This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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How I built a supplement guide people actually trust. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This supplement guide, it's actually not for me. It's from one of our case studies.
He built a successful business, I think $40,000 a year on the side, part-time, largely passive once it was set up. And so he took this approach of affiliate sales. It started with a single TikTok video about magnesium supplements. I do actually take magnesium. I do a little calm drink most nights before going to bed.
So maybe I need to check out what this guy's got. Anyway, the video didn't just get views, it got trust. People started asking questions. The creator realized there was a real opportunity, not just to promote products, but to hopefully help people navigate this messy and confusing landscape. You know, there's a lot of supplements out there and a lot of them are not that great.
So his goal was to build a no BS supplement guide, monetize it with affiliate links. He eventually added a newsletter and other stuff. So it's not a million dollar exit, but it's brought in $40,000, as I said. So that's pretty cool. Let's hear a bit more about how it worked.
This is part of our Throwback Thursday series, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. So this is Jesse, Jesse from North Carolina, I believe. Let's pass the microphone to him. I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap up. - Hey, I'm Jesse.
I live in North Carolina. I never set out to make money online. I just got annoyed by how hard it was to find solid info on supplements. Like every time I Googled something about magnesium or vitamin D, I'd land on a spammy site full of ads, fake reviews, or medical advice that felt like it was copied from Wikipedia. So I made a quick TikTok talking about how to choose a magnesium supplement that's actually bioavailable.
And to my surprise, it blew up. Comments poured in. Which one did you take? Is this the same as Calm? And to my favorite, tell me more.
So I did. I made a Notion page comparing types of magnesium, and I linked to a few brands that I actually used and added affiliate links through Fullscript and Amazon. That Notion page got passed around like crazy. I turned it into a standalone website called Supplement Clarity, and I added other beginner-friendly guides, like how to read a multivitamin label or what proprietary blend really means. I'm no doctor, but I make it clear.
And I've done my homework, and I'm transparent about why I recommend certain brands, but that's been key to this site's growth. Like it feels like it was made by someone for regular people, not by a brand trying to sell pills. So after building the site, I added a weekly newsletter with quick supplement explainers, ingredient breakdowns, and the occasional skip this trend PSA. I also started repurposing content into SEO blog posts. And the site now gets about 18,000 visits a month, mostly from Organic Search and Pinterest, which has been a great secret hack actually.
I've made just over $40,000 in affiliate income since launch, but most of it comes from three products alone, magnesium glycinate, a third-party tested multivitamin, and a really good fish oil. The affiliate payouts, they vary, but Amazon's tiny, but Fullscript pays recurring commissions if someone reorders. I also signed up with a few clean brands directly using Sharer Sale. And my biggest fear right now, honestly, it's Google updates and AI answer boxes. I've already noticed my top performing blog posts, best magnesium types ranked, dropping in traffic because AI overviews just show the answer directly.
So I've started focusing more on my email list 'cause that's something that I can control. I've got about 6,500 subscribers now and open rates are consistently over 40%. And even if it all vanished tomorrow, I'm proud of it. I helped a lot of people make informed decisions. And I've also learned a lot myself along the way.
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Hey, Jesse, thanks so much. Thanks for your service as well. I'm gonna assume that you are in fact offering helpful information and helping people get away from all of the not helpful information about supplements that are out there. It is a world that lacks a lot of transparency. So if someone can come along and provide some honest recommendations that are truly helpful built on evidence-based science, then I can imagine that that is valuable.
Listeners, let me know what you think, who you'd like to see featured from our archives of thousands of episodes, thousands, I did say, it is in fact thousands, 3,218 so far and counting. If you have a question and update about your sidehustleschool.com, where you can also download or stream every one of those episodes completely free. New episodes drop every day as well. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
