This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up, what's up my friends? Today's story, you're gonna like this one. This is Side Hustle School, by the way. And today's story is dog stocking hustle earns husky payoff. It turns out that there is a lot of money in Christmas stockings for dogs.
Now for everybody out there who wants to be a life coach and is wondering why nobody wants to pay them, you need to take all those motivational quotes off your Instagram and start putting up pictures of golden retrievers in the snow. The agency employee that you'll hear about in this story never saw himself starting a side hustle. He was perfectly happy working for that agency, his company. But when he noticed one of his marketing clients making bank on seasonal pet gifts, he just couldn't roll over anymore. He had to sit, he had to fetch.
Well, mostly he had to act and put together this dog Christmas stocking hustle. I'll tell you how it came to be and something important he learned along the way, a good lesson that could be helpful to somebody out there as well, right after the break. [Music]
Jeff Moriarty has been in marketing for 17 years. He's not stuck in the old ways of doing things. Over those years, he's adapted to become a master of search engine optimization, or SEO, and has a knack for pay-per-click advertising.
These two skills led him into the seasonal business that would become his new side hustle. One of Jeff's clients at the agency sold dog supplies, leashes, food bowls, that kind of thing. But you never would have guessed, you probably never would have guessed, the top seller. That top seller was dog Christmas stockings. That's right, stockings outsold everything else and by a wide margin.
Jeff was the only person in the company working with this client, and his SEO strategy was working. The company was getting more and more traffic, but the owner just wasn't into it. Over the years, it had become harder and harder to compete with Amazon, and his margins were already slim, so he decided to exit the business and close his e-commerce store. This was in 2014, and Jeff felt like he had a secret. None of his coworkers knew how well the store had been doing from those stockings.
Should he go for his own dog Christmas stocking business? He didn't really see himself as a side hustler. He liked the marketing agency life, and it seemed like adding another responsibility on top of that would just be too much. But then he couldn't stop thinking about it. Weeks and months went by.
Every now and then, he'd look at the search rankings to see if any other stores were dominating the Google rankings using his strategy, and whenever he looked, he was unimpressed. Sure, there were some other stores selling dog Christmas stockings, but none of them seemed to have a dedicated, mindful strategy. Maybe they just kept getting distracted by squirrels, or maybe they just didn't know how to execute, but Jeff did. The trick that worked for his former client wasn't trying to rank for broad phrases like dog Christmas stockings. The trick was targeting very specific phrases like Basset Hound Christmas stockings.
And while no more than a few hundred people were searching these breed-specific phrases each Christmas season, he knew that once he had a couple dozen breed options up, he'd be able to bring in a significant amount of traffic. Now these people were also willing buyers. So finally, a full year after his client closed up shop, Jeff gave in. The opportunity was just too good. The strategy, too obvious.
But he didn't have a lot of money to invest, and he didn't want to end up with tons of product in his garage. So he decided to go with a business model he'd been hearing a lot about for the past few years. That model was drop shipping. Rather than buying lots of product, all those dog stockings, and shipping them out himself, he would partner with a supplier who would also act as his company's fulfillment center when orders came in. After some searching, he found a partner and ordered a few dozen samples.
He also built a bare-bones Shopify website. With less than $1,000 spent, he was ready for business. In his store, dogchristmastockings.com launched in the fall of 2015. It was finally time to execute that strategy he'd been brooding over for the past year. And he had to do it quickly because the prime stocking buying season was just a couple months out.
Jeff focused in on the individual product pages. They would rank for those breed-specific keywords. He would add the keywords in the URL, he'd add them on multiple subheadings across the page, and then several times throughout the text itself. It wasn't anything fancy, but dogstockings were not a competitive industry, so it was enough to beat the dozens of other sites that didn't seem to be trying very hard. 42 product pages, and a couple weeks later, organic traffic began trickling in.
It was slow at first, but as Jeff checked his rankings daily, he became more and more excited. That November, dogchristmastockings.com made its first sale, and its second, and its 10th. By Christmas, Jeff had sold over $1,000 worth of product. Now, after the dropshipping fees, his profit was just a small portion of that, but it was enough for the work he put into it, and he knew he could do better next year. So he took a few weeks the next year to write new product descriptions, refine the feel of the website, and add a few additional products.
And it worked. The 2016 season saw nearly 10x the growth. Of course, not everything he tried ended up working out. For example, one weekend, he spent about 15 hours adding every product to eBay, only to make a single sale on that platform. It was rough.
But despite those missteps, traffic was still up. Over the 2017 season, Jeff sold over $20,000 worth of product, fetching himself a nice profit. So as we roll over into the holidays this year, he is pumped to see how 2018 turns out. His pages are ranking higher than ever, crushing the competition with three years of solid history, and he's got even more extra products he's trying out. It turned out to be a great seasonal project, and he likes it that way.
He gets to brainstorm fun ways to grow throughout the year, spend a few months hustling for those basset hound orders, gets plenty of time to rest, and then the cycle repeats. So let's sing the praises of a seasonal business. This story reminds me of "Letters from Santa," which was episode 338, actually called Santa's Letter Writing Gig, hustles down the chimney. In that story, a woman earns $5,000 each holiday season writing personalized letters from Santa. Now, the funny thing is nobody wants to hear from Santa during 11 months of the year, so she ramps up her letter writing sleigh in November and then goes back to her regular life in January.
So these kinds of projects can be a really good fit, at least for a lot of people. And in fact, Jeff said, I would personally like more seasonal businesses. I love the practice of working hard for a couple of months, then taking it easy, working hard, then taking it easy. It's honestly not difficult. I work on increasing the positioning year round, and then when the holidays hit, I get to see the fruits of my labor.
So as I said, seasonal businesses could be a good fit for some people. Now, last but not least, as funny as it is, there is a powerful lesson in focusing on search results and really targeting results like Basset Hound Christmas stockings. Because even though there aren't a ton of people searching for a phrase like that, a lot of those people are ready to buy. So there's low competition, and the people who are searching, you don't search for a Basset Hound Christmas stocking, unless you're fairly serious about buying. So consider how you might apply this to whatever it is that you sell or you hope to sell.
Definitely a good lesson there. We'll talk about that some more in some future episodes. There's a lot you can learn. Okay, friends, I hope you liked it. I hope you have a good day today, wherever you are in the world.
Inspiration is also good, but inspiration with action is better. I hope you listen, I hope you take action, I hope you do something for yourself. Today's Barking Show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/691. That is for episode 691. Be back again with you tomorrow, 692, coming up.
Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau. Go fetch yourself a profit. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
