This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, thanks for tuning in today. So glad you're out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. Today's episode is part of a feature we've been doing called Your First $1,000.
This is a very popular segment. As you might surmise from the title, it's all about how someone made their first $1,000. How did they get to that point? What choices did they make? What was difficult?
What was easy? Not their first $100,000, which is cool, but it'd be a very long story. It's actually all about their first $1,000. What are those points of origin? With that in mind, today's feature comes from Katie Emery.
And we first featured Katie back on episode 1732. Going Gray Blog brings in $6,000 a month. So let's talk about this a moment. The Going Gray Blog, this is a blog. She describes as an honest and comprehensive resource for women who want to confidently embrace their naturally gray hair.
So it's a blog about Going Gray. As mentioned in the title of that previous story, brings in $6,000 a month, obviously doing pretty well. I believe she has actually surpassed that now and is climbing towards six figures a year, which is pretty amazing, right? For such a niche topic. Although if you've been listening for a while, you're like, wait a second, Chris, maybe she's being so successful because it is a niche topic, because she has really tried to understand her market.
After all, she is part of that target market. She has her own story of embracing her naturally occurring hair color. So there's a lot we could say about that, but I think it's actually good to hear from Katie. How about her first $1,000? How did she make it happen?
What did it feel like and what did she learn? She's got some really great insight for us. I enjoyed working on this one. So let's hear it from her. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up.
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Hey, my name is Katie. I'm the founder of the blog kdgosplatinum.com and I was featured on Side Hustle School, episode 1732. Today I'm sharing the story of the first $1,000 I earned from my side hustle. I started my blog four years ago, partly as a creative outlet to help me get through a rough patch of my life, but primarily because I needed a low cost way to quickly bring in more money. My husband had been laid off and even though I worked full time, my salary wasn't enough to cover our monthly bills.
I had read that blogging was a great way to earn extra money from home and that was important to me as I didn't want to spend too much time away from my kids. What especially appealed to me was that blogging didn't require a large upfront investment in equipment. All you really needed to get started was a computer and a camera, fantastic. One of the other things that thrilled me about the idea of blogging was the concept of passive income. The idea that you could create something, put it out into the world and reap this financial benefit from it for years to come was thrilling.
So I read everything I could find on the internet about blogging, watched countless YouTube videos and quickly realized that even though my goal was to earn money passively, it was going to take a lot of action on my part to get this business started. I found out that I would need to learn WordPress, SEO, social media marketing, affiliate marketing and a bit of graphic design among many other things. It was so overwhelming that I almost gave up before I even got started. It all just seemed like too much. On top of everything else, I had recently turned 50 so I fretted that perhaps I was too old to start an entirely new venture, one that would require a lot of time, patience and new skills.
The only reason I didn't throw in the towel, to be honest, was because we had no other options. My husband worked in a youth-centric business and the likelihood of him finding another job after 50 was pretty slim. There's nothing like being on the verge of financial ruin to light a fire under you. So I learned what I could, wrote a handful of posts, crossed my fingers and launched my blog at the end of July, 2018. I knew that it would take Google a while to find my content, so I posted my content in Facebook groups and created Pinterest pins for every single one of my posts.
Luckily for me, one of those Pinterest pins went viral and I had 10,000 page views the first month. Since I had sprinkled Amazon affiliate links throughout my posts, I earned $31.73 in affiliate income that month. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it meant the world to me. It meant that people not only were willing to read my articles, but also that they trusted me enough to buy the products that I recommended. I was over the moon.
I kept plugging away, writing new articles, promoting them on social media, and learning everything I could about blogging while blogging. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I probably spent 40 hours a week blogging on top of the 40 hours a week I put into my day job. I woke up at five o'clock a.m., blogged for an hour, went to work, blogged at lunchtime, came home, and blogged after the kids went to bed. But the hard work did pay off.
Three months after I launched, I had enough traffic to apply to Mediavine, which is an elite ad network. Ads were placed on my posts by the end of December 2018. By January 2019, five months after I started, thanks to affiliate income and ad revenue, I earned my first $1,000. As I think I've laid out pretty clearly, that first $1,000 took a ton of hard work. But part of the reason it took so much work was because I was starting from scratch.
Now that my blogging foundation is in place, I don't have to work quite so hard. I can take time off from blogging and the world doesn't fall apart. The money keeps rolling in. Some months more than others, of course. This side hustle that I started in the hopes of earning just enough to keep us afloat now earns a high five figures and I have high hopes of growing it even more this coming year.
But the best part? For the first time in my life, I have a job that not only makes me money but is also creative and fun. It has also restored my confidence and my creativity, which had been battered a bit the few years prior to starting my blog. I also have met a whole community of people who are earning income in unconventional ways and that has helped me see that anything in life is possible. If I hadn't forced myself to keep going at the beginning, I would never have built this business that changed my life and my family's life for the better.
So if you have an idea for a side hustle but getting started feels overwhelming to you, don't despair, take a deep breath, step back, and take it one day at a time. Focus on the end goal and you'll most likely find yourself in a much better position than you ever dreamed possible. I wish you the best of luck. - Big thanks to Katie for telling us about her first $1,000 listeners. I hope you found that encouraging.
As I said, I really enjoyed working on this one just to kind of go through her answers about how she worried she was too old to start a new venture. And it took a lot of work, of course, like she's very honest about that. It took a lot of work, but obviously it's been extremely rewarding as well. Just to feel that confidence, the restoration of confidence and creativity. I hear that in lots of different forms from so many different listeners who are working on projects and it inspires me as well.
I want you to be able to start a project that provides economic empowerment just like Katie has done. So do check out katigosplatinum.com, especially if you might be in the target market or if you know someone who might be, Katie Goes Platinum. She spells her name K-A-T-I-E, katigosplatinum.com. You can also follow her anywhere. She's on lots of social networks, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Friendster, the Metaverse.
Maybe not all of those, but most of them. Katie is there or will be. And if you have a question or an update for us about your side hustle, let me know. sidehustleschool.com/questions. We are continuing to roll along throughout this year and I would love to know what you're working on.
I want to make sure we can be supportive and cheer you on properly. All right, that's it for now. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
