This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
All right, all right. Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Thanks for tuning in today to episode 2071. Now this is our Failure Friday segment.
Comes out every Friday conveniently. It's all about the lessons we can learn from things that go wrong. A collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Now these stories vary, but you get to hear directly from a side hustler who has struggled to get something off the ground. Often the story is, you know, an idea or an assumption.
Then that idea or assumption meets reality. Other times it is a circumstantial disaster. Things are going along okay, and all of a sudden something you never imagined comes along to make life difficult for you. So how does a person handle that? What do they take away from it?
Today's short story features Derek Adderley. Derek is a middle school principal from Pennsylvania. He got inspired by an original side hustle school story about making money from a fish tank blog. That was from our very first week of the podcast, I guess, well, more than 2,000 days ago, 2,070 days ago, to be precise. Derek then decided to try his hand at his own blog.
Now, unfortunately, his story didn't work out quite as well as the fish tank guy. So let's hear about that from him as well as what he learned. [Music]
This is Derek Adderley from Western Pennsylvania. I've been following your show since the beginning. These days, I'm working on a new business idea in my spare time as a middle school assistant principal.
When one of your books first came out, I loved the story about the guy who made $600 a month blogging about fish tanks. That was wild. It opened my eyes to the possibility of making extra money from a super niche topic. During our school's spring break that year, I thought about how I could apply this concept to my own idea. First, I need an idea.
I thought about what I was into, education, volleyball, hiking, taking care of my two-year-old. None of that seemed niche enough, and I didn't see an easy way to combine two of the topics, at least until I came back to sports and education. I settled on volleyball and began writing posts for high school players. It started with general tips and drills, but then I branched out to write about teamwork and leadership. Over the next few months, I spent every evening writing at least one article for the blog.
It didn't take long once I got into the groove. I came up with a list of topics and just knocked out post after post. Before long, I had 40 posts up, and I joined the Amazon Associates program so I could earn commissions. Then I sat back and waited for the visitors to arrive. You might guess what happened next, nothing.
Very few visitors arrived. I thought I'd done something wrong, which I had, of course, but I thought I'd set up the website incorrectly. I checked it at school on different computers, and that actually increased my traffic substantially, which probably tells you how low my daily traffic was in the first place. In the end, the project never really took off and I stopped making new posts. It was a bummer, especially since I'd told a bunch of people about it and they kept asking me about it.
I learned that I should have spent more time choosing the initial topic. The fish tank guy was on the money. He fixed something that enough people were into and that cost money to be a part of, which meant there was a good opportunity for affiliate commissions. For high school volleyball, search rankings were more competitive, and it's also not a sport where people spend a lot of money. There's not really a lot of supplies with volleyball.
I also wish I'd kept this project to myself so that I could share the success if it happened, but quietly closed it down if it didn't. Looking back, even though it didn't work out, I'm glad I tried. It taught me some new skills in terms of blogging and working with websites. Even more than that, and even though it was a failure, it actually gave me the confidence to try more things. So I don't regret it in the end.
I just wish I'd thought more about the topic before writing all those posts. [Music]
Thanks so much, Derek. Really appreciate you sharing that story. I definitely agree that search rankings are gonna be much more competitive for something like high school volleyball, but there's also not a direct connection with something that makes money in the way that fish tanks do. It could be a different sport if it was golf or any sport that just requires you to spend money, that might actually be a better connection with an affiliate model.
But of course, Derek has learned that. And he has also learned the theme of Failure Friday, which is never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. I have worked on lots of projects that have not gone very well, but one thing I do is I just never give up. I just keep working ahead. I try something different.
I mean, I'm willing to give up on a project, but I'm gonna keep working ahead to try a different project. So thanks again, Derek, for sharing the transparent and truthful story. Thank you listeners for being out there. If you have a question or an update about your side hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. And of course, subscribe, follow, wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
