This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hi there and welcome to Side Hustle School. I am your host, Chris Guillebeau. And I've been traveling this week, which is not surprising at all. I pretty much travel every week, at least somewhere. But long ago, when I first got my start writing online, I thought I was going to be a travel blogger.
And I thought that because I had this quest to go to every country in the world, so I started writing about it. And I just assumed that that was the kind of content I was going to focus on. Photojournalism, destination pieces, all about seeing the world. And to make a long story short, I realized I wasn't that great at chronicling what it's like to be in the Central African Republic, for example. Or seven tips to visit Salzburg.
Like, that just wasn't my thing. But I did eventually start a little business selling travel guides, focused on frequent flyer miles and travel hacking. And today's story kind of reminds me of that. It's a travel blogger who gets paid via Pinterest and guidebooks that she's written. Now, becoming a travel blogger is not usually the fast track to riches.
Most travel bloggers do not get paid at all, or if they do, it's very little. But here's one who does. Working on this project part-time last year, she earned $4,500, mostly by selling a guide to visiting Iceland. And this year, she's exceeded $10,000. So what does she do differently?
What has she figured out? How did she create that success? All of that's coming up. And I might tell you a couple of other ways that you can make money being a travel blogger before I sign off for the day. Today's story comes from Claire Robinson, who is based in France, but also travels a lot.
So, like me, who knows where she is right now? Claire's love for travel started in 2013 when she was working as a quality manager for a medical device company and was fortunate enough to travel around the world for her job. Since she was traveling and sometimes living abroad, she began to blog about her excursions. She set up a simple WordPress site and began sharing specific tips and itineraries from the places she would visit. She named that site ZigZag on Earth because she zigzags around whenever she has time before zigzagging back home.
Her blogging served two purposes. First and foremost, blogging was a way to prolong her trips. Claire is the type of person that loves doing a lot of pre-trip research for where she's going to visit. She likes planning everything out beforehand by checking out photos from people who've been. And this way she gets to plan a trip beforehand, experience it while she's there, and then re-experience it when she blogs about it.
Second, her blog was a way to help other people who might benefit from all the research she'd already done. None of this was for sale at first, it was just a hobby. After a big trip to Iceland in 2014, she wrote multiple blog posts about specific regions right down to the landmarks and roads to take. And from those series of posts, she saw the traffic to her website jump sharply. People seemed to enjoy finding information about Iceland, especially with the level of detail she was sharing.
Around this time, Claire experienced a personal tragedy. Her brother was a customs officer in a special investigation division and was killed in the line of duty while arresting an arms trafficker. This tremendous loss, his death, changed her mind about how she was living her own life. She looked back at her brother's life and saw someone who was passionate about everything he did, from work to music to biking to food, and appreciated every moment of his life. So to honor his life, Claire decided to live her life with more passion and let his enthusiasm for life guide her in her own choices.
What does this have to do with her side hustle? Well, around that time, Claire realized that her Iceland posts were consistently getting a lot of hits and that there clearly was a need for the type of information she could provide. In order to combine her brother's enthusiasm for life with her ability to organize and simplify information, Claire decided to write a downloadable guide for the type of traveling she likes to do. And she started with Iceland since it was so popular on her site, and she focused on providing information for one type of traveler, people who want to road trip to see dramatic landscapes, monuments, and also get the best photos. She tried to give a lot of information about fewer locations, as opposed to most travel guides that try to give information about hundreds of locations.
And she gave very clear directions about how to find the best shot of a particular waterfall, landmark, or landscape. To keep things simple, Claire created her guidebooks in Keynote, the Apple version of PowerPoint, and exported them as a PDF so that it was a universal format for people to download and read. She signed up for an e-commerce platform called Sells, S-E-L-Z, or S-E-L-Z. Sells takes care of the payment using PayPal, as well as the delivery of the guidebook to the buyer. This platform integrates easily into her WordPress website, so that was all she needed.
With those technical pieces in place, Claire published her first guide about Iceland. She says, "I didn't follow the rules when I published my e-book. I didn't plan a launch or a big build-up. I had a bunch of articles about Iceland, and I just wrote at the bottom, 'Hey, if you want more info to plan your trip, check out my travel guide e-book.'" She did put a bunch of information on the description page, though. Her goal was to be as transparent as possible about what was in the book so people knew exactly what they would be getting.
The first day she put the book up on her website, she didn't sell a single copy and was disappointed. But the next day when she woke up, she saw she had sold two guidebooks overnight. She loved the fact that they actually sold while she was sleeping instead of during the day. It made her realize the potential of this product. Still, she didn't spend any time celebrating.
She got back to work and started thinking about what the second guidebook would be. That second book was also about Iceland, specifically focusing on the Ring Road, and she added that to her website. Without any marketing efforts, people kept finding and buying her e-books, usually at least one a day. By early 2016, Claire decided to put some strategy in place to hopefully sell more. She focused on Pinterest, which she says has worked well for her, and her efforts brought in $4,500 in 2016.
She's continued with her free Pinterest marketing. She now has over 4,000 followers and 46,000 unique monthly visitors to her website. And at the time we spoke with her in 2017, her revenue had exceeded $10,000. All of this is done with minimal overhead and very few tools. She uses the free version of Canva to help create images for social media and also uses the same software that came with her laptop.
She does have travel costs, but she says she'd go on the trips regardless. That was what she was doing before she had a product to sell, so she doesn't count them toward her business expenses. Claire says that this side hustle has been part of giving her courage, helping her to start a new life and try to live that life to the fullest, just like her brother did. Claire has enjoyed hearing from her customers about how much her guidebooks have helped them. A lot of them have posted photos at the landmarks and landscapes she sent them to, and she also appreciates how much she's learned about herself in the process.
She said she always saw herself as someone that gets bored easily, but now she's consistently been working on her website for over four years and still loves it. She feels like she's doing new things, honoring the memory of her brother and growing her side income all along the way. Awesome. Congratulations to Claire. I love her focus, her discipline, how she's kind of changed her own life along the way and also how she took something that was completely a hobby, something she was happy to do for free, but then thought one day, "Well, what if I keep doing what I'm doing?" But I also create a way to get paid for it by making this guide.
So I think she took a strategic approach to this because, as I said in the beginning, a lot of travel bloggers really don't get paid. They have an idea of doing something similar, but they don't usually choose a focus like what Claire did in terms of just starting with one country and, like we saw in the story, not trying to provide all the information about everything, but clearly focusing on a specific type of traveler. And Iceland is great for that too because a lot of people go to Iceland to do road trips, to go on this ring road. So since she already had people coming to her website looking for that information, it's not surprising that she's able to convert some of them to purchasing the guides even with her very low-key marketing pitch. I also appreciate this part about how the first day she put her product up, it didn't sell at all, and she was disappointed.
Maybe you've experienced that sometime. I've experienced that before. But then the second day, she wakes up to those two sales and felt so excited. This principle, this moment of empowerment is what I'm hoping to get a lot of our listeners to. If you haven't had that experience yet, even just making one sale for a small amount of money, it really has the potential to change your life or at least give you a whole new perspective about your life.
And if you've listened to the show for a while, you know it can often lead to much more. So I'll look forward to seeing what happens next with Claire. $10,000 this year, part-time, mostly passive income now that the guidebooks are written. So we'll see what happens when she writes her next two guidebooks. Thank you for listening today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
Today's show notes include links to everything I mentioned, including those tools. There was a platform called Sells, which I actually wasn't familiar with before. Canva, which is some free software you can use to design images, as well as Claire's website, of course. In case you're planning to visit Iceland at some point. Those show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/293.
And once again, I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
