This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. So excited you are here today. This is our very first failure Friday segment of 2022.
Episode 1833 to be specific. This is definitely a segment we're gonna keep going. It's been one of my favorites and I hear from so many listeners who really appreciate the transparent, honest, and sometimes vulnerable stories that Side Hustlers, small business owners, and entrepreneurs have been sharing. The whole point here is we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more. So that's why the weekly segment called failure Friday offers you a collection of short stories.
Now this story, as we kick off a new year, some of these stories are often about disasters or, you know, epic fails. This one is a little bit different from some of the ones we've had in the past, like a cruise ship not showing up in Croatia. That was, you know, the cruise ship owner who his ship didn't show up. That was pretty big disaster. Or the time that Jonathan Fields, a popular author, former yoga studio owner, had a major malfunction in his yoga studio while an editor from Yoga Journal was there to kind of check it out.
So those stories are in the archives, you know, for your listening enjoyment, along with some others, like a container ship not showing up from China in time and so on. But today's story is it's a true misstep, okay? So it's not an epic disaster like that, but it's a true misstep. And full disclosure, the guy you're gonna hear from, his name is Brock, I have had exactly the same problem that he's gonna tell you about. Fortunately, he has turned it around, so you're gonna hear about that too.
But I encourage you to pay attention to both parts of the story because that's where the learning comes in. Brock runs a website called TheModestMan.com. The site helps short men dress better and ultimately feel more confident. We told that story in episode 1082, 1082, but of course he's had some struggles along the way, including this particular problem that he's gonna tell you about. So let's hear from Brock and I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up.
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Hi, my name is Brock McGough. I run a digital media brand called The Modest Man. And this started off as a simple men's fashion blog. My goal with the website was to help other guys figure out how to dress better and ultimately feel more confident. Now this blog has grown into a five figure per month multimedia content business, but the bread and butter of the business is good old fashioned SEO.
It's written content that gets trafficked from Google. That's the lifeblood of the business. Now the failure I'd like to talk about isn't an acute issue. It's not one thing that happened all of a sudden. It's a complacency that's set in over time.
So it's really more of a personal failure than anything else. For a long time, I kind of took for granted the fact that my website would continue to get more and more organic traffic over time. And for the first few years, it did. But the space got more competitive. I got a little bit lazy to be honest.
I had enough money coming in to live off of and I got distracted. I started focusing on social media and YouTube, even though those channels didn't generate nearly as much revenue as the website. And traffic plateaued big time. For nearly two years, monthly traffic topped out at around 280,000 page views. The newsletter growth stalled out along with revenue.
And then traffic started to decline. So I had to do something. I had to get back to my roots, which is just publishing high quality content and the only content that has the potential to get lots of organic traffic. So I got an Ahrefs account. I started doing better and more keyword research and competitor analysis.
I put together a massive list of content ideas. I posted a job to Pro Blogger, sifted through hundreds of applicants to find a few really good writers. I created a content brief template and hired an assistant to help with formatting all of these new articles in WordPress. And I started publishing twice as many articles every week and updating old articles. So I used to publish one new post a week.
Now I'm publishing three new posts a week and updating at least one old article. So about 18 months after starting that initiative, traffic hit about doubled to around 580,000 page views per month. And that meant that ad revenue and affiliate revenue also doubled. So the process was working and now I'm doubling down on this process even more with more writers, a more aggressive publishing schedule, even more websites, and of course more team members to manage it all. So the lesson here is that when something is working, the right move is to triple down on that thing, not chase some other new and possibly more exciting idea.
Most of us know what we need to do and often it's not the new or exciting thing. So like right now in my industry and niche, a lot of people are scrambling to figure out TikTok or to get more social media followers, but I'm focusing on what's actually making money right now in my business, which is building a website audience, written content that has organic traffic potential and it's working. And I don't think there's anything wrong with building an audience on a different platform like YouTube or social media or TikTok, but focus on one thing first and I think when you find success somewhere, the idea is to maximize success. So max out what you can do with one platform. So for me, it's the website and once I feel like I've truly maxed out that platform, then yes, maybe I'll go focus on YouTube or TikTok or something else.
But right now, it may not be as exciting as some other opportunities, but good old fashioned blogging is working really well for my business. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is the theme of Failure Friday, this segment. Maybe we should also just add here, good old fashioned traffic works well. Listen, there's a lot of people out there with websites who need to pay attention to Brock's advice because they too are getting distracted with TikTok or whatever else it could be.
But the point is, if you have a content website where you're trying to bring in lots of traffic, very often SEO and other attention paid to Google is gonna be actually more important than all these other shiny new things. And I just identify so much with Brock's statement about how he had this complacency that's set in over time. Like I have experienced that myself with lots of different projects. And so sometimes you just have to kind of regroup and kind of light this fire under yourself and say, hey, I gotta get back to work because I've got something that's really good here. I can't just float along and assume it's all going to continue without any active attention.
Okay, so again, thanks Brock for sharing your transparent and truthful story. Listeners, I wanna encourage you, check out Brock's website, TheModestMan.com. He also has a popular YouTube channel, The Modest Man, which offers all kinds of tutorials. I was actually just watching one myself, 10 ways to look taller and slimmer, which works for anyone. You don't have to necessarily be a short man.
He's got lots of tips there. And finally, he shares his detailed income reports at FullTimeBlog.com. So if you'd like to see exactly how much money he's making from quarter to quarter and where it's coming from, again, I just love the disclosure here. So FullTimeBlog.com, TheModestMan.com. If you've got a question or an update for us about your side hustle, that would be sidehustleschool.com/questions.
Thank you so much for tuning in today. Thank you for joining me for this new year, new season. Hope you'll subscribe or follow and come back tomorrow. New episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From The Onward Project.
