College Student Pays Off Loans With “Fitnancial” Blog

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

In today's story, a college sophomore grows her finance and fitness blog into a business that brings in $80,000 a year. This all happens before she graduates. I've mentioned before that if you're going to be a blogger, at least one who makes money, or one who wants to make money, personal finance can be a great topic because there are lots of natural collaborations and affiliate channels. But combining personal finance with something like fitness or wellness makes for a nice twist. In this case, the student you'll hear about focuses on well-being for women.

She says, "I decided I wanted my blog to be more than just a hobby when I was picking up traffic without really trying. I was getting emails from readers saying they wanted to learn more about certain things. They wanted to see my experience with a particular workout or diet program. So if I was making some money and getting some traffic without trying much, I knew I could do great things with my blog if I took it seriously." That prophecy turned out to be true as you will hear. Combining fitness with personal finance reminds me a little bit of the old blog Get Rich Slowly founded by J.T. Roth, a longtime friend of mine.

For a while, he was also trying to maintain Get Fit Slowly using the same principles. I think he decided at the end to focus more on the first one. At the end of the episode, I'll also tell you about one of my favorite long-running personal finance blogs that I don't think I've ever mentioned here. It's surprisingly under the radar considering how much interesting content is posted there each week. I often learn something just by going to take a peek.

So I'll mention that at the end of the episode. For now, here's a message from our sponsor. The story is called "College Student Pays Off Loans With Fit Natural Blog." The year was 2011. The first Thor movie had just come out. Adele's Rolling in the Deep was at the top of the charts.

And Alexis Schroeder had just graduated from high school. As is the case for many students, those four years were rough. But Alexis had to deal with issues far worse than failed tests and friend drama. She lost her father to cancer, struggled with other family issues, and was in an abusive relationship. As time went on, she developed a depression.

She turned to alcohol and cigarettes to cope, but ended up feeling worse than she did before. As a consequence, she ended up gaining a lot of weight. Alexis hit a tipping point when her family's house was being foreclosed on. She needed something in her life to change for the better. So she decided to work with a personal trainer.

With regular exercise and a change in her diet, she felt much better than she ever had. She had the strength, energy, and dedication to be active. She began to kickbox, hike, rollerblade, and go for walks rather than drive. Her friends were amazed at the 180-degree change they saw with her health. They soon began encouraging her to start a blog about her journey.

Alexis thought about it for a while, then launched FitNanchels.com in 2013. She didn't want to just talk about health, she also wanted to talk about managing money. The combination was important. Over the next few years, Alexis casually posted on FitNanchels a couple times a month. She would only spend an hour or two a month working on it, but she enjoyed the process.

It felt like a personal journal, just one that other people could read and draw encouragement from. Soon, however, something else would change. The blog began to pick up a decent amount of traffic, and companies would ask if they could advertise on the sidebar of the site or if she'd be willing to do sponsored posts. As a college student looking to pay the bills, Alexis jumped with the opportunity to make extra cash. At first, she earned a few hundred dollars a month from FitNanchels, which went a long way for someone with a low income.

After gaining some traction, she started talking to other bloggers. She made new friends, both offline and virtually. Through this process, Alexis realized that people really could make a living from blogging. Real life examples were all around her. So in 2017, four years after she first started, Alexis committed to treating her blog like a business.

She wanted it to grow, and she knew that only spending a couple of hours on it a month would not get her to the level she hoped for. So first, she committed to posting two to three times per week. She also began to put her audience at the forefront of her mind, not just writing that personal journal for herself. She wanted to make sure that readers were truly gaining something from her content. So she offered multiple free courses, including one on how to lose weight on a budget.

Next, she set out to study everything she could find, researching ad revenue, affiliate marketing, and getting more traffic from Pinterest and Google. It turns out Alexis's ideas to improve her blog were right on the money. She began to make $1,000 a month, then $3,000, and she even climbed up to making $5,000 a month. After her first year of committing to her blog, she made $35,000 in net income. This was all while she was still attending college.

Then in her second year, between her junior and senior years of college, Alexis made $80,000. This was more money than she ever expected to make in a year in her life. Since then, she's graduated with a degree in psychology and has been able to pay off all of her student loan debt, buy a car, and begin maxing out her retirement accounts. Although the blogging world can be fickle, Alexis has found a few ways that help her to stand out. She makes sure that her media kit and her contact pages are user-friendly.

She also reaches out to advertisers and affiliates first, instead of waiting for them to come to her. Finally, she keeps up to date with the latest technologies. For example, right now she's taking a course on Facebook ads. Her biggest and most important life transformation was for herself, overcoming those major challenges she experienced in adolescence. Another second transformation is helping others make their own positive changes with both fitness and finance.

Congratulations to Alexis. I love a good transformation story, especially if someone overcoming so many challenges going on to do so well for herself and now focused on building her business while also improving the lives of her readers. So fantastic all around. As I mentioned, she chose a good topic, personal finance, and I just mean that in terms of business-wise. It's a lot easier to make money with a blog about personal finance than it is about lots of other topics.

By combining it with fitness and overall well-being, it becomes a more cohesive brand. Her brand is also heavily personality-based. What I mean is, if you go and take a look at her website, which I would encourage you to do, right on the homepage, her message is really clear who she's trying to reach. I read this section that I really liked, it said, "I know what it feels like to be broke and working at a job that makes you unhappy." Five years ago, that was me. I was working a minimum wage job and stressed out beyond belief.

I never had more than $1,000 saved at any given time. But I knew I didn't want to live like that anymore. I was ready to take control and build a better future. That's when I started FitNanchels. So it's like her mission statement right there, not just a mission statement, but it's like a direct message to the right people.

Not everyone's going to get it or identify with it. She's really speaking to a certain subset of people, but that's the whole point. And this combined with the images and overall style on her site, just makes it really clear what she's about. So well done all around. Super cool.

I also wanted to give a shot to that other personal finance resource I mentioned or I alluded to at the top of the episode. It is BudgetsAreSexy.com. This is a guy, Jay Money, who has been blogging, I think, for something like 11 years, every single day, just about sharing his very detailed personal finance journey all about his family. He and his wife have three kids now. They have owned a home and sold it and they rent it.

Now they have purchased a home. He has gone through all these decisions and just documented it in great detail. He's also a very entertaining writer. So go check it out. BudgetsAreSexy.com.

We will link all that stuff up in the show notes. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. News notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1008. I'll be back again tomorrow with a weekly recap and a whole new set of stories all next week. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.