“Overlanding” Blog Offers Long-Range Travel Tips

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

[Music]

All right, all right. Hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to a new month. We are entering March 2022.

For those in real time, of course you could be listening anytime because everything we do here is evergreen. This is episode 1886. Also we're approaching episode 1900, which is pretty cool. So thanks for joining me today. Who doesn't love a road trip?

That's our theme for today. Who doesn't love a road trip? Actually, I don't love a road trip. I spent a lot of time in the car when I was a kid. My parents were driving me around everywhere.

So these days I don't actually want to get in the car for a long period of time. But hey, it's not about me. Lots of people like road trips and that's cool. Lots of people like camping. And one form of long road trip in particular is called over landing, over landing.

Now this word and the concept is more common in places like Europe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand. But it's actually grown a lot in the US as well, especially during the pandemic. Now in this story that I'm gonna tell you, a Romanian living in London profits from sharing his experience with extended road trips. His blog is perhaps the perfect lifestyle business in the sense that it's built around his passion. It's easy and low maintenance and it makes real money.

Real money in a passive income form. So I'll get things there. Let's talk about it. Over landing blog provides travel tips. The story's coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor.

[Music]

Ever since he was a boy living in Bucharest Romania, Ferrence Elikesh has been fascinated with cars. As he grew up, he realized he wasn't just interested in makes and models, but going on road trips as well. Now typically these weren't just trips that lasted a couple of days to the countryside. No, they were long distance trips to less frequently visited areas, often taken along remote trails. This was called over landing.

And the whole point was not any particular destination, but just to enjoy the journey itself. Later, as an adult living in London, where he worked in investment banking, Ferrence and two friends drove from the UK to Mongolia. Although they had many unforeseen bumps along the way, including having to abandon their vehicle into Jikistan because of a breakdown, Ferrence thoroughly enjoyed the experience. A couple of years later, along with his girlfriend Evelyn, who is now along for the ride, Ferrence took an even longer over landing trip. This one for an entire year.

They first drove across the Sahara and then from Europe to Singapore. And because this trip was gonna be so long, Ferrence decided it would be a good time to start writing about it. After all, over landing isn't a simple feat. It requires off-road vehicles that can reach places that are typically inaccessible. You need to camp off the grid and be self-sustaining.

There's just a lot of specific knowledge needed in order for an over landing trip to be successful. He set up his blog overlandsite.com at the end of 2017. Returning to his day job after the long journey, Ferrence knew he wanted to monetize this project so it could fund his travels, maybe even eventually lead to a new life. His research had shown that the best bet was by using affiliate marketing, especially since over landing is gear intensive. If you wanna get into it, you have to buy stuff.

To build out the site, Ferrence spent hours writing articles, doing more research, often sharing from personal experience. Then he would include affiliate links to shops which sold gear that he recommended. The shops would, in turn, pay him a commission for each product sold. Since he was looking to build traffic to his site organically, it meant that he had to make a lot of content and he had to make sure it was SEO friendly. This was time consuming since an affiliate marketing model usually requires a site to rank first, at least to rank on the first page of Google.

Now this takes months, even when you're doing it right. And Ferrence admits that the waiting game tested his patience. There was little to no growth in the beginning and he was doing everything he could by pouring his weekends and evenings into the site even as he worked a full-time job. But it was eventually worth it. He started getting commission checks for $10.

Then $50, then $100 and more. Ferrence was, let's say, on the road to real money. Today, the site generates $2,000 a month in revenue, most of which is pure profit. Looking back, Ferrence wishes that he had kept things simple by making sure his site was clean and lean instead of relying on clunky plugins that only slowed down the loading time. But of course, he's learned along the way.

Now he hopes to grow the site by investing in operations, such as outsourcing SEO and content writing and building partnerships. The idea is to turn it into a passive source of income so that he has more time and money for other activities. For Ferrence, starting this site hustle came from taking the path less traveled. In this case, quite literally. [Music]

So when is the affiliate model a good one?

Well, this case study here, this example is probably the ideal example because you have a very specialized niche interest, this concept of overlanding or extended camping, going out, really going off the grid. So it's a passion of a lot of people. It's also a growing passion, a growing interest, but it's a subculture. So in other words, it's not mainstream, okay? So the passion, the growing interest, one in which there's a lot to learn.

Like if you're gonna get into this, there is a lot you need to learn. You need to do a lot of reading and research. And then also you need to spend money. If you wanna get into this kind of hobby, it essentially requires you to spend money. So in this case, it's much better than a hobby that doesn't cost anything or is relatively low cost.

Like there's clearly equipment and gear you need to buy and it's a big part of the actual activity. So that's why a project like this is so well suited to this affiliate model. And now essentially his goal is basically to ramp it up and have more articles and have more traffic coming in. Because if he has twice the traffic coming in, well, he might make $4,000 a month. If he's got four times, then it goes up to 8,000 and so on.

And it doesn't always scale that way, but sometimes it does. Like we have had examples of affiliate websites, especially like in the home exercise space that have been doing eight to $20,000 a month in some cases. So if you like this model, it's really important to choose the right topic. That's kind of the key point. All right, congratulations, parents, good work.

Listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to everything mentioned in the episode, just come to sidehustleschool.com/1886. You can also leave a comment or question for us there. I hope you will subscribe or follow, come back tomorrow. But mostly I hope you will do something for yourself.

I hope you will invest in yourself today, get a little bit closer to your goals, and of course, take care. That's all for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.