Golfer Takes Swing At Content Website

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

In today's story, a sales agency manager transforms his frustration with online golf advice into a thriving website generating $5,000 in monthly income. And it might actually be more than $5,000 in monthly income, in fact, a few years ago, we broadcast a version of this story when he was doing $5,000 a month. So he might even be doing more now. This is part of a remix series, bringing you some of our original stories, our greatest hits from 2017, 2018. These stories are often updated.

If you do happen to have an incredible memory, well, each one is being rerecorded. And if you weren't listening back in 2017 or 2018, these stories are completely new. So as noted, this is about a sales manager. He basically builds this golf website offering advice and such, and he's earning $5,000 plus in monthly income, passive income largely through multiple sources of revenue. So I'm gonna share a couple of tips on SEO, just really simple tips, nothing technical at all, just simple basic things you can do to bring more organic traffic to your website.

Organic traffic, what's that mean? It means free traffic. That's the key point. People searching for terms, they come to your website, you're not paying any advertising or anything else for it. Not only is it free, it can also be consistent.

It can just kind of come every single day, and that's just a wonderful thing. So you wanna make that happen if at all possible. So let's talk about how you might do that. Gonna give you the story and some tips. Golfer takes swing at content website.

That is in fact today's episode. Stay tuned. [Music]

avid golfer John Sherman spent many hours on golf related websites and forums. He enjoyed the online community he found, but he was disappointed by the advice on those forums and blogs and videos. After a couple of years of digging through posts, he realized why.

The majority of the advice was being given by swing instructors looking to boost their authority or fish for clients, not by actual golfers. John wasn't just a golfer, he was a high level amateur player, and he knew he could write better, more valuable content than what he was seeing online. So after being inspired by stories he'd heard of similar businesses, he started his own WordPress blog, practical-golf.com. Since January 2015, he's been a sales manager by day and a golf writer by night. His initial goal was to create insightful content that would outvalue the other stuff out there, but he didn't focus on SEO.

In fact, he really didn't know anything at all about how to rank pages in search engines. Practical golf received most of its visitors through social media for the first year, but John noticed that traffic from Google was starting to become more and more significant. He started to read up on SEO, began playing with a few keyword tools, and before long he was a fanatic, not just about golf, but about search engine optimization. His primary objective was still to write amazing, actionable content, but now he was doing it through a keyword-enlightened approach, and he learned how to optimize his content for searchers. He also tried a few other strategies, including quizzes and giveaways, but nothing worked as well as making content that spoke to his audience and was centered around these high search keywords, and naturally the traffic soared.

John soon began using Google Ads and Amazon affiliate links throughout the site, and quickly began earning him a few hundred dollars a month. Hoping to create another revenue source, he wrote a 30-page e-book called "The Complete Guide to Course Management," and published it on the Kindle Store for $2.99, just three bucks. At the time, there wasn't a lot of competition for golf e-books on Kindle, so that soon began earning a few hundred dollars a month as well. Six months later, John would publish his second e-book, "101 Mistakes All Golfers Make," and "How to Fix Them." He priced this one at $6, or technically $5.99. Because of John's growing authority, this one would go on to become a Kindle bestseller, at least for a few weeks.

A little over a year into the hustle, John started working on a premium membership program. He was enjoying the income from the affiliate links, ads, and e-books, but he knew he could create another revenue source if he made some exclusive content. Now, John was still working full-time at his job, so this took nearly six months to put together. He wanted to include videos from 10 other high-level golfers that he'd met online, and coordinating them was the biggest challenge. Some of them knew how to edit their own videos, but John offered to do that part himself for the few that didn't.

By the end of it, John had created these professional quality tutorials, a few dozen training games to make practicing fun, and a series of audio recordings with successful golfers. There was nothing like it online, at least nothing of that quality. He wrote up a landing page, set the lifetime access price at a low $50, and created the members-only area of his site. Sales didn't skyrocket overnight, but the premium membership did grow quickly over the course of a few months. Just as John had hoped, income from the premium content eventually surpassed the income from ads and affiliate links.

And as he continued to create better and more targeted content, the income went up month after month. Soon, he saw his earnings go up to $6,000 a month, depending on the season and any media coverage he received for his membership. It was a really nice side hustle, especially when you take into account, he started it for next to nothing, just around $100, but he still wanted it to become more. Fast forward another year of steady organic growth. Practical golf now averages 40 to 50,000 unique monthly visitors, and generates an incredible five to $8,000 a month of pure profit.

When we first recorded this story, John was nearing the point where he thought he'd be able to quit his job and become a golf writer and consultant full-time. But to get there, he planned to keep writing reader-focused content and also launch a few new tools. He thinks that a paid listing option for courses may create yet another source of revenue. John's thrilled to be earning so much from his passion, but the bigger joy is the community he's created and the relationships he's built. "I've made tons of friends from around the world," he says.

"The online golf community is great." Sounds like his driving ambition has served him well. [Music]

All right, so a few tips on SEO, just really simple things to do when you're making a content-based website with a lot of articles or videos, whatever the medium is, you've got a topic. So first of all, you choose a focused topic, not just golf, but preferably something more specific than that. You choose the right keywords, and there are tools you can go to. Just search Google keyword tool.

You'll find some paid tools, but there's also free resources as well, where you can find, okay, what are the perfect keywords to target for this focused topic? And then if you're building your blog using a WordPress site, which sidehustleschool.com is built on WordPress, I think like half the internet is, you can use a simple plugin that makes a lot of this SEO process really easy. So you actually don't need to think about it a great deal. You just need to identify those keywords, and then the plugin can do a lot of work for you. Now, of course, John was consistent over the years.

That's probably the biggest thing, not just SEO tricks, but he was consistent, and he made it work. It wasn't a foregone conclusion, but he decided to tee off and hope for the best. Congratulations to him. Thank you so much listeners for being out there. 3,000 plus days and counting.

New episodes every day of the podcast, of course, and the complete archives for free. 3,000 plus episodes, again, all for free at sidehustleschool.com. That's all for today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the "Onward Project."