This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I have the privilege of bringing you a different true story every day, someone who starts an income generating project. Not a part-time job, not just working harder, but something that actually has the potential to make money for you.
And today's story illustrates that principle very well, features the affiliate model of side hustling, where someone earns money exclusively from a website where visitors click links, then that person gets permission. This model is less popular or at least less common than it used to be, but it still works for some people in some industries. In fact, choosing the right industry is actually a critical part of success in this field, so I'll discuss that more at the end. For now, the story of a digital camera blogger in Montreal who snaps his way to passive income is coming right up. [Music]
Today's story comes from Itai Denan in Montreal, Canada.
By day, he's a software engineer and his side hustle is Neo Camera, a website and blog focused on digital cameras and camera gear. For years, Itai had been knowledgeable about digital cameras. He'd share information with his friends who would pass it on to their friends. After several years of doing that, he decided to put what he knew online. That's when he started Neo Camera and he decided it would be supported by ads and affiliate programs.
One of his first steps was to sign up for AdSense, which gives him a few pennies every time someone clicks on an ad. And one of the first milestones was to get it to cover hosting and domain costs, but then it grew into a real passive income source, earning anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a thousand dollars or more each month. This is all from startup costs of just $17 for a domain and $55 for a year's worth of web hosting. Neo Camera started as just 10 pages, but has since grown to a lot more, 40,000 pages in fact, with millions of visitors arriving every year. Itai would add pages whenever he tried a new camera or a new gear, whenever he read a book on the subject or just whenever he had something to share.
The site has buying guides, camera reviews, photography articles, search engines to find cameras and lenses and tools to compare them all. There are a lot of websites about digital cameras out there. Itai thinks that web visitors became interested in his because he made the process of choosing a digital camera simple. A lot of the other sites would have 30 plus page reviews dissecting every menu item in each camera. But Itai's reviews were just three pages long max and only covered the essential things that people really wanted to know.
What can the camera do? How easy will it be to use? Oh, and how well does it take photos? That's kind of important, right? Simplicity brought the readers to the site and his no nonsense approach to evaluating cameras kept them coming back.
Neo Camera grew to those millions of visitors organically. Traffic comes from search results and people on forums and blogs sharing links. At one point Itai tried AdWords and even hired an expert and paid for some campaigns, but he noticed the new traffic went away once he stopped paying. He then decided it was the wrong tool for his site since he's not actually selling anything directly. He only earns money when people click the links and sometimes when they click the links to purchase something.
But in addition to that money, the site has led to other opportunities. Neo Camera made Itai an expert in the field and he's gotten a number of speaking engagements from it. One of the companies who asked him to speak also asked him to teach photography, which he did in the evenings while working his day job at a pharmaceutical company. At some point he had full-time income from his day job, extra cash from teaching, and the monthly passive income from the site. Going forward, he hopes to refocus the site's visitor base 'cause it has declined significantly since beginning a shift that he traces to the growing popularity of people just using their phones to take pictures.
As iPhones and various Android phones have gotten better, fewer and fewer people are actually purchasing an expensive digital camera. His site had seen up to 1.3 million monthly visitors at one point during the height of the digital camera market, but it's now down to about half a million each month, which of course is still a huge number. Itai says that the relative decline of interest in digital cameras has taken down a few competitors and the reason his site survived is because it was a side hustle rather than a full-time job. If he can better monetize with a smaller number of monthly visitors, Itai hopes to be able to continue at his day job, but negotiate a reduced workload that he can spend his free time traveling. And while he's traveling, he'll be taking photos with one of his many review cameras.
[Music]
Well, it's interesting about the decline of digital camera interest relative to phones. I had not heard that before, but of course it makes perfect sense. And my favorite part of researching Itai's story was this differentiation that he focused on about how there were all these other digital camera sites that have 30 plus page reviews, but his reviews were simple. It focused on what people really wanted to know. It does make sense that there's also a market for geeks and hardcore folks who want that 30 page plus review featuring every menu item and so on, but he recognized that the average person researching and planning to purchase a digital camera doesn't care about all that.
So can you still do this model? Well, yes, we've featured a number of episodes on the show. They're doing something similar. In fact, one of my favorite stories that I tell over and over, actually in this side of the book as well, was featured in episode eight. And this is the story about a guy who goes on a cruise and comes back and essentially creates a cruise website doing exactly what Itai is doing here with digital cameras.
And in that case, I think the last I heard, he was doing something like $4,000 a month from that website. So yes, it is still possible, but it's important to choose the right industry. Now, how do you know which industry is good to choose? Well, you choose an industry in which there are advertisers trying to reach people searching for that topic. So if you think about both of these examples, cruising and digital cameras, somebody searching for a digital camera, especially a particular model, there's a pretty good chance that they're thinking of buying it.
Digital cameras are not cheap. So the camera manufacturers, as well as retailers, have incentive to try to reach those consumers, get them to make a purchase. Same with cruising. Most people who are searching for cruise information, especially about a particular cruise line or a particular itinerary, something specific, they are thinking about making that booking. So if you're that cruise line, or perhaps that cruise line's competitor, wouldn't you be willing to spend money to reach them?
So if you're thinking about, okay, what is the kind of site that I would create like this, if you don't see an obvious connection between that topic and products and services that companies are selling, preferably for a high price, and you might want to think about doing something different. Because your odds of success in this model really depend on volume, on getting enough people to come to the site and click those links. And generally speaking, the way it works with AdWords and AdSense, the pricier the item, the more competitive the field, the higher the cost. So all things being equal, you want to find a market that has those higher cost products and services. Well, congrats to Itai.
I'm pretty happy with my phone as my camera. I'm not a great photographer at all. But whenever I meet somebody who's looking for a digital camera, I know where to send them now. And if you'd like to check out that site, or if you'd like to hear the episode about the guy who goes on a cruise, comes back and starts a similar project, our show notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/349. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you're doing well.
As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. I'll be back tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
