Aussie Engineer Moves to Farm, Earns Passive Income

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

[Music]

What's up, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau coming to the end of Thanksgiving week, at least in the United States, if you're listening in real time. I've been enjoying telling you these stories this week. I hope you've been enjoying them too.

I hope something in them is interesting or helpful or inspiring. Today's is about an Aussie engineer, an Australian guy who works as an engineer and is also a pretty passionate cyclist. He ends up moving to a farm in Australia and earning passive income. He does this first through an ebook, he writes, and I'll tell you how that came to be. And then it expands to affiliate income, some other guides, and I think a couple other things he's doing as well.

So as usual, I'll tell you where he got this idea, how it came to be, some of the tools and resources that allowed him to make this happen, and of course, what the results have been and what do they mean to him. All of those details are coming right up. [Music]

In 2009, Tim Marsh from Australia took his first trip to France. He had a purpose, to follow the Tour de France and do Le Top du Tour, the mass participation cycle sporting event where amateur cyclists race the same route as a Tour de France. Tim is an admitted planning obsessive, so he spent hours making all the arrangements.

Had there been a guidebook to help him, it could have saved him a lot of time, but he couldn't find one, so you probably know what happens next. On his long flight back to Australia from that French adventure, Tim wrote the first draft of that ebook. It wasn't that hard because he knew exactly what he wanted to say. It was just a matter of chronicling it, setting out the different sections, putting little tips and resources. And after laying it out on the plane, Tim tidied it up further, added some photos, and he sent it off to a company that helped him publish it.

That process took a few months, so during that time, he decided that his experience would also make for a great blog. That was the start of Valo Nomad, a website for cycling holidays and adventurers, featuring e-books and guides, product reviews, nutrition info, training insights, travel tips, and more. After publishing the first ebook, he got to work creating more resources. Now, as you could probably guess, Tim is an avid cyclist. He works as an engineer in the health industry in Australia, a job that he loves, and uses his side hustle as supplemental income.

But that's not all. Tim is also a Melbourne escapee. In 2011, he and his wife moved to the far north coast of New South Wales and now live on a 10-acre hobby farm with chooks, which is slang for chicken, cows, and goats. Time is of great value to Tim, and his side hustle is passive income. It takes effort for him to grow it, but it takes minimal effort for him to maintain it.

Getting started, he used a free WordPress website, paid a couple hundred dollars for a custom theme and hosting, and started a free MailChimp account for email. His sales of affiliate commissions are currently in the $400 to $700 a month range, in addition to sales of e-books and prepaid SIM cards for cell phone use abroad. Now, this isn't a ton of money, of course, but once again, it's completely passive. After Tim got his first sale, he thought, wow, I guess this actually works, but now how do I get another one? That's when he began building out further resources.

And here are a couple of resources that helped him. To create landing pages, Tim started with a service called Lead Pages, but changed to Lendingi after getting a deal for life through AppSumo, a website that features heavily discounted software. Another notable program is Convert Player for video marketing that helps turn viewers into paying customers. I realize that's four resources, I just gave you quickly, so don't worry, we're gonna link all of these up on the show notes, as always. And before we summarize, let's talk about money-back guarantees for a moment, because Tim offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, even on digital products.

And I thought this was interesting to highlight, because sometimes people ask me, like, don't you worry about getting scammed? If you sell an ebook or something that people can download, can't they just download it and then ask for a refund right away? And Tim's answer, which is basically the same as mine, which is that instead of worrying about a small amount of money and having that person resent the whole process and become a negative promoter, Tim wants people to be happy and come away thinking, like, what awesome service? And eager to tell their friends about it. So it's some goodwill that also makes good business sense.

And by the way, in thousands of sales, he's refunded a total of five e-books. So not a huge deal. Tim's advice to fellow hustlers, especially someone like him, who wanted to take something that they were knowledgeable about, distill this information and create a community, find a way to sell these resources to them, his advice is to just start producing. If you are content-driven, whether it's written or video or audio, just create. Put it up somewhere and start collecting email addresses.

Don't sweat the website design, just get it up. He also says, don't spend money on the stuff you don't need, where you can begin with a free product or service, use that to your advantage. Not surprisingly, I hugely agree with that as well. Tim's next passive income goal is to get to the point where he can consistently cover his mortgage from that money that's coming in that he doesn't do anything for. Of course, he still has his day job, and he's got some other parts of the side hustle that he does more active work for, but this way he and his family will have some spare cashflow for holidays.

Because in his words, there are still a lot of mountains he needs to ride. [Music]

Well, cycling is a sport and industry where a lot of people are really invested in it. Like if you get serious doing this, you do it every weekend, you subscribe to magazines, and you also buy a bunch of gear. That gear is not usually inexpensive. And for people who are hardcore, there are also training camps or extended activities like this Laetat du Tour that is basically an amateur tour to France.

So combining his experience and thinking about how he could help other cyclists, allowed Tim to create this project that now brings in that passive income. He does that with no pressure, and I think that's really important. He has a day job. He's not trying to live off that money right now, because if he was, or if that was the goal for everyone, it might be easy to look at some of these stories and say like, well, you know, he can't live off of $700 a month. But the thing is, that's not really the point.

He's not trying to live off of $700 a month. He's trying to build this asset for himself, on track to covering his mortgage, and maybe at some point it will grow well beyond this. But even at this point, it's still a clear side hustle success. Wherever you are in the world today, I hope you're doing well. Hope you're thinking about something you can do to create more freedom for yourself.

Perhaps that kind of passive income that Tim has experienced. And if you wanna find the show notes for today's episode, where I'm gonna link to his site and all of those resources I mentioned, some of them might be helpful to you, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/329. That's for episode 329. I'll be back tomorrow with the weekly recap. Always love bringing that to you.

Until then, I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]