College Student Turned Fashion Influencer Earns $140,000

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

[Music]

Hello, hello, hello. What's up and welcome to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau. Excited to bring you a new episode today, a new case study, in fact, coming to us all the way from India. You know, the kids these days from all over the world, not just India, but all kinds of places, they want to grow up and become influencers.

It's like the new career choice. I'm not sure if guidance counselors or college prep programs have caught up, but there's definitely a demand. No doubt fueled by reality TV. And of course, you know, all sorts of social media and such. So in this story, we're going to go behind the scenes of a young influencer who made more than $140,000 last year.

Seriously, if you've ever wondered how this world works, like do people actually get paid for it? You know, for their posts on Instagram or their blog posts about, I don't know, different kinds of content and such, well, now you'll know. We're going to look at it in this story. And the answer is spoiler. Yes, they do.

At least in some cases, at least this one does. College student turned fashion influencer earns $140,000. That story is coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]

As a 17 year old, Harmon Awol was amazed with the influencer life she saw on Instagram. Those people seem to have the perfect life, full of food, travel, and shopping.

It was a happy and luxurious lens and Harmon wanted it for herself. In the middle of her first year of college, she turned to the internet to see what exactly these influencers were doing, how they were doing it, and how they were getting paid. Now, I should mention at this point that Harmon is from India. So if you, like me, live in North America or the UK, maybe Australia, New Zealand, somewhere like that, you might not realize that Instagram is pretty big everywhere. In fact, in parts of Asia, it has even more adoption than where we are.

And what Harmon found was that every single one of the influencers she liked had blogs. So her next question was how to start one of her own. Harmon found further that many of them were using WordPress. So she followed suit and began her free website. Within six months, she was living the life of luxury, flying to Dubai with a Gucci bag on the empty business class seat next to her.

Oops, sorry, that's the wrong story. Actually, Harmon was burnt out. She had been posting pictures of her so-called happy life, but in reality, was having a hard time. She didn't feel pretty enough or perfect enough. She was constantly comparing herself to other influencers, and she didn't understand why she wasn't attracting an audience like some of the other accounts she followed.

Took her about a year to get out of this mindset. And then she tried again. She started another free website, then eventually spent $100 to buy a hosting service and a domain name, yourgirlknows.com. Yourgirlknows.com. As a student, she didn't have a lot of money, so she asked if she could use her mom's credit card.

And thankfully, her mom said yes, otherwise we wouldn't have a story here, but we do. Harmon also didn't have money to pay for courses. So through her initial research on how to profit from a blog, she picked a successful blogger every day and then went to read or watch all their free content about growing the website, trying to dissect, reverse engineer what they did. Harmon observed their techniques and took detailed notes. First observation, to make money, she needed traffic.

She saw that a lot of people were getting views from building up their presence on Pinterest. Since she planned on having a female-focused audience, she figured this would be an effective platform to invest time. So Harmon rolled up her sleeves, taught herself how to gain a following on Pinterest. The algorithm there was ever-changing, just like all these different networks and platforms, but she paid close attention. And she was amazed to see that after two months, traffic on her blog had jumped up.

From there, Harmon started to join every Facebook group she could, at least the ones for bloggers. And she heard that in those groups, hundreds, sometimes thousands of bloggers would share their experiences. And there she learned about what other people in the community were struggling with, as well as what was working, what their tips and tricks were. And by engaging with her virtual coworkers, she was able to refine her instincts. Beyond that, Harmon also made it a point to post consistently.

This was a challenge as a student, but she knew that consistency was key. So she buckled down and got the work done. Through her research, she was able to discern which posts would do better than others. And right now, most of her content centers around fashion, skincare, beauty, and lifestyle. She writes about topics many young women are interested in, from where to buy fake designer bags, don't worry, we won't tell, to how to smell good all day with minimal effort.

Her work is reminiscent of Seventeen magazine. Harmon started this side hustle on April 3rd, 2020. She made her first few cents, yes, since, two months after she began with an Amazon affiliate program. And then with that consistency, marketing, and research, she started making about $900 a month by September. Soon after is when she began to use SEO, which skyrocketed her profits to be around $400 a day, also known as $144,000 a year, at least last year, it was.

So while she has to reinvest some of that money back into the site, she gets to pocket most of it. As a 20-year-old student living in India, Harmon says this amount of money is quote, seriously, a lot. In India, many people live with their parents until they're 25, sometimes even longer. So being financially independent makes both her and her parents incredibly happy. So far, her only two marketing techniques have been through Pinterest and SEO, aside from all the research she did, of course, and she's now beginning to delve into email marketing for the first time.

Oh, and of course, Harmon is still a student, where she is getting a bachelor's with honors and economics. [Music]

Congratulations to Harmon. I enjoyed working on the story, especially because she is in India. We often have stories about people from the U.S. or maybe a similar country, at least in terms of economic development, that have done some kind of online project like this and ended up going big, which is great, not to take anything away from those stories, but I think it's really amazing that a 20-year-old student in India can also achieve results like this.

So well done. We all have a lot to learn from her, at least I do. I will speak for myself. So I wanna encourage you to check out her blog. We will link it up in the show notes page.

It's also called Your Girl Knows. So you can probably find that if you wanna go search for it, yourgirlknows.com. Listener's inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Show notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/1956. You've got a comment or question, you can leave it there.

And of course, I hope you will subscribe or follow, come back tomorrow, the podcast, the show, the community, the experience, it's all completely free. And there's a new episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]

- From the Onward Project.