This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up? Welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau. The show is Side Hustle School. Another really great story for you today.
Now, from time to time, I talk about blogs. I published my own blog for more than eight years now, and you may wonder how blogs can make money. Now, I have a whole series about this coming up, but just as a preview, there are actually several different revenue models. And long ago, the most common way was advertising. And that's still the case for some very high-traffic, general consumer interest sites.
But probably going back at least five years or so, most professional bloggers switched to making their own products and services, which were often much more profitable than relying on general advertising. And there are still several different iterations of that. And as I said, eventually we'll get to a whole series, but today, you'll hear one story about how a PE teacher starts a blog that has made more than $10,000 so far through a sustainable revenue model that will likely continue to grow. And I'll tell you about that in just a moment. [Music]
And now our story.
Ben Landers is a physical education or PE teacher in Columbia, South Carolina. If you think there aren't many qualifications to being a PE teacher or that it's just about playing sports, you'd be wrong. Ben has a master's degree in education from one university and a master's in educational leadership from another. Not only is he very knowledgeable, he's also very passionate about teaching his students quality lessons that will empower them to be stronger, healthier, more confident, and make better decisions as they grow up. He says that being a PE teacher is a great opportunity to have a positive impact on the kids that you teach.
And he knows it's something he was born to do. About two years ago, he started thinking about how he could help more students, not just at his own school or even his own school district, but potentially far beyond. So he started a resources blog focused particularly on serving the needs of other PE teachers. It began as a way for him to reflect, answer common questions, and provide some needed materials to help teachers out. He originally thought he would try to sell PDFs and online courses to eventually make it sustainable, but he reworked that plan as he went along.
Remember that Side Hustle School success often comes from drawing on a couple of different skills and then combining them in some way. So for Ben, in addition to his passion for education, he's also been a part-time photographer and video maker, not professionally, just off and on, since he was in college about 10 years ago. So he already had some equipment and he was comfortable using video. So for the new blog, his startup costs consisted mostly of buying a domain, getting website hosting, an email management service, and a few WordPress plugins. That first year, he was focused on writing and creating some of that video content to get his name out as an authority among PE teachers.
He also learned more about how to write and publish digital products. Now, even though his primary focus during that first year was growing the blog, he still made enough from his first PDF sales and Amazon affiliate fees to pay for the costs of the site and break even. In fact, when he got his first sale notification, he was on the treadmill at the gym. He said he immediately took a screenshot on his iPhone and texted it to his wife. That's how excited he was.
And he also says that even though he put about 1,000 hours into that first $27 sale, he felt like he had begun to unlock the power of the internet. Now that was great, but I mentioned that he made a change to make a lot more than $27. After about a year, he realized that in the long term, selling one-off PDFs for a low price was not gonna be a great revenue model. So he wisely made a shift and decided to create a membership site where teachers would pay annually for access to resources. Immediately upon making the shift, he started to make an actual profit from the business, not just break even.
He began with a beta launch and offered a $97 a year fee to sign up. Then once he got a few kinks worked out, he launched the official membership at $149 a year, which is still a reasonable price for a whole year's worth of resources for teachers, but it's a lot more than $27 first of all, and it's recurring, which is probably even more important. Currently he's at 90 yearly members, which is his main source of income. And he still also makes some extra money from the PDF products that he still sells at a lower price point. Last year in total, he made about $11,000 from this project.
Now $11,000 on the side is great on its own, but it also led to a huge benefit for his family. And that benefit was that his wife was able to leave her job to come home and raise their young daughter. That had been a goal of their families for more than a year, but it wasn't really possible just on his teacher's salary. And thankfully with the side hustle, he's been able to make enough to make it work. Lastly, that's not all.
As part of seeing his success, his wife got inspired and she's now working on her own side hustle. So even though she left her job to focus on working as a stay at home mom, the family may become a two side hustle income household before much longer. [Music]
So what a great story, $11,000 doing something, first of all, that's obviously very helpful, serving teachers, making a direct impact on kids, and also using smart business sense to ensure that this income could continue to arrive. And that switch that he made was really key. He very well could have continued only selling those low cost products.
He could have been an authority in the marketplace, could have still helped people, which was great. That was his original goal, but with far less of a sustainable model. So he wisely recognized that first path to revenue was not the best. And that's why he changed to the new model of a membership site, which is going really well. Now when a project like this goes well, and he truly is providing a great service to those teachers, most likely it's just going to continue to grow.
So this is also the kind of story I'd love to come back to nine months, 12 months or so from now to see how it's doing and what it's grown into. So Ben, on behalf of side hustle school, I congratulate you and I also challenge you to continue developing this great resource. And for you listening over there, I hope these case studies inspire you, but as you know, I don't want you to just be inspired. I want you to transform that inspiration into action. I would love to be able to tell your story on the show.
So get to work and let me know how it goes. I'll have a new story for you tomorrow and every single day. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is side hustle school.
