This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings and welcome. This is Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Now last week, I told you the story of Candy Japan. That was a really fun subscription service where this guy in Japan went around and collected all kinds of new Japanese candy and then shipped it twice a month to people in the US and elsewhere.
Now, as I said, fun story, and it was definitely profitable, but there's also a lot involved in setting up that kind of service. You have to procure all the product. You have to somehow get to that sustainable foundation of subscribers to make it worth it. And then in the case of Candy Japan, they also had to deal with shipping hundreds of boxes each month internationally. So don't get me wrong, it's an awesome story.
It's a big success. But in today's story, you'll hear about a different subscription service. This one is less profitable than Candy Japan, but it's also a lot easier to set up. And by the way, in this story, you're gonna hear about a specific tool that I haven't talked about before. This tool is free and can be very helpful in figuring out how to advance and market your idea.
So at the end of the story, I'll cycle back and tell you a bit more about it. [Music]
Today's story comes from Remy Silva of Sunday Meal Prepper. By day, he's an SEO specialist for an auto dealership group in Los Angeles. His side hustle is a subscription-based website that sells meal prep recipes. Remy has always been health conscious.
He noticed that meal prep was getting more popular on Instagram. He then did some research with a free tool called Keyword Planner. And he found that the phrase meal prep had been exponentially growing year after year, but yet nobody had monetized it with good content. There weren't a lot of websites trying to rank for that term. And in fact, he felt that the phrase meal prep for weight loss had a tremendous opportunity to become a side hustle.
There are a lot of people who want to make their meals once a week, doing all the cooking upfront. And in fact, Remy had this problem himself. He hated not knowing what he was gonna eat for lunch at work, so he decided to help himself and other people who want to save money and make healthy lunch choices. The goal was to start a website around the concept of meal prep. Remy was new to building websites.
He felt overwhelmed at first. He researched Wix, Squarespace, other options. He ultimately went with WordPress because he liked how customizable it was. And it also forced him to learn skills like HTML and JavaScript. Now you don't have to learn those skills, but in Remy's case, he wanted to minimize his startup costs as much as possible.
And he also wanted to learn to code in the process so that he would have skills to walk away from even if this particular hustle didn't work. Before he switched day jobs to the auto dealership, Remy had been working as a business process analyst. So he had some experience developing and documenting processes. He created a free recipe kit to entice people to sign up. And then he wrote an email responder series segmented by what people click on and sending them relevant content.
In other words, if someone wanted to know something specifically about paleo meals, for example, when they express that interest, they would receive information about that. But if you weren't interested in paleo, then you wouldn't get that information. He also set the site up as an automated subscription-based service. So once people purchase, their recipe kits are automatically sent to them digitally once a week via email, or they can just log into their account and download it directly. Remy worked with his partner on the recipes.
She created them, and then he would cook them and make slight changes like adjusting the seasoning or adding more vegetables. To promote the site, Remy wrote a series of blog posts. And at first, this didn't go so well. He had focused on terms that people weren't already searching for, so therefore he didn't get much traffic. For example, he wrote one post about meal prep tips, but no one was really searching for that.
So he went back to that keyword planner tool, and he saw that a lot more people were searching meal prep ideas for weight loss. He also noticed that people were searching for meal prep ideas in general, or meal prep recipes, but not meal prep tips. So he changed the focus of his blog posts and making that shift helped him gain more traction, got him to rank high on a lot of keywords. And during this time, he tried Google AdWords as well, the paid advertising program, but the cost per lead was not profitable, so he decided to focus on organic growth, writing those posts, trying to rank in the search engines. Remy has also tweaked his website as he's gone along.
So for example, once he explained how exactly the prep kit works, the conversion rate jumped dramatically. He thought he had been pretty clear, but he realized people still had questions. So he had much better performance once he explained it all in detail. In the past month, Remy's website has had 11,000 new visitors coming 100% from organic traffic, meaning people who are just searching on Google, there's no cost to those visitors. And they're also signing up.
Sunday meal prepper gets around 20 to 25 new email subscribers a day, and the goal is to convert at least 10% of them to a paid subscription plan. The site is less than a year old, and after making his first $5 sale, Remy walked down to his local Dunkin' Donuts to celebrate with a cup of coffee and a donut, which basically cost him the entire profit of that sale. Fortunately, once he figured out the right keywords to focus on, business grew quickly. He now makes around $1,000 each month through this recurring revenue model, where as long as he keeps those people happy, they're gonna keep paying month after month. And he can focus all of his efforts on going out to get new customers.
And hopefully increasing that number as he goes forward, even without paying for advertising, which is of course a fantastic success. [Music]
All right, so congratulations, Remy. Now let's talk about that tool I mentioned, the one that he used to figure out what the best keywords were. This tool is called Keyword Planner. It's free from Google.
You can find it at something like adwords.google.com/keywordplanner. But if you forget that, just type in Keyword Planner. It'll be the first result. I'll link it up in the show notes as well, of course. So this tool is very helpful because it can show you what people are searching for.
And as you can see in Remy's story, you don't always know what people are searching for. Sometimes the idea that you have is not necessarily the same one that everybody else has. So you think that meal prep tips is a great phrase, but everybody else is searching for meal prep recipes. So with that knowledge, then you can go back and focus and hopefully reach a lot more people. You can also see how competitive each term is, which is also really good, because what you're looking for is a phrase, maybe even a single word, if it's a new word, that does have a lot of people searching for it, but doesn't have a lot of competition.
And that's kind of the sweet spot. And this tool, as I said, will show you exactly what it is. So if you already have a side hustle, or if you have a topic in mind, something you're thinking about working on, it's great to go and kind of play around with this tool. Just type in what you think the main search phrase is, see what else comes up. It might lead you to think completely differently about your idea.
Or if not, maybe it'll just confirm that you're on the right track. I just checked it out myself. I typed in the phrase side hustle, and this is interesting. It also shows you how many people are searching for that phrase over time. So in this case, I could see that side hustle has had this tremendous increase over the past year, I think more than 900%, which I'm not surprised about at all, but it's really interesting to see it in the data.
And then I could also see what other people are searching for. So there was a whole list of phrases like how to make money online. There was also a list of phrases like side income, second income, and so on. So that's your assignment. I know you may be listening to this on your commute or somewhere else, but whenever you get a chance, come and check out that keyword planner tool and see what you learn.
You can learn more about that on the show notes for today's episode right at sidehustleschool.com/109, 109. And if you'd like to leave a comment or question for the show, give me a call on the new Hustle hotline. It's 8449 Hustle. That's 844-948-7853. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.
Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
