This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there listeners, what's up? Welcome back. We are kicking off a brand new week. I am heading home from my trip to Australia. I'm gonna be in Portland, Oregon for two days, then I'm going to Victoria, Canada later in the week.
If you'd like to follow along with my Instagram stories, the account is 193 countries, 193 countries. And today you can follow me all the way to India, or at least you can follow this story, which comes from India. It's a really good one. It's about an IBM employee from India who is really good at spreadsheets. And he creates these tutorials, goes on to earn $3,500 a month from it.
And the funny thing is, this isn't the only Indian guy I know who is really good at spreadsheets and has started a side hustle of making money, teaching other people how to use them. Long ago when I wrote the $100 startup, I did this call for stories. And I remember hearing from this guy who wrote in and said, "Oh, I live in India and I help people with their spreadsheets." Like I'm an expert at Microsoft Excel. And to be honest with you, I thought, what a boring story. Like I'm trying to get people excited and motivated.
Do I want to write about someone whose side hustle is spreadsheets? And then he told me he earned something like $100,000 a year from this project. And I was like, okay, I'm paying attention now. How does that work? And it was one of the first things that influenced my thinking that boring side hustles sometimes are the best.
If you can find something that really helps people and you create a product or service out of it, does it matter if it's not the most sexy topic? In fact, for some people, spreadsheets probably are sexy. Anyway, that was a different guy. His name was Mr. Spreadsheet.
I don't think it was his legal name, but that's what he went by online. Today is a totally different person who is also an Excel spreadsheet guru from India. As I mentioned, he goes on to earn a lot of money and I'll tell you exactly how he does it. Let's say thanks to our sponsor and then the exciting thrilling topic of Microsoft Excel. Stay tuned.
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Today's story comes from Sumit Bansal in New Delhi, India. His previous job was as a marketing manager at IBM, doing data analysis, storyboarding, and client presentations. His work required him to use a lot of Excel spreadsheets in PowerPoint. Don't we all love Excel and PowerPoint? Well, not all of us do, but a lot of people use them every day.
And that's how his side hustle became Trump Excel, a blog sharing tips and shortcuts on spreadsheets that he used at work. Sumit started this hustle which is now his full-time work several years ago because he wanted to share answers to a lot of questions that his colleagues were asking. When he got a positive response from those colleagues and from friends, it gave him more confidence that his blog was useful. He started that blog on Blogspot since it needed minimal technical skills. And he then migrated to WordPress after he'd written 10 posts and was comfortable with the process.
There he began to write tutorials and create videos every week. He signed up for Google AdSense where he'd get paid when website visitors clicked on ads. This wasn't an immediate gold rush. His first few months, he earned a few dollars each month. Traffic grew and the payouts increased over time, but not by much.
It wasn't until a year and a half after starting the blog that he found a real way to make money. That was by creating online courses. He launched his first online course in October, 2014, and within an hour of sending the email, he got five sales. This was a pretty basic course. In fact, he called it Excel course, not the most imaginative title.
Those first few sales, however, affirmed his faith in the blog he'd worked on all that time. He celebrated with a few friends, bought himself a few books he'd wanted to read, and then got back to work. As I said, that was three years ago. Now, Sumit has three courses. That basic Excel course, which sells for $127, an Excel dashboard course, which sells for $297, and a Visual Basics for Application course, which also goes for $297.
They don't all sell every day, but more often than not, at some point during the day, he'll get a notification that either $127 or $297 has arrived in his bank account. Not only that, he often gets positive feedback on how these courses are helping people do better work at the office. He recently got an email from one of his students who mentioned how he used the techniques shown in the course to create a dashboard. That employee then received a standing ovation. Another student emailed him to tell him how the course helped her move from contract employment to a full-time job.
Right now, Sumit makes about $3,500 in monthly profit from his tutorials, a significant income in India. His expenses include rent at a co-working space, some important subscriptions, and an email marketing tool. Let's talk about some tools and logistics of how this works. When he first started the blog, Sumit didn't know much about search engines, and he didn't care. When he realized he was getting most of his traffic from search, he spent some time learning how search engine optimization worked so that he could get more traffic.
He found that creating new content helped gain traffic, but so did optimizing existing content, which was a quick win since it didn't take as long and the impact was visible much faster. Even when he wasn't making money, he still invested in premium plug-ins and email automation tools. This paid off since he now has an email list of 25,000 people and a social media following of around 50,000 people, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. This work helps him with content ideas too 'cause he does keyword research to make sure he's getting relevant traffic from search engines, but most of his new content is based on questions from readers. As soon as someone joins Sumit's email list, they get into a specific funnel, and then based on what actions they take, they get customized content.
