes Swashbuckling Adventure Tour Company: A small-town Oregonian grows a travel blog into a multiple six-figure business
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