This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello friends, listeners. Welcome back to Side Hustle School. I am your host, Chris Guillebeau. Question for you today. Are you a detail-oriented person?
Well, if so, you have a valuable skill. Speaking as someone who is not always great at the details, I have a lot of respect for people who are of this concentration, this focus, that are able to kind of go through stuff piece by piece. It's so important. Like I have no doubt of its importance. I just tend to go pretty quickly with stuff sometimes, and I miss some details.
So with the show, for example, I'm really fortunate to work with my assistant, Whitney, because Whitney is a detail-oriented person. And she does so many things so much better than I could. She does all of our scheduling now. She works with our writers, with the people who are gonna be on the show, does all the wonderful show notes that you can see on the site, fixes the site when it breaks, probably because I broke it. She's just really great at that stuff.
So if you two are a detail-oriented person like her, as I said, it's a valuable skill, and there are probably multiple ways that you can take that skill and apply it to your new side hustle. Today's story, not shocking, is somebody who does exactly that. It's actually from a guy who's trying to get out of debt and improve his finances, and he is this detail-oriented person, particularly when it comes to reading blog posts or reading any kind of online content, I suppose. So in this story, you'll hear how he takes that skill and turns it into an all-new project that makes at least $1,000 a month. And it's just getting started.
As always, I will bring you that story after this quick shout-out to today's sponsor. [Music]
For TV director, Lenny Braun, it was time to do something about his personal finances. After a few years of neglect, they'd become a bit of a mess, and he was determined to get them back on track. He decided he would start reading personal finance blogs and applying their principles right away. So he became a regular reader of sites like Mr. Money Mustache and Budgets Are Sexy
before making his way through the blogosphere to find lesser-known writers too. While reading so many blogs, Lenny began to notice that all of these writers occasionally suffered from the same problem. Typos and grammatical errors would find their way into their posts, and they'd still be there days, weeks, months, or even years sometimes after the article was posted. It was a shame, he thought, that bloggers with such good content could be let down by such a small mistake. Lenny doesn't like to skim anything when he reads.
He takes his time and devours each section of a post or column as an individual chunk. This means he retains more of the information, but he's also hypersensitive to errors. It was in this problem he saw an opportunity to improve his personal finances and help these bloggers improve their work. Since he was gonna be reading the articles anyway, he could offer to proofread them for a small fee, and that way his favorite bloggers could post their work with full confidence. Lenny decided to brand himself as the blog proofreader.
He bought the domain name and used a free template to create a landing page for his site. It's short and basic, but he likes that it gets straight to the point. The domain and the web hosting were his only startup costs. In fact, it cost him less than $100 to have that website up for an entire year. Once that basic site was finished, he turned his attention to pitching the bloggers he was reading.
He chose his favorite one, and after a few deep breaths, finally built up the courage to write to her. She responded quickly, but wasn't interested. Refusing to be defeated, Lenny saw the positive in the fact that she'd replied, so he moved on to the next person and then the next. When it comes to pitching, Lenny has a simple formula. Be honest, be nice, don't waste their time, and add value.
One part of the strategy is to add that value upfront. When he sends his pitch, he'll highlight a portion of their blog post that contains a mistake and provide an improvement for it in the email. If they like the work he's done, they can use it for free and consider working with him further. If not, at least he's helped somebody out that he's been reading for free for the past few months. He also knows that because he's pointing out a mistake that someone's made, it's important to frame their mistake positively and not make it feel like he's rubbing it in their face.
When it feels like you're a friend who's there to help, not a critic who's trying to trip them up, your pitch will be better received. It took a lot of pitches before Lenny got his first bite. He was often told thanks but no thanks by the bloggers he'd write to, but he stayed consistent and kept pitching when he found new errors in their posts. The persistence eventually paid off. He landed a contract with a personal finance company that published a blog, and this contract gave him a substantial amount of content to read and comment on each month.
He was also given a great opportunity by blogger Jay Money who placed him on his own recommended list of resources for personal finance bloggers. This has helped him to bring in new customers without having to go out and look for them himself. But still, he does go out and look for them. He's got a couple tools he uses to do that. The first one is a site called Rockstar Finance that shares three new personal finance blog posts a day.
These come from a wide range of blogs and often contain new blogs that he's never seen before. The second is Feedly, which is an RSS reader, allows him to read lots of different content from different sites. So whenever new posts show up in his feed, he can be one of the first to read them and look for fresh mistakes or new people to try and pitch to. This combination of pitching and exposure has helped Lenny to earn around $1,000 extra each month from proofreading the posts. Although he points out he should probably share that money with his wife because she proofreads what he's proofread to make sure everything is ready to go.
For anyone looking to be a proofreader, Lenny says it's paramount that you read as much as possible. Don't just read for speed or pleasure, but take the time to process each sentence. Pay close attention to how things are said and what makes them right or wrong. Lenny is focused on growing his client base. He likes the idea of possibly one day making this venture his full-time hustle, but for now, he's just happy to be on the hunt for more typos.
So I mentioned my assistant Whitney at the top of the show. Another person and good friend that I've worked with for many years now is named Nicky Hishall. I actually wrote about Nicky in my book Born for This, but I don't think I told the story of how we met. Over the past 10 years, he's built probably 70% of my websites and lots of other fun stuff. If you have signed up to come to a book event with me anywhere in the world, you go through this online process that he built.
If you've ever come to the World Domination Summit, WDS, he is an inaugural member of that team. We've worked together for eight years on that. So all the web development associated with that project is from him. And I tell you all that because I want to mention how we actually met in the first place. Long, long ago in the first year of my blog, the Art of Nonconformity, Nicky sent me an email that was very similar to what Lenny's doing when he pitches.
So in his case, he wrote in and said, hey, I've been reading the blog and I really like it, but your email signup form is annoying. To be fair, I don't think he said it quite like that. He was probably more diplomatic. But basically what he was saying is, I don't like your email signup form. It kind of gets in my way.
But then instead of just making it a complaint, he was like, so I made a better one for you 'cause I understand why it's important to have an email signup form. I know you want to capture email addresses. I don't object to that philosophically. But I've made one for you that's gonna be a better user experience. And he went through all the different reasons why it was better.
And he said, if you'd like, I will install this for free on your site and you can see what you think. And I read that and I thought, great, let's try it because at the time I didn't love what my email form was doing, but I didn't know a better way. So he did that for free and it helped me. And long story short, here we are basically 10 years later. And not only have we done all these projects together, he's also a really good friend of mine.
Two years ago, I traveled to Spain for his wedding. So basically with that story, I'm endorsing Lenny's approach here. I just think it's key to make sure that what you're doing is actually valuable, which in the case of both Nicky and Lenny, clearly it is. So when that's the case, if nothing else, it can definitely lead to a lot of good introductions and connections with people, if not much more. Well, think about that today.
Ask yourself, is there something you can do? How can you add value to other people? Especially if you're a detail oriented person, if you can catch things that other people miss, there might be some service or even some product out there for you as well. Do think about that and remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. We are almost at episode 400.
Episode 400 is coming up tomorrow. So today's show notes are at sottasolschool.com/399. In that episode tomorrow, I will bring you the weekly recap and also talk a bit about what's to come. I'm so glad you're along for the journey. I hope you'll continue to join me.
I'm Chris Guillebeau for Sottasolschool.
