Photographer Visits 30 Countries, Leading Tours & Getting Paid

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

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Hey my friends, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Today we'll look at building an online community around a shared love of photography. After struggling to build an online following at first, a photographer changes course and finds the right lens.

She hadn't traveled very much outside of Canada and the US until she was 34, but now her side hustle allows her to visit places such as Cuba, Morocco, and India, all while getting paid. And it's not just about tours. At the end of the episode, we'll look at the several different ways she gets paid. She actually has multiple businesses all connected with this one source, as well as how she learned to recruit and nurture her community. So if you're interested in photography, you'll like this episode.

If you're not, it's still a good case study about taking a topic and then logically building out products and services around that while also recruiting a following. Now this is a very successful project. She's now doing it full time, but it all started with zero followers. It all started with zero revenue streams. So how did she make it happen?

Well, stay tuned and I'll tell you. [Music]

Darlene Hildebrandt has always had a passion for photography. After graduating from a two-year program in college, she worked with other photographers and did weddings on the side. As she gained experience, she ran a portrait photo studio before working as a rep in the industry for a company. A few years ago, Darlene longed to make a change.

She still enjoyed taking photos, but she wanted to teach more. She had seen how writing could influence people and thought that a blog was the best format for her. The first few posts she published were simple. Although she had nearly 20 years of experience in photography at this point, writing about photography was totally different. Darlene got around this difficulty by sharing an image and then showing how it was created.

Not only did this allow her to tap into personal experience, it also helped her build a connection with her readers. In addition to the blog, she was teaching locally. And from those classes, she got a better sense about the type of issues that beginners often struggled with. These classes thus became a source in which Darlene got her ideas to write about. The explanations in her posts were tested in her classroom, so it kind of went both ways.

And when Darlene saw the aha moment on the faces of her students, she knew that she was on to something. But to turn her blog digital photo mentor into a go-to photography resource, Darlene knew she had to do more. She had been learning about the best way to build her blog. And one of the methods she learned about was guest blogging or guest writing. That was a way in which a blogger would write a guest post on another site with links directing readers on that site back to the blogger's own blog.

In preparation for a potential guest post, Darlene designed her own ebook for sale. Her idea was that she would write this post and people would come over and perhaps they would purchase that ebook. But because she did her own designs, she didn't have any budget and she used only free templates, the initial result was less than ideal. When Darlene reached out to numerous photography sites to submit a guest post, she received a reply which accepted all three ideas she'd pitched. And she had just been accepted as a guest writer on Digital Photography School, the largest photography site on the web.

Her initial post did well and she was invited to become a paid regular writer, contributing two articles a month. This had a huge impact on Darlene's traffic and email list as she was put in front of a large audience with the same demographic and target that she wanted to reach. Her email list began to grow by over 1,000 people a month with one article in particular going viral and netting her 1,200 signups in a single day. By the end of that year, she had 9,500 email subscribers with this number more than doubling to over 20,000 the following year. So that's great, but a blog without a revenue stream is only a hobby, not a business.

Darlene knew that she needed to monetize that blog in order to go to the next level. So regrouping from the first attempt with the ebook, she created her first online course for about 15 paid students. A year later, she doubled down, invested more resources to create a fully professionally shot and produce video course on portrait photography. For that course, she brought in a co-instructor and partner along with the two-man video crew and video editors. This was a significant step at that point, but one she believed would pay off returns in the long run.

Today, Digital Photo Mentor has over 150,000 monthly visitors and a highly engaged email list of tens of thousands. Aside from the digital course and products that Darlene sells on the site, she's also been able to offer unique experiences with worldwide photography tours. With locations such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Morocco, there's rarely a dull moment. This is one of the reasons that in 2018, she decided to go full-time and all-in on her blog. From the tours to product sales to a whole series of new opportunities, the website and community has given her life a complete snapshot.

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All right, congratulations to Darlene. I've actually known her for many years myself. She was part of the early years of World Domination Summit, so it's great to see her go on and do so well for herself. Well done. Now, in terms of Darlene's business stuff, she's actually got a really good mix, almost a 50/50 mix, roughly speaking, between what are essentially two different businesses, or we could say two income streams, which are really like an interconnected business altogether.

And that is the business of Guiding Tours and the business of selling digital products, affiliate sales, workshops, basically anything else. So for 2019, she expects the tours to do at least $50,000 in net income and the same for the sales of the products and the affiliate commissions and all that. So, you know, at least $100,000 income from two different yet connected income sources. And this is really great because she also points out that the income isn't consistent month to month just because some months are slower. Some months there's a promotion and that would increase the income.

Other months they're not doing any tours. So that decreases it. But overall, this is an estimated average or a projection for 2019. And, you know, when you're in that situation, which is really common actually, this kind of business, you know, the income fluctuates and some months are better than others. If you wanna work toward, depending on it full time, it's really helpful to kind of put yourself on a salary and say, okay, well, here's what I think, you know, this year is gonna look like.

I'll be even conservative about it just to be safe because if I end up with more money, well, that's a good problem to have, but I don't wanna end up being short. So instead of just every month looking and seeing, okay, how much did I make this month and how much can I, you know, withdraw for my salary or my payment or whatever, I'm gonna put myself on a salary to where, you know, every month I'm taking X amount. And at the end of the year, then we kinda like, you know, add everything up and see if there's more that I can withdraw or not. That's just a really common way of dealing with fluctuating income, you know, if you make the switch to being self-employed from having a side hustle, which is exactly what she did. So anyway, inspiring story.

If you'd like to check out the show notes, they are at sidehustleschool.com/741. We will link up Digital Photo Mentor as well as her community. Check it out, she's got good stuff going on and be sure you come back tomorrow because we got one more episode and then our weekly recap and then a whole new series of episodes next week along with perhaps the relaunch of the Side Hustle Society. I'm excited, I hope you are. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.

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