In case someone isn't opening his emails, they automatically get into a re-engagement workflow and they eventually get deleted if they never open the messages. This allows him to keep only engaged readers on his list. He also has ways to market to readers who haven't become customers, but then stop pitching them after they've purchased. So for example, if you buy one of his Excel courses, the software immediately tags the email as a customer and they don't receive any further pitches for that course. This is something similar to what I do.
At the end, I'll come back and tell you a bit more about how that works 'cause it can be really powerful. Now, why is this project working? Why is it popular? Sumit thinks it's because it's difficult to structure such a course. His isn't the only spreadsheet course out there, but many similar courses either don't cover all the topics or they end up overwhelming the student.
He took a lot of time to make sure his is structured in a way where he covers all the essentials but doesn't get into anything unnecessary. If you're planning on doing something similar, the first step is to find a topic. Sumit suggests you analyze similar websites in whatever niche or topic you're thinking of. See what kind of content is getting better engagement. You can also use several free keyword research tools.
I've got a list of them here and I'll link them up in the notes. Last, if you already have an audience or a social media following, you can ask them what topic they want to learn about. Then with that information you go and do the keyword research on that specific topic. Sumit also recommends creating useful and comprehensive content on just one specific topic. So if you're a tech blogger, he recommends focusing on just one technology and try to create content for that.
Don't try to write an all things technology blog. Choose something specific and that will help with both readers and search engines. What's coming up next for him? Well, Sumit is now focusing on creating two new online courses. He's also trying to branch into face-to-face workshops for his readers and for corporations.
Check your formulas, the spreadsheet hustle is thriving. So a funny story. I mentioned to telling you about this one that his first course was called Excel Course, which is a pretty unimaginative title. But it reminded me of when I started my blog, The Art of Nonconformity. This was almost 10 years ago now.
And when I started that blog, I didn't have any intention of creating a business from it. I was just trying to chronicle my worldview, my experiences, this quest I was on to visit every country in the world. But over time, I realized that people were asking me the same questions over and over about how I traveled. And so I thought, well, maybe I'll create like a little travel guide or something. And I did, and it went well.
And then I created another one and kind of everything built from there. But the funny thing is that first product of mine was titled something very similar to what Sumit did. He called his Excel Course and I called mine Discount Airfare Guide, which was true and descriptive, but it's also a pretty boring title. Not much creativity, not much imagination in that title. And I did almost no marketing for it, but just like Sumit saw, the first day I had sales, it made something like $1,000.
And I had put a few weeks of work into it. So it's not like I just made $1,000 for nothing. But when that happened, I saw the potential because I was like, okay, I put some work into this, but now it's done, now it's out. It made $1,000 the first day. Maybe it won't make $1,000 every day.
And of course it didn't. But it did go on to sell every day. I think I priced it really affordably like 25 bucks or something. And it was really exciting over the next few weeks and months even to go about my day. And whenever I checked my email at different points in the day, there'd be a notification that said, you've got money, here's $25.
So I went on from there and eventually I got better at titling my products. I created something called Frequent Flyer Master. I created a subscription service called Travel Hacking Cartel, which is actually still in existence. You can check that out at travelhacking.org. But just like in today's story, it all kind of began with that first product.
And that first product began by paying attention. And the paying attention led to taking action, which is crucial because if I had the idea, but never did anything with it, well, that wouldn't have brought me anywhere. So when you pay attention, when you experiment, you take action, not everything you do is gonna work out. But instead of just asking yourself, okay, what if this doesn't work? What if I fail?
You should also ask yourself, hey, what if it does work? What if this does bring me to something greater? What if people actually buy this thing that I make? What would that look like for me? What would that mean to me?
And I don't know about you, but I've seen over and over in lots of different people, how fulfilling and purposeful and meaningful it can be when you make something and strangers come along and value it enough to pay for it. It's really great. And that relates to my core mission with Side Hustle School, to make that happen for all of our listeners, at least all of them who are willing to do the work. So if that's you, remember I am cheering you on. This show is here every day to support you.
Remember as well, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. There are a number of tools and resources associated with this episode. I didn't want to go through all of them in the story because there are a lot of details. But if you're interested in learning more, just come check out the show notes, we've got a list of them there. And those notes are at sidehustleschool.com/387.
I'll also include a link for a free trial with the email software that we use that allows us to do some of that same kind of automation that Sumit does. It's a really interesting and powerful thing and you can check it out for yourself, try it at no charge, see how you like it. I hope you enjoyed this story of the Indian spreadsheet guru. I've got another story for you tomorrow, but for now I'll sign off and say farewell. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
