Social Media Fan Ties the Knot with Wedding Marketing

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

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For those of our audience who are of a certain age, by that I mean, you know, my age or possibly older, you might remember America Online, also known as AOL. And do you remember your AOL screen name? Do you remember your first screen name or online handle if it wasn't AOL? For some of us that actually predates AOL. I remember having to service Prodigy when I was, I guess, 10 or 11 or 12 years old, somewhere in that range.

I don't think Prodigy exists anymore, I don't think AOL exists anymore, at least not in the same fashion. But in this story, when a long time social media fan, hello AOL, looks to add creativity into her life, she combines her passion with weddings and her skills in online communication. Now, as you'll hear, I love the focus on a specific market here. And sometimes people ask me, you know, why do you always pick on life coaches, you know, and social media managers? The reason I pick on those fields, I don't mean to pick on you if that's you, but there are just way too many Jack or gills of all trades in those fields.

There are way too many people just trying to be a generic social media manager, that's my point here. And you need to specialize and focus on a specific person, group, or industry. That's what today's story has done, she's done really well, I'm gonna deconstruct it for you. Another great example is iPhoneJourney.com, which is the website of professional photographer Jack Hollinsworth. Now, Jack has been a photographer for several decades, long before the iPhone, but he's chosen to go all in and focuses his education almost exclusively on mobile photography.

Photography is another field that has a lot of people in it. So by saying like, I'm gonna be the iPhone photographer, and there's actually a lot of people who do that now, but he was one of the first, he has been able to build quite a following. So focus on that specific market. Today, we're gonna talk about social media fan who ties the knot with wedding marketing. Stay tuned.

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Nina Adeo was in fifth grade when AOL came out. Then in high school when MySpace was all the rage, and in college during the birth of Facebook. Social media grew up while she did, and she was always drawn to it. During college, it was all still new enough that few people were studying it for academic use. She didn't even know it could be a job.

So as Nina continued into adulthood, she gravitated towards administrative work. Still, she couldn't forget her love of the online world. So she started a blog for the TV show, "America's Next Top Model." That blog soon boasted over 40,000 followers from around the world. Unfortunately, the show ended, and with it, so did Nina's blog. As the industry grew, however, Nina started to realize working in social media could be a job, and she wanted to break in.

She figured that her blog would be the perfect way to showcase her creative and digital talents. So she proudly listed it on her resume, and her hunch paid off. She scored a job doing social media for a hospitality group of wedding and restaurant venues. The job was both rewarding and stressful. While she enjoyed parts of it, after she got married, Nina decided to look for a job where she knew she would be leaving at a normal time every day.

She began working as an administrative assistant. While this was a nice break for a while, Nina now found herself missing the thrill of searching for online likes and experimenting with hashtags. She also missed working with weddings. She just didn't want to be on site all the time. So, working after hours and on the side, Nina created her own Wix website for $30 a month.

It was a virtual dream board for the business she wished she had called I Do Wedding Marketing. The dream was to intersect her passion for weddings and her skills in social media. More than anything, she wanted to help wedding professionals build their social media presence, so they didn't have to worry as much about marketing themselves. After letting her dream website simmer for a few months, she finally hit the publish button, saying I Do to her new business. She offered a variety of services, including auditing an online presence, managing content creation and posting, and overall online customer engagement.

Around this same time, Nina created an Instagram account for I Do Wedding Marketing. After all, she had to show prospective clients that she knew what she was doing. Within a few months, she had the opportunity to attend a networking event hosted by a local wedding officiant. There, she landed her first client, a wedding magazine. It was a perfect match.

By working with a magazine, Nina would have access to a whole list of wedding professionals that advertised with them. The magazine was a longstanding reputable leader in the wedding industry, and therefore an ideal client to build up her credibility. Nina says that having a focused audience from the start really helped her business to take off. She knew she wanted to work with wedding professionals, so she could quickly narrow down who to follow, what hashtags to use, and what kinds of businesses to approach. She says that it also made it easier for professionals to find her.

All around, choosing the specialization was the most important decision she made, after choosing to start her hustle, of course. Going full-time is Nina's long-term goal, but with COVID-19 and resurgence, and many events on hiatus, it's not the right time yet. So for now, she's looking to offer courses in wedding marketing. She knows that many of her clients are also freelancers or doing weddings on the side, and that some of them would rather pay one time for a course to learn than to continuously hire her. Ultimately, her goal is to help as many wedding professionals as possible take control of their social media presence.

And despite the pandemic, she's been doing just that. While now isn't the right season to pursue her side hustle full-time, she's still enjoying the creative outlet, making an extra $500 to $2,000 a month and looking forward to the future. [Music]

Awesome, congratulations to Nina and iDo Wedding Marketing, which you can check out at idoweddingmarketing.com. The other website I mentioned at the top of the show was iphonejourney.com. And here's an interesting fact about when Nina's business was growing, she was actually ready to pursue iDo Wedding Marketing full-time, and it was March of 2020 when she made that decision.

So she put in her four weeks notice at her administrative job. But if you're familiar with that timeline, March 2020, a couple weeks in, COVID-19 lockdowns started, which turned the entire events industry into kind of a, I was gonna say a free fall, but it was more like a standstill. And the good news is, because Nina had turned in her notice amicably, she gave them four weeks notice, they actually ended up asking her to stay on. So that's why she's still working that job now. So definitely a smart idea to keep on good terms with your employer, if at all possible.

Hope you enjoyed this episode today. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Our show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1289. That's for episode 1,289. Thank you so much, my friends.

Be sure you're subscribed because much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.