This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Oh, hi there, what's up? Welcome back, this is Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. I hope you've been well since we last connected. I hope you've been thinking about what kind of life you want to build for yourself and how a side hustle can be an important part of that.
How it can allow you more freedom of choice so that you can do what you want. That is our single-minded focus with Side Hustle School to help you make more money so that you can do what's important to you and not just make more money, but do it in a way that is empowering. So you're not just working more hours, but you're actually building something for yourself. And pretty much every story that we feature, at least I would say eight out of 10, adheres to that model one way or another. Today's is no exception.
I mentioned making more money. Well, do you like to save money? If you like to save, if you're kind of frugal and you embrace that whole lifestyle, you're not the only one. There's an entire industry of personal finance blogs out there that are designed to help people spend less or otherwise have more money at the end of the month. Some of these blogs are very successful while a lot of them aren't.
And I think what helps the successful ones stand out is first of all, consistency, because so many people give up along the way. And then second of all, understanding their audience. So you're actually writing to a specific group of people, not just anybody out there in the world who wants to save money because that's a very, very broad market. But if you can figure out who it is you're actually hoping to serve and you truly understand the needs of those people, you speak their language, they can relate to you, that along with consistency, I think, is the ticket to success in the personal finance blog world. So today's feature is about a mom from Sacramento, California, who starts a blog during the recession a few years ago.
And at first it's just kind of a hobby, but over time she begins to A, be more consistent, and B, understand her audience more and therefore better serve their needs. Conveniently, this also leads to her making more money. She earns money a few different ways from this blog and it adds up to a significant income. Naturally, I'll tell you exactly how much and how she's made it happen. Stay tuned.
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Today's story comes from Pam Farley in Sacramento, California. Pam was a corporate marketing writer for 17 years, but now she runs a few different side hustles. Her main one, Brown Thumb Mama, is a blog featuring healthy living and money saving tips. Pam started this blog in 2009 during the recession when everyone was pinching pennies. Her husband is self-employed and wasn't paying himself back then, so her coworkers were always asking how she supported her family on her salary alone.
Pam figured that if they wanted this information, others could benefit from it too, and that's why she first started the blog. It featured gardening advice, those money saving tips, and restaurant copycat recipes, all to help other busy moms learn how to make things instead of buying them. For the first few years, Pam treated the blog as a hobby. She didn't research best practices or engage sponsors or advertisers. She just enjoyed doing it and she learned as she went along.
But in the past two years, she's devoted more time to improving her craft and increasing the income. So what's helped? Well, first she focuses on what to write about and what to avoid. Whenever she's considering a topic, Pam makes sure that it fits the needs of her target reader and that it meshes with the theme of the site. For example, even though many of her readers may have watched the Super Bowl, writing about junk food snacks doesn't fit with her brand.
But if she had a healthy recipe for a typically junk food snack, like homemade queso sauce for chips, then that might be a good fit for brown thumb mama. In other words, know your audience. As she worked on the blog more, Pam first tried to monetize it by using Google AdSense. With that program, you get paid for impressions, which just means a certain amount for every thousand people who visit your site each day, as well as for clicks when those visitors leave your site to check out an advertiser's offers. Pam's checks from AdSense grew to a few hundred dollars a month, which helped pay for daycare.
Not a bad start, but last year, Pam was introduced to a service called Mediavine through a blogger's mastermind group she had joined. This service searches out advertisers and places their ads on your site for you, so it's much more targeted and personalized. You have to have at least 25,000 visitors to your site each month to apply for Mediavine, and once she switched to them, Pam's income went up a lot. I'll tell you exactly how much in a moment. Pam is also an Amazon affiliate, so she includes links to products on Amazon when she's writing her blog posts.
For example, her famous recipe for homemade orange chicken calls for oyster sauce. Not everyone is well-stocked on oyster sauce, so she includes a link to her favorite brand in the recipe. Finally, her fourth revenue source, all from the same blog, is partnering with brands for sponsored posts and other featured editorial. That same mastermind group helped her learn how to approach brands, focusing on what's in it for them offer based on how valuable she believes her audience is. On average, she charges $400 a post.
So what does that add up to? Well, Pam now makes at least $3,000 a month from the blog, minus about $100 in expenses. And in case you missed that, $3,000 a month in revenue with only $100 a month in expenses, that's a pretty great scenario, and it kind of illustrates how if you can get this model to work, there's a lot of potential. 40% of that income is from Mediavine ad revenue, and the rest comes from all the other sources. She expects her income to increase as she gains more readers, and as she better serves those readers by continuing to be consistent and by understanding their needs.
Okay, so let's talk about this concept of knowing your audience and why it's so important, especially for a project like this, 'cause there are a lot of blogs about personal finance, about gardening, about healthy living, all these different kinds of topics. So some people are more interested in one of those topics than others. Some reader demographics may be different. The aspirational needs of the readers may be different. So you can't cater to everyone, and you shouldn't try.
Even if you say like, well, everyone who wants to save money, well, that's an enormous group of people, or everyone who's interested in natural living. Okay, that's a big group too. But if you go and take a look at Brown Thumb Mama, like when I went to look at the page, it's super clear right away who it's for. The tagline is natural living, healthy eating, and attempted gardening. So you have these clear values, along with a little bit of humor and humility, attempted gardening.
And then the mission statement is, if you're a busy person who wants to be healthy, live naturally, and save money, you're in the right place. See, the people who fit that criteria, they read that, they recognize themselves right away. They're like, oh great, that's me. And of course the name of the blog is Brown Thumb Mama. So right from the name itself, it's setting a context that this is a family-oriented blog.
The person writing this blog has kids, so she's gonna share from her own experience of raising kids all while trying to do these things. Live naturally, eat healthy, save money. Whereas if you look at other successful personal finance sites, I sometimes mention a couple of friends of mine, J.D. Roth with Get Rich Slowly, and Pete from Mr. Money Mustache.
Those blogs are also focused on similar values, but from a very different perspective. And those two guys write with a very different voice. And so as different as they are, I think all three of them have been successful because of those commonalities I mentioned about being consistent and knowing your audience. There's probably some other element of luck or circumstance or magic as well. You can't control those things, so you should focus on the first two.
Whatever it is you're trying to create, what can you do to be consistent? What can you do to truly understand the person or the group's needs that you're trying to serve? That's my challenge for you today. I hope you enjoyed this story. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.
If you wanna check out the show notes and learn more about Brown Thumb Mama, I'll also include links to the other things I mentioned, that Mediavine Network, those other blogs I just talked about, maybe even Pam's recipe for homemade orange chicken. All that kind of stuff will be on our show notes page that my wonderful assistant Whitney makes every day. That page for today is sidehustleschool.com/418. That's four, one, eight. Until we meet again, I hope you are well.
I will be back tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Cytosol School.
