The Rise and Fall of BirdSupplies.com

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Oh my gosh, have I got a story for you today. Let's go back to the early days of e-commerce more than 20 years ago, when a bird-loving social worker had a dream. Her dream was to bring bird supplies to the masses, at least the bird-owning masses, in particular, the owners of parrots. Her site goes on to make up to $250,000 a year before falling prey to the vultures at Google. What do I mean?

Well, that's what the story is about. You have to listen to it. We're calling it the rise and fall of birdsupplies.com. Or alternatively, bird lover makes soaring profits from parrot plucking prevention. This is the one and only Side Hustle School.

My name is Chris Guillebeau, and in this story, you're not only gonna go behind the cage of this aviary income source, you'll also hear how she goes from success to failure, and then to success once more, plot twist as she rebuilds her nest egg. So without feather ado, let's say a quick thank you to our sponsor, thank you sponsor, and then we will take flight. Squawk. [Music]

Diane Burroughs has had an affinity for birds since childhood. Her family raised chickens when she was growing up, and later, as an adult with two children of her own, she found herself rehabilitating injured birds in her neighborhood.

After one successful rescue, Diane and her young children realized how much they missed that bird's company. It didn't take much convincing on the kids' part to get a feathery friend of their own. They set out to find a perfect type of parrot for the family, and Diane soon adopted Peanut, a cockatiel. Once they felt they could confidently take care of Peanut, they adopted a larger and more challenging bird, a Molucan cockatoo named Peachy. Peachy's exoticism meant that he needed specialized care and products.

Without it, he would be likely to experience significant distress. More on that a little bit later as we go on, yet Diane couldn't find any quality products in her hometown. I know what you're thinking, why didn't Diane just order the products on Amazon? Duh. In like two days, it could be there with Prime, maybe even an afternoon, depending on where you live.

Well, listen, this was back in the dark ages of 1998. Roosevelt was president. Penicillin was not yet invented. The Model T automobile was still on the highway, and we were all using dial-up internet. Also, the word Amazon mostly just meant a river in South America.

There weren't a ton of online shopping opportunities back then, especially in such a niche market like Birdcare. Diane was a social worker who had also dreamed of owning her own business. She knew that parrots were a popular pet, the third most popular in the United States, in fact. She also knew from experience that parrots were expensive, high-maintenance pets. She had a hunch that the same upper-income people that were attracted to parrots would also be attracted to new technology like e-commerce.

So she decided to invest $12,000 into her online store, birdsupplies.com. $9,000 went into web development and infrastructure, and they last $3,000 into inventory. Her hunch was proven right. In the first year, she made $12,000 from selling 350 products. There were few competitors, and Diane chose to sell high-end products, resulting in a greater profit.

For the next 12 years, that's right, 12 years of e-commerce, Diane's business grew and grew. She was selling all kinds of items, from bird toys to cages to vitamins and more. She was even thinking of quitting her day job and moving from Kansas to Colorado in pursuit of aviary riches. In advance of the move, Diane hired a UK marketing firm to do all of her SEO, or search engine optimization. She'd always done that herself before, but it just made sense to have somebody else take over while she was short on time.

Or so she thought. She had a good six-month run. Her SEO was fantastic. Whenever people search for birdsupplies of all kinds, she was at the top. But then, in 2011, disaster struck.

Diane was relying entirely on Google search results for her sales leads, while Google introduced a new algorithm to penalize sites that were using that particular SEO method. The penalty clipped the wings of birdsupplies.com. It went from being the number one keyword result to number 165. Have you ever looked at the 165th result on something you've searched for? That's right, nobody's got time for that.

Diane went from making $250,000 a year to just $50,000 after the drop. It was devastating. She cried foul, but Google didn't listen. Also, foul doesn't even relate to parrots, which was another problem. She had to go back to working full-time, and it took her a grueling 18 months to get the penalty removed.

