This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. A side hustle is a project you create to earn money apart from your day job. So whether you hate your job and you're trying to make a big change, or you love your job and you have no plans to leave.
Either way, everyone should have more than one source of income and that's what a side hustle is all about. And just to be clear, the goal is not for you to go out and start something exactly like what you hear in each episode. I don't expect everyone to have a fish tank blog, but the point is to learn through the stories and eventually apply them to your own hustle. Today's story is really fun. It's all about how a woman in Pennsylvania gained more than one million followers on Pinterest, then developed a recurring income, all while working full time and raising a family.
[Music]
This story comes from Gabby Orkett in Rockton, Pennsylvania. [Music]
Her day job is as a sales rep in the oil and gas industry. And as if that's not enough to keep her busy, she's also a certified yoga teacher, a photographer, a lifestyle course facilitator, and she has a young family. So how she does all those things, I have no idea. But in today's story, we'll focus on how, in addition to everything else, she also gets paid every month for Pinterest campaigns.
So if you're out there and you have no idea what Pinterest is, it's a social network built around the sharing of images and short posts known as pins. It has a very high female demographic and some users take it very seriously, spending hours a day, even with no income generating interest at all. They just like pinning. If you think that's odd, just understand that it's like any other hobby or social network. If you're into it, you're into it.
And if not, you don't get it. So what you need to know is that there are millions of people who are very serious about Pinterest. And whenever something like that exists, there are also usually a number of ways to make money from it. A lot of side hustles come from paying attention to how groups of people like to spend their time. And that's where people like Gabby come in.
She's known as an influencer, which in this world pretty much just means she has a lot of followers. There aren't a lot of other qualifications. Your network of followers speaks for itself, at least from the perspective of brands that are eager to reach potential customers. Because of all those loyal followers, she was able to sign up with an agency that manages campaigns for brands looking to get more exposure for those audiences. And she began directing some of her pins to those campaigns only when she felt it was a good and natural fit for her audience.
In exchange for doing that, she would get paid. Now in the first month, Gabby earned more than $1,000. And she was in disbelief. She looked at the check and couldn't believe she'd just been paid to look at photos on the internet and post her favorites, which is literally what she was doing on Pinterest. This was a side hustle from her many other projects and she hadn't spent a lot of time on it.
But after that first month, she got serious and decided to become more active. So every day for weeks, somehow in that limited free time she had, she pinned and pinned and pinned over and over. First thing in the morning, last thing at night. When she couldn't sleep in the night, she woke up and pinned some more. And in addition to working hard, Gabby also worked smart.
Pinterest is organized by boards of related images. And Gabby has a lot of boards related to crafts and photography, which just happened to be very popular Pinterest categories. But she also has them broken down into smaller categories. And then she noticed that it helps to follow other influencers that also have a large following. So she did that, sometimes piggybacking on their followers by repinning their content and commenting on their popular pins.
Especially in their early days, networks like Pinterest tend to have a phenomenon where the rich get richer, essentially, where someone who has a lot of followers is likely to gain a lot more followers just because they have some. And so after a while, momentum kicked in for Gabby and it just grew and grew from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands and finally more than 1 million followers, even though she wasn't a celebrity, she didn't have a huge social network account somewhere else. And now throughout the course of three and a half years from those brand campaigns, she's made over $40,000. And this is why side hustles are so powerful. You might be listening and you say, well, $40,000 in three years, that actually isn't a lot.
But remember, this is extra income. She has a day job, she has other things that she does. This is like a little side project where she goes on and pins images that she likes. It's $13,000 a year, more than $1,000 a month consistently. And that's very meaningful to a lot of people.
It's definitely a big side hustle success. [Music]
Like a lot of Pinterest users, Gabby started just for fun, but her entrepreneurial mindset quickly led her to think, hey, I wonder if this could lead to something more than just my own enjoyment. So after listening to this, you may want to go away and start pinning like mad, but if not, consider the broader principle, something a lot of people are interested in, a system that can be learned and mastered, and then a way to monetize it to create regular income, no matter how busy things get with the rest of your life. Well, it may not happen exactly like that for you, but if you listen to these stories and begin applying them to your own hustle, you will see results over time. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is much better.
What can you do today to get closer to creating real freedom for yourself? That's it for today's episode. There's a new story and lesson every day, seven days a week. When you subscribe in iTunes, you'll automatically get each new episode downloaded to your phone or computer. I hope to see you for tomorrow's episode.
I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
