This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Oh my gosh, hello, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Thank you so much for tuning in today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I have the privilege of bringing you this podcast every single day for 1962 days in a row.
Now today's episode is part of a new feature we're doing in 2022. It's called Your First Thousand Dollars. And as you might guess, or as you might know, it's all about how someone made their first thousand dollars. It's been really fun to work on this segment because just to hear some cool updates, really get to go to that point of origin of understanding how somebody had an idea and what they did next and what they learned, of course, along the way. It's just super cool.
So I'm so grateful to everybody who has been featured, all of our side hustlers from the archives who have come back as well as of course, our amazing community, which would be you, our listener. Thank you for listening. And without further ado, today's feature comes from Kyle Batis. We first featured Kyle and his kids back on episode 1604, French Bulldog blog fetches extra bones. Yeah, that's what it is.
It's a French Bulldog blog. This business grew to become an ongoing asset producing regular passive income. But what about Kyle's first thousand dollars? Of course, how did he make that happen? He and his kids, I should say.
What did it feel like? And what did he learn? You're actually gonna hear about his first, I think it's $3 and 50 cents or something like that. But don't worry, it scales up from there. So let's hear from Kyle and I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up.
[Music]
Hey, Side Hustle School listeners. This is Kyle Batis from FrenchieJourney.com. I was featured in episode 1604. And basically what we did, my family and I, when we got a French Bulldog back in December of 2019, we decided to start a website. Just chronicling our journey with our French Bulldog.
And so that was the idea. And myself, my fiance, our three kids, our three teenage kids, we started putting together articles as we ran into experiences with our French Bulldog. Everything from picking the best crates to the bed we bought for him, toys we researched for him and got, pet insurance to medical issues that we experienced with our Frenchie. We just started writing those articles and kind of sharing that. We put together the site, used WordPress and started writing articles.
And we didn't crank out articles like a lot of them. We started slow and this was a side project of a side project. So we started building that up. And it was probably about five months in before we started getting any traffic to the website at all. But as soon as we started seeing, we were reaching other people, that was exciting and that kind of gave us some motivation.
And then shortly after we started getting traffic, we had our very first commission sale where we linked to a product that we bought for our Frenchie and somebody else clicked on that link and bought it. We got a commission on that sale. I think that first commission that we got was about $3.55. Certainly nothing to retire on and nothing to write home about. But I'll never forget that day we got that first commission.
We were so excited and it was just validation that we were putting some good stuff out there that was helpful to other people. And it's those little milestones along the way that I think can keep you motivated. And that revitalized us to create more content. And we just kept writing, writing more and more and more. Today, we've got 187 articles on the site.
I never would have thought we would have had this many articles published on the site. The site's now getting over 32,000 visitors a month from organic search, which is ranking for different keywords in Google that somebody might be typing that are French Bulldog related. And now the site is routinely making $1,200 to $1,400 a month. But it took a long time to get there. And I encourage you, keep at it, take small steps, enjoy those little wins along the way, stay consistent, keep publishing if this is the business model that you wanna go after.
I have a quote that I've always loved and it reads like this, success generally depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed. If we had stopped six months in, then we wouldn't have had anything to show for it. But the fact that we kept going, we kept publishing, we started ranking for more keywords, we started getting more traffic. And now the site is a nice little moneymaker that helps subsidize our family expenses and keeps us motivated to keep working on it. And so at this point, we're probably adding an article a week or so, but it's paying off and the site's continuing to grow in traffic.
I think it could get to the point where it's earning multiple thousands of dollars a month. And so that's kind of our next goal. And that's another tip too I'd give you is set those little milestones. I think when you first start a project like this, focus on activity and that's always been a goal of ours is to create, what's the next milestone of how many published articles that we can get on this site? First it was 10, writing 10 articles.
That was our first goal. But then we turned it to 20 and then 50 and then 100. Now 200 is our next target. And we're close to hitting that. We'll have that early in the new year.
So that's my advice. That's my story. We've had a great time working on this project. It's a lot of fun. It's rewarding in a lot of different ways.
And I encourage you to keep going. I hope this is helpful. Wish you the best of success. KyleBadassFrenchyJourney.com. [Music]
Thank you so much, Kyle.
Really appreciate that update. Bulldog blogger builds Bow Wow Biz. I think that's what I'm gonna title this episode. The Frenchie Journey blog, sounds like a powerhouse. 187 articles, as you just heard.
32,000 visitors a month from organic search. And that means essentially that he is being helpful. The blog is being helpful to 32,000 people every month because they're typing in keywords to Google, searching for specific information. They're coming to the resource that Kyle and family have built. So very, very cool.
And again, thanks, Kyle. Our listeners, I hope you found it encouraging. Check out the website for yourself. You can be 32,001 at FrenchieJourney.com. FrenchieJourney.com, just in case you're into French Bulldogs, or you just like to see how someone builds a content website on a very niche topic, but one that a lot of people are searching for information on.
Excellent case study to learn from. And if you have a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow. New episode every single day.
Seven days a week, in fact. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