Still, she learned the hard way to not put all of her parrot eggs in one basket. She doesn't blame Google for everything. If she had diversified her advertising in the first place and focused on building traffic elsewhere, the Google penalty wouldn't have been as much of a hit. As she rebuilt, she worked on having birdsupplies.com rank highly wherever she could, not just Google. She makes sure to link her website to her Instagram and Pinterest posts, parroting her popular content so that people can find it wherever they are.

Plus, she now has a regular advertising spot in the mega-popular Avian Veterinary Journal. Through this ad, she also picked up several endorsements from veterinarians. This has strengthened her credibility and helped her target people more directly. Not only that, but the 18 months of slow business gave Diane the opportunity to reevaluate. Within the past few years, she has narrowed her focus from all things birds to almost exclusively selling feather-plucking products.

Now, let's talk about this. Parrots have a tendency to pull out their feathers. This can be caused by a number of reasons, including boredom and anxiety. You see, birds live very stressful lives. They have to ask for crackers.

They have to repeat things you say. That's about it, actually, but still, it's hard. So to keep these birds from manifesting their cracker panic into plucking out their own feathers, Diane invented a sort of collar for the birds. This collar is like the cone of shame that some dogs are forced to wear. I don't think the dogs choose it.

It's just more of an owner decision. And the collar is made of fleece instead of plastic and is brightly colored to match the birds' feathers. With her new specialization, the business is much more manageable. She has also now written a series of e-books all about feather-plucking. Let me just repeat that.

A series of e-books all about feather-plucking. I went to take a peek at the website because I was just thinking to myself, I don't have enough feather-plucking e-books. And here is a brief selection of some of Diane's titles. Eight secrets to end parrot feather-picking and mutilation. How to stop a biting parrot.

How to read parrot body language. Do parrots have emotions? Is your screaming parrot driving you nuts? Behavior modification for feather-picking. Now with reproducible worksheets.

And my personal favorite, hormonal parrot behavior, what you really need to know. At first, the Google penalty seemed like it was the universe flipping the bird at her business. But Diane grew and ultimately became stronger through her struggle. Last year, the business once again cleared six figures. That's right, $100,000 a year in feather-plucking prevention.

And they said it couldn't be done. Like a parrot phoenix rising through the ashes, overcoming its desire to pluck its own feathers, Diane is now stretching her wings, flush with birdseed and PayPal deposits. [Music]

Well, it is difficult to add any commentary to a story like the rise and fall of birdsupplies.com. The story kind of speaks for itself. I will just note very quickly, a two-fold reminder here.

Number one, be careful about building your business on one source of income or referrals. We have encountered this problem, this challenge and other stories as well, where all their business is coming from Google search results or from some other source and then that disappears. It goes away and then all of a sudden they realize like actually we don't have as strong of a business as we thought, it's just that this one source was sending us a lot of traffic. And at the same time, my second reminder, it's also okay to treat your side hustle as bonus money that might go away at any time. Okay, so perhaps it's just a matter of perspective and goals, if you're trying to build a business to replace a full-time income, you want this to be your main thing, then you definitely want to be mindful of diversification.

You definitely want to be mindful of trying to rank in different locations and having a broader strategy like Diane eventually learned to do. But if your parrot hustle is just something you do for fun or for creativity or for your extra source of cash, you're not dependent on it, then maybe it doesn't matter. If you are dependent on that one source of referrals and it eventually dries up or flies the coop, let's say, then it's disappointing, but it's not necessarily a disaster. It just means, okay, now it's time to do something new. Let's change it up.

I hope you enjoyed this story as much as we enjoy putting it together. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you'd like to see these soaring show notes for today's episode, just come to sidehustleschool.com/618, that is 618. Oh, also, by the way, check out my own eBooks, Feather Plucking for Cash Money and Get Your Parrot Out of My Pocket, which are available nowhere, sadly, but no, they should be. It's on my bucket list to work on those just as soon as I can.

All right, time to sign off. I am now leaving the nest, but I will return tomorrow. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is, again, the one and only Side Hustle School.