This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome back, friends, listeners, and community. I am your host, Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. Today's featured story comes from someone who's both a Side Hustle School listener and one of our writers who works with Whitney and me on compiling the daily stories. It's all about how he takes his skill in freelance writing, something that a lot of people would like to do for money, and then finds a way to create a specific resource for those people.
And that word specific, or specificity, is key, as you'll hear, because part of his discovery process was focusing on something he called his X Factor. He says the X Factor is the topic you spend the most time reading about, the topic that your friends come to you for advice for, or the topic where you have an above average set of skills. Everyone has something they can teach to someone else, and there's a market for almost everything. That's what he says, and there is a market for almost everything, or at least there's a market for a lot of things. As you may know if you've been listening to the show for a while.
So I'll tell you about this freelance writing Side Hustle, how he gets the idea, how he develops it, and how he turns it into money, right after this quick thank you to today's sponsor. [Music]
For freelance writer James Johnson, it was time to make a change in his business. Although he loves the freelance world and the flexible life it affords him, he felt the need to do some work that was more people focused. He knew that writing articles and blog posts was helping people in one way, but he wanted to do something a bit more hands on. For the first six months of 2017, James spent his days toying with different ideas of people focused businesses that he could try.
He would listen to podcasts, including this one, and devour books to help him try to find his answer. But after months of false starts and bad ideas, he felt like he just couldn't come up with anything that fit. Then one day, a Facebook friend got in contact to ask for advice about how to start his own freelance writing business. He'd been following James in the background for years and wanted to learn from him. Always happy to help a friend, James jumped on a Skype call and walked him through how he could get started.
When he ended the call, James couldn't help but feel like he'd done this before. He checked his email and Facebook messages and saw that he'd help people with the same problem many times since he'd first started out. He'd even been paid to write a few blog posts about it. That's when the obvious idea dropped in his lap. If people were asking for this information, he thought perhaps he could charge for it.
James set about creating a website where he could begin to share his advice. He called it the freelance writer's school. That name came about as a lucky chance after the first 14 names he'd tried for taken. As the saying goes, the 15th time was the charm. He purchased a domain name, a basic theme to stylize the site, and a subscription to an email service, bringing his total startup cost to just under $200.
Before creating any content for the new site, James went out to research what people in his niche were talking about. He looked at blog posts and Facebook groups and made a Google spreadsheet to record specific words and phrases they used. He then used this list to create a homepage, a about page, and a welcome email series using terminology that would make sense to them. This research also allowed James to create what he calls an avatar, but if you've read the side hustle book, you might know it as an ideal customer. He wrote a short biography of this imaginary person's fears, challenges, and aspirations.
Whenever he writes any blog posts or a sales page, he writes for this person who shares all these important traits. In particular, he wrote a series of social media posts focused on telling stories with actionable tips to share in Facebook groups. Within the first few months, he was able to use that strategy to add 280 people to his new email list. He noticed that most people responded best to his content about getting started and taking your first steps as a freelance writer, so he decided he would create his first two products focused on that topic. One product would be free and the other would be for sale.
The first product is a free email course that helps people learn the main principles of starting a freelance writing business in just seven days. Each day they receive a new email outlining the next principle and an actionable step to take to achieve it. The second product is a paid course called the 60-minute writer. This course shows people how to start a freelance writing business in 60 minutes a day over the course of 30 days. He priced this course at $75 because he wanted to be sure the people who bought it were serious about making an investment in themselves.
The first week the course was available, James made a bit less than $2,000, and he continues to average at least $600 a month through sales of this product. In order to make sure he didn't need to keep relaunching the course, he added a sales portion to the end of the free email program, which positions his new course as a premium follow-up to what they've just learned. This allows him to automate his sales process and generate income without having to be there at each point of sale. If you're looking to start a similar business yourself, James recommends that you spend some time looking for your X factor. He says this is the topic you spend the most time reading about that your friends come to you for advice for, or where you have an above average set of skills.
Whether you're into baseball cards or pouring the perfect cup of tea, or many of the other things that you've heard about on Side Hustle School, or perhaps something that we haven't even covered yet, there might be somebody out there who wants to learn from you and they'd be willing to pay for it. The long-term goal for James is for freelance writer's school to make up 80% of his income. He hopes to create an online community where writers can come together and learn from the school's resources, share ideas and help each other grow their businesses. So this is another great example of going from starter idea to next level idea. The starter idea was to actually do freelance writing, get paid for various columns and blog posts and articles.
The next level idea was to create this resource for all the people who were already asking him, "How do you do this? How can I get into it? How can I get my first assignment or my first commission?" And I wanted to comment on the name of this resource, the school itself, as well as the name for his paid product. So the name of the school itself, freelance writer's school. Like we said, that was his 15th choice.
He went through 14 other ideas, but they were all taken. Other people had those domains. I think freelance writer's school is still pretty good because you get what it is right away. You understand, okay, this is a school or at least a training program of some kind for people who want to be freelance writers. It's not the sexiest name in the world, but it doesn't have to be.
What I do think is a pretty sexy name or title is the name of his course, which is the 60 minute writer. Now that I think is fantastic because that has a benefit built right in. You don't necessarily know all that it's about just by hearing those few words, but it sets it up really well for the pitch, which is learn to become a freelance writer in 60 minutes a day over the course of 30 days. It also generates curiosity and interest. So if you don't understand what it means to be a 60 minute writer, for a lot of people at least, it makes them think, what's that about?
Tell me more, which is always really good. Every month on Cytosol School, I do an extended episode, which focuses on a topic that listeners are asking about over and over. And I noticed in 2017, one of the most popular extended episodes was called the 90 minute website. And that was an episode where we talked people through how to create your first website in 90 minutes or less. If you'd like to hear that episode or any of the extended cuts, just go to sidehustleschool.com/extended.
Just like the regular episodes, those are all archived, they're all free. You can listen to them whenever you want. And clearly people responded to that concept. So I think the 60 minute writer is kind of like that. There's also a mega popular book by Mel Robbins called the five second rule.
I wrote a book a few years ago called the $100 startup. And funny enough, since then, there've been a bunch of others who have used the same kind of model. There was like the $90 startup, the $50 startup, the $0 startup. I know I'm a little biased, but I'm not sure those were as good as the original. Just saying.
The point of these phrases or titles or names is that they are catchy and not just that they're catchy, but they give you this concept right away. They capture your attention, they draw you in, they make you want to learn more. So whenever possible, as you're thinking about what do you develop, what is your X factor? How are you going to turn that into some kind of asset? Something that works for you.
Maybe also be thinking about, okay, what am I going to call this? What is catchy? What is compelling? How can I distill this thing that I want to teach into one short phrase? Communicating a clear message is almost 50% of the battle.
So I think James has done really well with that. I hope he doesn't stop writing for us, but I also think it's great that he's helping other people out in building this resource for himself. So if you'd like to get his free course, if you're interested in learning about freelance writing, or if you're just curious from a side hustle perspective, to see how he goes from gently providing this free info to saying, oh, hey, if you like this, here, there's more. Here, there's something you can pay for. We'll include a link to that on our show notes page where you can check it out for yourself.
That page is going to be sidehustleschool.com/403. That's for episode 403. Thank you for listening today. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I hope you'll ask yourself today, what is my X factor?
What is the thing that I can show other people? What is that thing that I keep reading about? Is there something like this that could be my side hustle? And if so, how could I crystallize that, or distill it into one short phrase so that the right people are immediately drawn to it? That's my challenge for you today.
Let me know how it goes. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
