This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Lifelong Girl Scout earns her side hustle badge. Hey friends, what's up? Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host all throughout 2025. I'm bringing you some remixes of some of our best stories over the years, especially the early years, which was a long, long time ago.
I've gone back and pulled some of the favorites from the archives. This has really been fun to go through stuff and also get some updates in some cases. So if you actually were listening seven years ago, well, some things will be fresh. If you weren't listening seven years ago on this day, well, it's not quite this day, but approximately seven years ago, then all of these stories will be completely new to you. Today, we're gonna talk about a lifelong Girl Scout.
Jody Carlson is her name. She devoted much of her adult life to Girl Scout troops. She had been a Girl Scout and she was volunteering. She had been the leader of a troop for over a decade, but then she had to take some time off and decided to spend some of that time when she couldn't be actively involved with a troop, just kind of working on the side, developing resources. Now, some of these resources were in fact for sale.
She actually gives a ton away, which is great, but she also sells some. And that I think is a wonderful side hustle model. Give away some of your work and make some of it available for sale. We've seen it over and over. It can be very, very effective in lots of different markets.
So let's look at how it worked out for this one. This Girl Scout, she's selling eBooks and guides. Let's talk about how she does it and what the results have been. It's all coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
For Jodi Carlson, the Girl Scouts have been a huge part of her life for over 25 years.
For 12 of those years, she'd been a scout and then 13 as a leader. But when her son was born in March, 2015, Jodi decided it was time to step down from her position and focus that time on her young family. Although she loved the challenge of her new home life, she then missed the volunteering and organizing she'd devoted so many years to. She knew she couldn't commit herself to a schedule with lots of fixed appointments, like she'd have to do as a troop leader, but she still wanted a meaningful way to contribute to their community and inspire those young visionaries. The year before her son was born, Jodi had created a website to share with her local troop.
Shout out troop number 80671 in a small city in Ohio. She made the website to share thoughts and advice with other leaders around the country. She'd also written a small ebook to sell at $5, just enough to cover the gas to get to the meetings, and was surprised that after six months, people from the other side of the country were still buying and reading it. She felt that this site, if she could expand her products and the information, would be the perfect way to help the broader community and make a little money to put toward her student loans. She decided to upgrade and called the project Leader Connecting Leaders.
Initial startup costs were a grand total of $16 for a domain name. She did all the design herself. She was already paying for Adobe products for her day job and had access to a free hosting service. So she spent that $16 on the domain and was ready to go in just a few minutes. Now Jodi's second step was to find out where the current traffic to her site was coming from and how she could increase it.
So she added Google Analytics to her site, it's free, and found that most of her visits came through Pinterest from a few images she'd shared in the past. Now this played right into her hands as a designer. So Jodi created a new image for each of her articles and shared them on Pinterest. This has allowed her to generate traffic even months after the article was initially shared. She also used the power of social media to market the business in other ways.
By running competitions, giveaways, and writing shareable articles, Jodi's been able to generate a lot of traffic through Facebook. This also gave her the confidence to try running Facebook ads for her products, but that had more limited success. Now I mentioned that a lot of the information Jodi gives away for free. There are long-form articles, tutorials, and how-to guides that give most of her readers most of the information they need to run a successful and entertaining Girl Scout troop. But Jodi puts a small price between $3 to $5 on some of the specific resources, like activity booklets, printouts, and games, to solve specific leader problems in just a few clicks, and with a quick download from her site.
So with that low price point, what do you think happens? Do you think she just makes a small amount of money? Well actually, Jodi was able to generate $3,000 to $3,500 per month with these low-priced products. In fact, halfway through the first year of our podcast, she was on track to double the previous year's profits. So this is going pretty well.
And Jodi says there are two important parts to her business she would recommend to other listeners who want to do something similar. It is automation and an engaged mailing list. Okay, so Jodi spends four hours a month using tools like Hootsuite to create and schedule updates that go live even when she's not at the computer. And she sends multiple emails a month, providing extra information to her most loyal readers, letting them know about new articles, ideas, and products, and building this trust, she says, has been integral to her success online. If there's any secret sauce in her project, it is understanding the Scout leader's pain points.
After 25 years in the Girl Scouts, she has been there, she has experienced them all. So creating products that would have solved her problems and writing the copy in an empathetic way to the struggles of other leaders has allowed her to grow her business without needing to be salesy. Now she says the best part of the success has been getting feedback from the leader she's been able to help. She gets motivation from receiving a message, explaining how her products have transformed meetings and excursions, especially when they come from towns and cities not even close to where she lives. Jodi's toying with the idea of starting a new side hustle to run alongside her current one, since her current one exists somewhat passively at least.
She's gonna continue making useful products for Girl Scout leaders and inspiring new female leaders across the country, but you don't need to be a Girl Scout to be inspired by Jodi to head out and start your own side hustle. [Music]
Well, this type of content marketing is very simple. It's not complicated at all. The skill is in understanding target markets, other Girl Scout troop leaders, and knowing what they need. And then in terms of applying it, it's not that hard.
As noted, she spent $16. She built the basic website herself. She priced her products very, very affordably. So the skill is in understanding that, but this type of content marketing has been going on for a long, long time. It's not going anywhere.
These days we have AI and all these crazy things, but yet people are still paying for this and people still need help and basic resources. So I like stories like these because they show the importance of just being helpful, creating an offer, and doing it in a way that allows you to generate passive income. Also a quick little tip from Jodi, install analytics on your website so you can see where people are coming from. That is also important. All right, I'm gonna leave you with that today.
Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Thank you so much for listening. We have a new episode every day. I'm so excited to make the podcast for you. 2,951 episodes and counting, but much more is on the way and the best is yet to come.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
