This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Thank you again for episode 1500. That was yesterday, I am so grateful. I'm also so amazed. Like I never thought I would actually get to 1500 episodes. The original goal was 365.
So I don't know if we'll get to 3000, right? That's the problem with doubling, as like the more you do, it gets harder. Like when I did 100 episodes, I was like, okay, I think I'm gonna get to 200. So I'm not sure we're gonna get to 3000, but I'm firmly committed to 1501. I can say that with confidence because here it is, right?
This is 1501. Welcome to Silenceful School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. There are an estimated 200 to 500 million people in the world who meditate daily. Are you one of those people?
I have tried multiple times and haven't been successful. I have lots of other good habits. Meditation is not one. So I'm always interested to hear from other people who have found it to work for them. And I think that's great, that's wonderful.
Maybe part of my problem is I'm doing it wrong or I'm thinking about it wrong because not all those people, those 200 to 500 million people, they're not all the same. So in today's story, this is interesting, a longtime fan of meditation creates enlightenment guidebooks for what he calls ordinary dudes. He's focused on men. His guidebooks include a beer can on the cover. Okay, so he's trying to find a market within a market.
Ordinary dudes, he calls it. Freelancer writes his own story by creating meditation books for men. That's what we'll look at today after this quick message from our sponsor. [Music]
John Weyler has been meditating since he was 17 years old. He says that it's helped him overcome anxiety, panic attacks, and even saved his relationship with his now wife, who was actually his girlfriend at the time.
But unlike a lot of meditators, John doesn't completely buy into the hippie culture surrounding meditation. Although he says that there's nothing wrong with that, he found himself wanting to connect with people outside that space. He especially hoped to encourage men who had previously written off the idea. And that's what sparked his desire to write an ordinary dude's guide to meditation. John wanted to dispel the myths and preconceived notions about meditation.
But this wasn't his first experience with writing professionally. John works as a freelance writer and published his first book a few years before called "Backpack Abroad Now." Through that first publishing experience, he ran into many pitfalls. He had a difficult time learning how to self-publish on Amazon and says that he didn't have a great cover, which makes a big difference. So he's changed it since then. Taking all that he'd learned, he wrote and published his ordinary dude's guide.
Unfortunately, the second book didn't do well either. In the first six months, it only sold 20 copies. John was disappointed. He really believed in his book. And even though it was nonfiction, he knew he had a novel idea.
He couldn't find any other meditation books that catered to men and especially none that had a beer can on the cover. That's when he discovered Amazon advertising. He started using it and invested just $25 a month at first. He sold 27 books in August that year and then released a paperback version in September. Once again, he saw a significant increase in sales.
He hit his first $500 in December of that year when he spent $125 on advertising. From there, he figured out that marketing was his key. He began to write even more books. In fact, between October, 2018 and September, 2019, John published four more titles. Like "The Meditation Guide," the new books also centered around themes of enlightenment and mindfulness.
They were all directed towards his target audience of, well, ordinary dudes. Sales didn't really pick up until his six called "A Dude's Guide to the Couch." That one was an unexpected hit, regularly bringing in $500 a month on its own. The whole time John was writing, he was also focusing on improving his advertising strategy. After learning how vital it was to the sale of the first book, he knew that learning as much as he could would be invaluable to the future of his business. This meant expanding beyond Amazon.
Putting all of his advertising eggs in one platform's basket was dangerous. As he saw it, he was playing on someone else's turf. When they wanted to change the rules, his sales could plummet. This actually happened from time to time, which served as a good warning. Now John uses many strategies.
Although he's had a blog for years, it wasn't until June, 2020, but he began posting on it frequently. In September, 2020, he began using the service Qpromote to boost his blog posts. Using this service, his posts have racked up over 12,000 shares in just the last four months. Not only that, but his sales went up by 20%. According to John, this is one of the techniques that finally allowed him to break through making $1,000 a month consistently and get the biggest bang for his book.
Moving forward, he currently has six more titles. He's in the middle of writing, six, much more prolific than me, but he also wants to spend more time freelancing, which is his main source of income. Not only that, but he wants to do this while still expanding his knowledge on marketing. For a while, he was penciling in way too much work and his health began to suffer. Since then, he's decreased the workload, taking care of himself more, and his business has thrived in response.
John is confident that he will continue to rise to the challenge, spreading the word about meditation, one ordinary dude at a time. [Music]
So think about this idea of a large market that we historically associate with a certain type of person, whether right or wrong, maybe there's some stereotyping there when we think about meditation, for example. Obviously, it's not all hippie women who meditate, but what John observed is there are a lot of men who didn't connect to it or didn't relate to it, at least on a surface level. So that's the question, what other markets can we associate with a certain type of demographic or psychographic, where the topic, the actual thing could be relevant for lots of other people, if only the messaging has changed somehow. I think about in Portland, there's a woman owned school for carpentry and other trades.
And it's not just women owned, it's classes for women to learn about carpentry and all these kinds of trades. I don't know the whole backstory there, but I assume that at some point they thought there could be a lot of women interested in this, but historically women are not targeted by other schools or workshops or classes. There's kind of an association that it's mostly men who are doing it. Anyway, it's not all about gender. You can think about something entirely different.
Think about genealogy, think about gaming, think about something that you might not associate with younger people or with older people, or with something totally different. You get the idea here, it's like you take a popular movement and consider who might be missing out on it. And then that's where your opportunity is, at least that's where the potential is. So think about that today, think about how you can mix things up. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.
If you'd like to find the show notes for today's episode, including links to the ordinary dude books, anything else I mentioned, go to sidehustleschool.com/1501. I told you we would make it, 1501. All right, do come back tomorrow because I'm pretty confident about 1502. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
