Military Mom Makes Moola Managing Media

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

[Music]

What's up, hello and welcome to Sodacil School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. So glad you're here. It is the end of March, at least for those listening in real time, the final week of March, episode 1177. Of course, if you're listening later, that's totally cool because we do our best to keep everything in the Sodacil School archives as relevant as possible for the longterm, at least probably 80%, I would say.

All right, so today, case study format, got a story for you. Also, if you're wondering where you can find time to work on your hustle, which is what we're talking about in this week's classroom episode, well, you might wanna pay attention to the military mom in today's story. When she looks for a way to make some extra money after yet another move for her husband's job, she stumbles into a virtual role that provides assistance to both her clients and her family. She goes on to improve, evolve and grow this business. Military mom makes moolah managing media.

That story is coming right up. [Music]

It was 10 years ago when Emily Ragan gave up a dream job to move across the country with her husband. It wasn't the first time either. Her partner was in the military and moving was just part of the lifestyle. There were some perks to packing up and moving so often.

For one, it meant that Emily was able to get a lot of different experience. She'd worked in journalism, news and social media and a whole host of cities and environments. But with this latest move, things were a little different. For the first time, she and her husband had a baby in tow. So instead of finding outside work, she became a stay-at-home mom.

This was challenging. Life on a single income didn't leave much money for luxuries. While Emily knew her role was important, she was still hoping to contribute financially. And soon she had an opportunity to do just that. A referral from a colleague led to a small job on the site.

The task was quite simple, to help a small business with their Facebook presence, posting once in a while and occasionally reaching out to media outlets whenever they had something to talk about. Both tasks were things Emily had done in the past and she knew she could accomplish them with her eyes closed. The client agreed and Emily received a retainer with a monthly fee of $75. It was a small amount of money, but it meant a lot to her. The money could go towards a date night for Emily and her husband or a guilt-free trip to the salon.

But above all, it gave her a new sense of worth. After working with this client for a while, Emily was presented with a new opportunity. A friend gave her the heads up about a Facebook post she saw. A business owner in that friend's network was looking for help putting together a media kit. Unlike her first gig, this job wasn't something Emily was familiar with and hadn't done before.

But she was a good writer, she knew the basics of PR and above all, she had a willingness to learn. She hopped online and studied everything there was to know about the process. In the end, she delivered, big time. The client was so happy with Emily's work that they kept calling on her services over the next year. Soon, she had built a reputation as the person who could get any administrative task done.

During this time, Emily had given birth to another child and the family was growing. They also moved a couple more times for her husband's military placements. All through that process, she kept her clients. The reason was that all of her work was done online. Without knowing it, she turned herself into a virtual assistant, a one-stop remote admin shop for business owners across the country.

And she was happy. She only had a few clients, but they were reliable and provided a nice side income for her growing family. So for the next five years, she kept earning a few hundred dollars a month. It was then that she saw the potential in the online space, specifically the blogging world and Pinterest. She'd seen others producing online content, crafting sales funnels and marketing themselves.

Now Emily switched into full on business mode. First, she picked up more client work to boost her side income into the four figures. Then she saw the potential of teaching others how to do the same thing. She knew plenty of other military moms who'd love to make extra money as a virtual assistant. She began training a few people she knew in online marketing, PR and social media.

In time, they found clients of their own and felt the same level of empowerment Emily did. This led her to transition her business from doing mostly client work to mostly creating courses around becoming a virtual assistant. She produced content on her blog and made free PDFs with tips and tricks. Eventually she began selling a guide titled "The VA Crash Course," accomplishing all of this while her family grew to four children. Between her client work and selling courses, she's earning over $2,000 per month while staying at home and managing the household.

Any future moves might be disruptive to her family of six, but not to her income. [Music]

Okay, so a couple things here. I wanna talk about Emily's about page because it's a really good example. I always like to point out when somebody has a good about page because longtime listeners may know that page is the second most important page on your website. Obviously the homepage is what people see the most, but then the about page is where people go when they're thinking about hiring you, especially for a service business.

So let's talk about that. EmilyReaganPR.com/about, which we will link up in the show notes. You go there and you see some really well-done photography of Emily, as well as her family. You see a personal story. The copy right from the beginning is hi there.

If you stumbled on my page, someone probably told you about me. And that is an excellent thing because I have done very little to promote myself because for the last 10 years, I've been promoting my clients. I really love that introduction and it goes on from there. Putting forward these two values, which are the most important to communicate in a service business. The two values are being welcoming and being authoritative.

So she's welcoming. Like I said, it's warm, it's vibrant, it's personal, yet it's also authoritative. It's like, oh, I can trust this person, first of all, as a person, but I also trust her as an expert, like as an authority. So she's doing that really, really well. Great example.

And I also want to give a shout out to all of our military listeners, military servicemen and service women, as well as spouses, partners, family of military. All of you are a great inspiration to me. So thank you for your service and thank you for doing something for yourself too. It's okay, you can do both. That's what we're all about.

You can do something good for other people and for yourself at the same time. All right, listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1177. That is 1177, including links to Emily's site as well as anything else I mentioned in the episode. Thank you so much for listening.

Be sure you're subscribed and come back for more. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.