Zen Master Makes Mindful Moola

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

[Music]

Over the past few weeks, I have been excited to work on an upcoming course. I haven't done a course in a long time. This one is really special. It will be delivered entirely to your phone. Very cool process.

It's all about helping people go from idea to income, which of course, you know, is our whole point here at Side Hustle School, help you find an idea, help you take action on it. It should be ready in just over a week. So I look forward to sharing it with you. Now for today's story, and by the way, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

In today's story, when an online marketing manager gets a pandemic pay cut, he meditates on options and creates a wellness blog. And we have a good section of our community of people who are interested in affiliate marketing, specifically in a way to get paid for reviewing and recommending products. And I don't mean in an Instagram influencer way, but rather by way of a blog or a review site. So I'm always excited to come across a strong case study in how somebody can do that, which is exactly what we have today. This really has the potential to earn a lot of money passively, at least once you do a lot of active work, of course.

So this guy has done a lot of active work, but now he's earning a lot of money. So good things. This guy in particular is doing very well. I'll tell you more in the story. Zen Master makes mindful moolah.

Stay tuned. It's coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]

Matt Oney has worn every digital marketing hat there is over the past six years in his day job as an online marketer for a startup in San Francisco. After working hard for his employer, he started to question why he wasn't putting that sort of effort into something of his own. He had heard about affiliate marketing and thought it could be something that played to his strengths.

On top of that, Matt had an old boss with a successful affiliate website. So he called on that boss to ask for advice. The old boss ran through how to pick a good niche and said to make sure it was something Matt actually cared about. It didn't take long for him to settle on health and wellness with a particular focus on mental health products. In February, 2020, he registered the domain name zenmasterwellness.com.

It was a little different, but Matt felt it was exactly the kind of branding and image he wanted to set for his new venture. With this domain registered, it was time to build the site. And for all his experience, this was an area where his skills were lacking. He wasn't sure where he'd find the time to learn while working full-time. But luckily or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, that was about to change.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, his employer cut his hours and salary by 20%. And this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. As I said, lucky or unlucky, depends on your perspective, Matt figured that with a little more time on his hands and a little less money, he now had both the space and the necessary incentive to work on his site more seriously. To start, he outsourced a logo design on Fiverr for $50 and purchased web hosting for $140. For the design, Matt installed a plugin called Elementor.

This is a template builder that basically allows for what you see is what you get design features, where you can drag and drop the elements you want without being a programmer. What followed was, wait for it, nearly three months of procrastination. That's right, the slow burn of unmet expectations. In fact, Matt didn't post his first article until May. That was a review for a telehealth appointment service known as Hello Ahead.

And like many budding website builders before him, his site traffic was as quiet as a Buddhist monastery during a silent retreat. To be specific, the site saw almost no traffic for an entire month. By June, Zen Master Wellness began seeing a whopping three or four visitors every day. Matt was so excited by these drop-in visitors, he decided to write his second article. This was a review for Alpha Medical, a telemedicine service specifically for women.

He continued learning, identifying keywords and writing articles on an occasional basis. By July, this method had his site generating around 25 visits a day. Within those articles, he began placing affiliate links to the product's website. These tracked users' clicks and he would receive a commission for every sale he generated. You know, all those sales that weren't coming in.

But wait, we're not done. The effort paid off in a big way when he published what would be his fourth article. Matt noticed the rise in popularity of tech-enabled home gyms like tonal, tempo and mirror. He was a firm believer that mental wellbeing was tied closely to exercise. Perhaps more importantly, he also noticed there weren't many online articles comparing the models.

He spent three days writing a comprehensive, detailed post doing just that. Now these results were fantastic. Almost overnight, his site received 300 visitors per day, up from, you know, three or four and then 25. But that wasn't even the most exciting part because soon after, he received his first commission check for $120. With his side hustle mindfulness in full swing, Matt researched more hot products to write about.

Over the coming months, he signed up to share a sale and impact. These are two popular affiliate networks where you can find merchants and products to earn commission from. He also subscribed to Venture Capital newsletters to try to get some insight on product trends and launches in the market. If he was early, he figured he could write content that dominated the search results before other bloggers caught up. The strategy worked.

And over the next year, he added content that would often succeed, not always as successfully as his smart Jim's article, but that generated revenue nonetheless. How much revenue are we talking about? Well, get this. Just over a year into Zen Master Wellness, the site generates an average of $10,000 a month in commissions. With that sort of money, you might think Matt has quit his full-time job, but that hasn't happened.

Instead, he looks at Zen Master Wellness as a way to increase his wealth. It's definitely a healthy compliment to meditation. [Music]

Zen Master Wellness, there you have it. As I said, a case study in how to use affiliate marketing, how to choose a topic that is clearly associated with products. I think that's the first part.

If somebody asked me, you know, why is it working so well? I would say first, he chose the right topic. He chose a topic that is clearly associated with expensive products that consumers are looking to purchase. So the traffic is very targeted, even when it's only a few visitors a day or 25 a day or whatever. Of course, it's much more now.

People looking for reviews on Mirror or one of these other products or services, you know, if you're searching for that, you're also pretty likely looking to buy it, or at least you're seriously considering it, which is much different than just general traffic or somebody stumbling in. And so accordingly, he also focused a lot on SEO. In fact, he increasingly did that as he went throughout the year. He began to pay more and more attention to it because that traffic is coming for free. This isn't like he has to pay Facebook or Instagram or somebody for ads.

You know, if he's writing these articles and users are happy with them, they're spending a lot of time on his website, Google knows that and Google rewards that. So he chose the right topic. He focused on SEO and he just kept writing. That is really, you know, the trifecta of affiliate marketing success. So congratulations, Matt.

Thank you for letting us share your story. And listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. To find today's show notes, go to sidehustleschool.com/1625. We'll include links to Matt's website, the tools that he has used, the affiliate networks and so on. All that will be there.

And if you have a comment or question for the show, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for tuning in. I hope all is well in your world and I hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From The Onward Project.