This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
I love the setup for today's listener question. My sister got sort of famous, and the way she got sort of famous was millions of people saw her viral video, but there's no money involved, there's no product for sale. She just made a video that did really well. Is there any way she can profit from it? That's what we're going to hear today.
We're going to hear about this from a listener, it's not my sister, my sister is awesome, but to my knowledge, she hasn't made a viral video recently. I should go and check just in case. But we're going to hear from David in South Carolina. Welcome back also listeners to Side Hustle School. And David's sister recently went viral with a video that millions of people have seen, and you know how it is these days with like Instagram, TikTok, elsewhere, things kind of take off, they get shared everywhere.
And this was not anything bad, just to be clear. I don't think David's sister was beating somebody up on an airplane, I think they just did something kind of funny and it took off. And so now David's wondering on her behalf, what can we do about this? Like there's no direct income from the video, her sister hasn't really thought about being an influencer, but he's more like, is there any way she can profit from this? You know, there's so much attention.
So what happens in this situation, if you've ever wondered how can you turn maybe short lived viral fame into a longer term potential income stream, or at least even some current income? Well, let's talk about it. Let's look at it. Turning a viral video into income. That's today's episode, detailed question and my answer coming right up.
Hello, Chris, I'm David from Columbia, South Carolina. My sister recently went viral with a video that millions of people have seen. However, there's no money involved and she doesn't have to sell a product. Is there any way she can profit from her newfound fame? What steps should she take to turn this viral moment into a potential income stream?
I know it may not be possible, but we're curious about your answer. Well, what an interesting world we live in, right? Because these days there are hundreds, maybe thousands of minor celebrities who get there 15 minutes of fame from one of these videos that everybody's seen and talking about. But we don't really know anything else about that person. And what do they do next?
Are they able to go on a reality TV show? Are they able to profit from it somehow? And for the most part, I think it's safe to say for the most part, not much else happens. For the most part, they had this video, again, hopefully it wasn't something embarrassing. Hopefully it was just something funny or cool or interesting.
And then maybe for the rest of their life, or at least for a number of years, people recognize them and they're like, "Was that you? That was me. Oh." And so it's interesting. Maybe there's a way to leverage it in terms of a job interview or in terms of some kind of business, but there's really not a direct connection to getting paid. So that's the first thing.
Most of the time it doesn't actually lead to riches or anything lucrative at all. Now there can be exceptions. Most people will make merch and I heard of a situation recently in which someone made about $40,000 after being in one of these kinds of videos and they didn't have a lot of followers before. And so that's great. But I also didn't hear the whole story.
Like I don't know, did they sell $40,000 of merch in which $15,000 maybe was the profit or even less than that? And will they be able to keep selling the merch? Probably not. It's kind of like a one-off situation. So what I think is best is for David's sister to kind of ask herself, you know, the big questions of life.
What is it that I want to do? What do I want to help people with? What do I want to do with my life? What do I like doing? How can I combine what I like doing with something that is helpful and useful to others?
All the kinds of questions that we always talk about. Everything that a good side hustle is built on. And then, you know, perhaps there's some connection with all of this fame with everybody who's following her. Then it's like, hey, everybody, I'm doing this now. And this is my website or this is my product or, you know, follow me for more videos on something that's a little bit different.
Now inevitably what's going to happen is only a small fraction of those people that initially saw the video will actually care about what this person's now doing and choose to follow them and so on. But it can give you a little boost. And that's something. What it could be, you know, this 15 minutes of fame led to me starting something that may not be directly related to that video, but turned into be a pretty cool and impactful project over time. So that's what I think about that.
Might be some short-term profit. Doesn't usually work long-term for most people, but use this as an opportunity to figure out what is it that you want to do next? And hopefully you can use this attention to give a bit of a boost. David, my best wishes to your sister listeners. Thank you for listening.
If you have a question or a comment, www.sidehustleschool.com. New episodes every single day, all throughout the year, seven days a week, always completely free. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. the Onward Project.
