This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Welcome to Side Hustle School. It's Chris Guillebeau, your host. I'm live in Austin this week, hosting my new event, Neurodiversion. It is a celebration of unique minds, all for people with ADHD, autism, other neurodiverse types of thinking, and just the whole broad community. Parents, partners, clinicians, educators, and so on.
I've been working on this for a year, so it's exciting to see it come to action. You can learn more at neurodiversion.org, perhaps join the waiting list for a future event. But in the meantime, obviously the podcast continues. We don't take days off here at Side Hustle School, seven days a week means seven days a week, every single day of the year. And I'm excited for this episode, Throwback Thursday, YouTube tutorials help immigrants gain citizenship.
I really enjoyed working on this story years ago, when we first featured Danielle. I think we've had her on a couple of different times over the years, over nine years, it's been a while. And she's been going for a while, teaching citizenship classes and civics lessons on YouTube. This business has sworn in a huge increase in subscribers and income. She's doing really well, helping a lot of people.
I love this business model because she's providing very helpful information. People in this field sometimes get ripped off, they pay too much for courses or study aids and so on. And she's just like, hey, all the information is available for free, come and learn from me. She makes it very easy to follow. And because it's YouTube, she gets paid through ads.
So it works for her as well. All right, so let's hear directly from Danielle. Let's hear about that huge jump that she had in subscribers and income, since we first featured her long ago. I'll come back at the end with a few words of wrap up. But for now, here is Danielle Feng.
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Hi there, this is Danielle from Essa Group in Washington, DC. My side hustle is teaching citizenship classes and civics lessons on YouTube. It was featured on episode 94. I am currently teaching citizenship classes and ESOL classes in the community. I volunteer with different organizations in the community doing that.
And a lot of my students, because the classes run eight to 12 weeks at a time, they can't always make every class. So I started putting my lessons on YouTube for them so they could catch up and review. And what happened was I noticed that people from all over starting to watch the lessons and workshops and started gaining a following. Then what we did was we turned on the monetization for the YouTube channel and the videos I was making just to kind of see what would happen. And it really took off, it was surprised.
And now I feel like I'm connected through this YouTube channel with people all over the world asking questions and trying to figure out the process. And it's developed into not just going through the steps of what you have to know for the interview, but also I do a lot of interpreting the government websites 'cause government websites can be so intimidating, especially it's like link after link after link. And English is obviously their second language and it's just so confusing, the amount of red tape and forms they have to fill. So I work on just bringing it down to very simplistic terms and step number one, step number two, go here, fill out this form this way. And then I've also developed a network of people with different law organizations and different citizenship organizations around the country that I could work with.
And then if someone is having trouble, they write to me right on my channel, I try to actually answer every single question that comes in. And if they're having trouble connecting with what I'm trying to explain, I could connect them directly with somebody in their area. And so it's kind of, it's teaching citizenship, teaching ESOL, teaching how to do the interview, but then also being very specific in helping them through the process. I was going to go back to 94 to see how many subscribers I had. But I do remember I was making about $2,000 a month.
I'm not sure how many subscribers. But since then, I'm continuing to update my lessons and the videos to reflect all the changes in the current administration. But now I have over 93,000 subscribers. And yeah, and at 100,000 subscribers, YouTube award will award me like a silver creator award. Not sure what all that entails, but it's a recognition for getting to 100,000 subscribers.
So I have that kind of goal in mind now before when I was like, ooh, my goal was 25,000 and 50,000. And I'm like, oh no, I gotta get to 100,000. So I'm at 93,000 subscribers. And actually from $2,000 a month, I'm making basically about $10,500 a month on YouTube right now. So it has been quite the increase in income, which has been great since I have one child in college, and another one coming up.
So it has been really, really helpful in that respect. And, you know, turned into, it's more intensive, but I'm actually really happy doing it. And it brings so much, it still brings so much, like joy to me every day. And every day is different because people's stories are incredible and they're all so different. I think that my YouTube channel has been successful because I do really try to work hard on building a positive community.
And like I said, I spend a couple hours every day answering questions and researching things for people. Sometimes it'll take me two seconds to answer a question. Other times I'll spend an hour researching this one question for one person. And, but basically building this positive community where then they're able to talk and especially with the subject matter that the channel could go. You know, I get some pretty hateful comments here and there, but they're just gone, just kind of like, I don't even pay attention anymore.
And they're just deleted. And I don't allow them in the community. So kind of really growing that safe, positive community, I think keeps people coming back. [Music]
Well, if you can't tell, I'm a big fan of Danielle and her work. Go and check it out for yourself on YouTube.
Search for Essa Group, E-S-S-A Group, Essa Group on YouTube. You're gonna find just tons of videos and see exactly how it works with the business model. So as people view these videos, lots of people typically, at least some of the more popular ones, then YouTube shows ads on those videos. She gets paid. And again, she's just providing a very helpful service.
So well done. There's something that you can do as well. Listeners, you can do something like this. Maybe it's not even YouTube, maybe it's not even teaching, but there's some knowledge you have, a skill that you have, something that you have developed over time, and there's a way to take that and turn it into perhaps passive income, just like what Danielle has done here. So thank you, Danielle, for being a wonderful example of that.
Thank you listeners for being out there. New episodes out every day, of course, and you can access the complete archives of Side Hustle School, including other episodes from Danielle, other episodes about YouTube, other episodes about teaching or education, transferring knowledge you have into a format that people can consume and pay for, or otherwise access in a way that gets you paid, like what she's done. All of that is available for free at sidehustleschool.com. And whatever you're up to today, I hope you take care of yourself. Thanks for being there.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
