This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Got a great story for you here today. I have always been a big fan of projects that provide free resources for people, but also allow the project's creator to get paid. So in other words, the customers or the main clients are not actually paying, they get it free, but the person who made that project still has a way to get paid. And the classic example is Danielle Feng and her project ESSA Group, which I've talked about a number of times. Danielle provides YouTube tutorials to help new immigrants prepare for the US citizenship exam.
All that information is really complex. Danielle helps to break it down, and she's got hundreds of thousands of people watching these tutorials. And because of advertising, YouTube ads in this case, Danielle's able to make a good profit while the people who learn from her tutorials access them for free. So today's story, that's a historical story. Here's today's, it is perfectly aligned with that model.
Instead of YouTube as the medium, and instead of immigration as the topic, this story, this case study, it provides most of its info on a website in the form of test prep guides and practice exams for college, college or university, including the ACT, SAT, and many others. In fact, I think it's actually branched out now, but that's how it got started. So I'll tell you all about it. In this story, a former educator schools the system, offering his test prep guides for free, but generating a massive return through online advertising. Of course, I'll give you all the details.
It's coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]
Having worked in the education industry for more than a decade, Dave Evangelisti was familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of online learning. In particular, he knew how valuable tutoring and test prep courses could be, but he also knew that many of those services cost nearly as much as college tuition. It gave Dave an idea that was genuinely rooted in service. He wanted to provide truly free resources for students who couldn't afford to pay or who just didn't want to.
And those resources would be based at his website test-guide.com. He began with a mindset of small actionable objectives. As I said, his primary goal was to be helpful. Money-wise, Dave hoped to be able to earn enough to pay for his lunch, his lunch every day at least, but still just you wait. This straightforward model proved to be successful.
Quickly, Dave was tasked with wearing a multitude of hats for the site to function. With a low overhead of just under $100, basically a domain name and web hosting, the site would live or die based on its ability to gain traffic. Dave would pay for his lunch with ad clicks that amounted to a couple cents from each user. Now his assessment on the absence of free material turned out to be so accurate that within a year his site's ad revenue was bringing in up to $250 a day, more than enough for Outback Steakhouse. With traffic continuing to ramp up, Dave focused on optimizing the site's SEO to get better rankings in Google.
But just when he thought he'd cracked the code, it turned out he'd made a pretty big mistake instead. By creating a plethora of backlinks, including some from low-quality websites, Dave's resource was virtually everywhere. He thought that would be great. You want to be everywhere, right? But Google had other ideas.
In fact, they de-indexed his site, punishing him effectively, and traffic plummeted. Now thankfully, Dave could rely on his steady income. It was a side hustle after all, but of course he wanted to regroup. He made a page that told Google to ignore all of those questionable backlinks and was able to get the site back within a few months. Now this experience certainly left an impression.
Ever since, Dave has been strictly adhering to Google's guidelines and to much benefit. Having to rebuild the site from the ground up taught him an important lesson in persistence. Organically growing traffic, instead of using those sketchy link campaigns, proved to be more effective in the long run. How effective? Well, the site has now been visited more than 50 million times by over 27 million different users.
By targeting an audience of students seeking free resources, the site went from making $5 a day to being on track as the leader in free practice tests, prep course reviews, and study materials, all in just under four years. Test-guide.com now provides more than a hundred different practice tests, including the MCAT, ACT, SAT, and many others, all completely free of charge. Dave eventually quit his corporate job to work full-time on the site. At some point, he further optimized his revenue by signing up for affiliate programs. Not only does the virtual tutor provide its own original source material, it offers users in-depth reviews of other test prep courses, should they need more resources.
But again, those paid resources aren't required. You can access all of the practice guides for prep. Dave hopes to build the brand to the point that people will automatically think of test-guide.com the way they think of using regular study material. With a full team of employees, it's now a seven-figure business. That's enough to buy a lot of lunch.
[Music]
Well, I went to take a look at test-guide.com since it's getting so much traffic, obviously it's doing a lot of things right. And I think with this kind of site, it's kind of what I expected in the sense that it's not going to have a great design necessarily. The entire point of the site is to attract a lot of traffic and to provide these practice tests. It's a very text-heavy kind of site. The entire process, design and development of the site is built around SEO, essentially.
So if you want to do this kind of project, this is the model to follow, and there are lots of guides on how to craft your website this way, the right keyword density, all that kind of stuff. It's a very analytical process. So some people are into it and others aren't. And what you want to figure out, because with this kind of site, you're making money through advertising and through these affiliate programs, you want to figure out the right blend of how helpful versus how intrusive. I don't want to say that advertising is always intrusive, but you're there to look for a practice test.
And there's also all these ads. And if you're the site owner, you want people to have a good experience on the site, but you also want them to click the ads. And so that's why there is this tension or balance between how much those ads are in your face and so on. So I thought it was interesting to kind of look and see how he's done it. I did take the practice CDL test, just out of curiosity, the commercial driver's license test, or at least one of them, one part of it.
And I scored 80%, which I was really surprised at, because I totally guessed at several of the answers. But who knows, maybe I have a future in long haul trucking. Probably not, but I did enjoy getting 80% on that test. Anyway, check it out. And I hope you learned something from this story.
There's always something you can learn from every case study, even if your main interest is in something different. So keep that in mind. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, including links to, well, test-guide.com, go to sidehustleschool.com/1865. Thank you so much for joining me today.
New episode tomorrow, new episode every day, in fact. I hope you subscribe or follow it, wherever you like to listen. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
