“Middle Class Dad” Earns Passive Income from Parenting Advice

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

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Once in a while, an old school blogging model can still work to bring in passive income. We're gonna talk about blogging today here on "Side Hustle School." I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Now, this model does come with some risks because the project is dependent on some factors outside your control, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider it. So today I'm gonna tell you about a dad who writes a blog about relationships and parenting and building your own deck, all kinds of stuff. You can learn about infidelity and building your own deck and also martial arts all in the same blog.

And he earns an extra $2,000 a month in passive income through the form of affiliate commissions. Now, I also have a website critique for him in which I don't hold back. I'm gonna give some constructive criticism in the spirit of onwards and upwards. I'll offer some suggestions. Obviously he is doing well already, but I think he can do a bit better.

So hopefully we can do something together to increase those numbers further. We're calling it middle-class dad earns passive income from parenting advice. So stay tuned, here's our sponsor message and then on with the show. [Music]

Jeff Campbell, an academy director for a martial arts studio in Austin, Texas, spends a lot of time with kids. His days are spent organizing 500 of them and his nights are dedicated to his three almost teenage daughters.

He's also a self-described handyman and an advocate for healthy eating. Before getting the job at the studio, he spent 25 years working as a manager for Whole Foods. He describes himself as just your average middle-class dad. And now he blogs about it. He started this blog in August 2016 as an outlet for all things dad related, which includes parenting, obviously, but also relationships, personal finance, travel, and household things like product reviews and home repairs.

He said he had decades of experience to share and he knew his wife would only listen to so many of his opinions. But he also set out with the intention of looking for more freedom and flexibility. In his words, "I was tired of trading my time for money, giving that some people can accomplish much more in the same amount of time than others." Jeff knew that wherever the blog ended up going, his end goal was to monetize it. So how would he do that? Well, mostly through affiliate commissions.

And here's how it worked. With a $35 investment, Jeff bought the middle-class dad domain and set up basic WordPress hosting. He also signed up for an email subscription service and hit the ground running. Now, in addition to being a middle-class dad, he's also a self-described one-man show, he did everything he could to keep his startup costs low. When he wasn't building his own deck out on the porch and then writing a step-by-step post about it, he was teaching himself about Pinterest so he could generate traffic to those posts.

As his traffic began to increase, Jeff added affiliate links. That way he could get paid when people clicked through to make a purchase. He says he still remembers his first affiliate commission. It was small, but he knew if he could do it once, he could do it again and again. He also knew that with careful observation, he could pay attention to other people's blogs and learn from them.

It took about two years to see consistent income and growth, but it did happen. After those two years in, Jeff now earns an additional $2,000 a month, which he adds to the family budget to cover the costs of raising a family. His main goal is to keep his income streams diverse because he's noticed that each of them has an ebb and flow. This way, if one of them falls through, he still has plan B and C and D. This comes in the form of different affiliate programs, Amazon affiliate links, and an ebook about budgeting for parents.

Generally speaking, middle-class dads, most popular categories tend to be about relationships and do-it-yourself jobs. So on this site, you can read about rekindling your marriage, overcoming infidelity, and also repairing some windows while you're at it. With a family, a full-time job, and a side hustle, Jeff sometimes struggles to find time to do everything. He gets up early to work on his blog before it's time to take the kids to school. He also actively cuts out things that don't make a difference.

For example, he learned that promoting middle-class dad on LinkedIn and Twitter wasn't worthwhile, at least for him. So he only focuses on platforms and actions that have the biggest return, like those Pinterest posts. From one reader to 25,000 unique page views a month in just two years, Jeff has built the middle-class blog into a serious side hustle. [Music]

All right, so a bit of website critique here, and whenever I do this, just to be really clear, big respect to the people who are featured on the show. I have so much respect for them.

And to be able to build a side hustle through a blog, earning $2,000 a month about relationships and parenting and fixing windows, I mean, it's pretty cool. No small achievement. So any critique I have is always in that spirit of good to great. What can we do to take this to the next level? All right, so I like the concept and the tagline here, the new middleclassdad.com, which we're gonna link up in the show notes, of course.

And I think he's found an interesting niche in writing about, again, fixing the deck or home repairs or whatever, while also improving your relationship with your spouse or your kids or just being a better person. So I do like that. When I scroll through some of the content though, I understand he has to have ads and affiliate links, I mean, just like we do with side hustle school. But a lot of the ads that are embedded seem pretty intrusive, and they also seem a little bit incongruous. So for example, I'm reading this long post about seven powerful ways martial arts will save my marriage.

So interesting headline. Lots of people wanna click and see what that's about. And as I scroll through the post, a lot of incongruous ads are just kind of like appearing. And what is otherwise an interesting editorial? So he's using some AdSense retargeting, which means that some of the ads that I'm seeing are unique to me.

But apparently Google and new middleclassdad.com have determined that I need to buy a rug because I'm reading all about martial arts in his marriage. And there's this huge picture of six different rugs that kind of appears as I'm going along. And then I scroll down a little bit further, and apparently these sites also determine that I need some help with mind mapping, because there's this big ad, like an enormous ad, like showing this mind mapping software. And like I said, it's kind of incongruous, and this kind of points to like a built-in conflict or tension when you're doing something like this, because you want your user to have a good experience, you don't want them to be overly annoyed with the ads or pester. But you also do want to bring them relevant ads, and you want enough of them to pay their way in one fashion or another.

So how do you resolve this? My suggestion is when something is working and it's not annoying, then great, do more of that. And if it's not working and it's annoying, remove it. Like my suggestion, I could be wrong, but I really don't think these particular retargeting ads on this kind of editorial post are working. So if it's not working, then remove it, right?

If it's working and it's not annoying, do it. If it's not working and it's annoying, remove it. If it's working and it's annoying, right, then you have that kind of balance. Then you have that decision to make, and I actually think it's okay to push it a little. So I'm not saying at all that he shouldn't have ads or that he shouldn't be encouraging his readers to purchase various solutions or services, products, whatever it is, because that's after all, they trust him.

Like they're coming to this website as a resource. So as mentioned, just a respectful critique there. And whenever I make a critique, I also think like, what do I need to be changing on my site? Because there's a lot of stuff that I need to fix too. So I'm always trying to improve and need to go and give some attention to that at some point.

But I do have a lot of things to do, a long list of stuff, just like you do probably, and just like Jeff does. But we do make time for what's important to us. So I'm glad you've invested some time in listening to this episode. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Those show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/718.

That is episode 718. And I'll be back again tomorrow. Much more is on the way as we close out the holidays and season two. Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is Side Hustle School. [Music]