College Student Manages Large Ad Campaigns for Businesses

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

[Music]

Welcome to Side Hustle School and welcome as well to a new month, at least to our listeners who are following along in real time. It is now March 2019 and we are marching forward. You're marching forth. Actually, march forth is gonna be in three days, but we are marching forward. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

It's my honor and privilege to bring you these daily stories of real people out there, perhaps people just like you, or if they're not just like you, at least they are inspiring stories, who have found a way to create a new future for themselves. Maybe they're creating security. Maybe they're creating options. Maybe they're just making some extra money and that is totally okay. That is A-OK with us here on Side Hustle School.

So question of the day, in the new frontier of online marketing, can a teenager manage a $50,000 a month ad campaign for a major e-commerce company? Well, guess what? When an overwhelmed business owner wants to hire somebody to decipher the world of online advertising, often after they've tried doing it on their own and lost money, they don't care about your age or pedigree. They care about your expertise. And the way they tend to evaluate your expertise is through reviews and testimonials.

We'll look at all of that in today's story. And in that story, an enterprising teen uses the freelance jobs website Upwork.com to begin a thriving business as a Facebook ads consultant. He does this while he's just getting started with college himself. He makes $1,000 in his first nine days and then goes on to stabilize his earnings at around $3,000 a month part time. How does he learn to do this?

Well, through YouTube mostly, but stay tuned and I'll explain more. [Music]

Lucas Lee Tyson has been making money online since he was a teenager. He first became interested in online business at the age of 15 while trying to figure out how to get more views on his YouTube videos. At the time, he had a channel where he made Photoshop tutorials. Fast forward four years and Lucas was working part time for a startup.

When he discovered the company had a marketing agency managing their Facebook ads and Google AdWords, he thought, hey, I wonder if this is something I can learn and then offer the service to companies myself. So he went and did just that. This project had zero startup costs. Initially, he didn't even have a website. He began by creating a profile on the freelance job site Upwork using his digital marketing day job as proof of experience.

Within four days, Lucas had landed his first job. Within nine days, he had made his first $1,000. He was ecstatic. This was validation for his idea. It was also $1,000, can't beat that.

He worked hard and did a great job for his client. That first client's positive review of his work helped to kickstart his reputation on the site and enabled him to get more jobs. Lucas has since gone on to have a lot of client work through the site. These days, he does that Facebook ad consulting and campaign management for online businesses. He conducts this operation while attending school full time.

So how did he learn to do this? Well, he trained himself through a combination of watching YouTube videos, reading blog posts, and just doing the work. He admits he was terrified with his first Facebook ad. He had visions of screwing up, wasting the client's money, and getting banned from Upwork. He would check on their ad account every five minutes, literally refreshing the screen every five minutes, making sure that things were going okay.

But it all worked out. Over the next few months, he managed a few ad campaigns for tiny companies who had just several hundred dollars in their budget to spend on ads. Then things changed almost overnight. Lucas was approached by a large e-commerce business who wanted him to manage their campaigns. They had worked with several agencies in a few months' time with little success.

This company was spending over $50,000 a month on their ads. Lucas realized this was a completely different challenge. He really dug in, devouring everything he could find about managing high-budget, profitable Facebook campaigns. And it paid off. He implemented what he learned, tested techniques, and in his first two months, cut their ad costs by 70%.

Soon the company was back to profitability, making more than ever from paid traffic. His advice to anyone wanting to get started in this kind of digital marketing is to learn the basics and then find your first client as soon as possible. And Upwork may be a good way to do this, Upwork.com, which we will link up in the notes. Another way is to get started working for an agency who looks to outsource their work. Although agencies don't typically pay as well as working for a client directly, they'll gain experience and confidence.

Working for an agency also gives you the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of campaign types, which can be useful when you expand on your own. The lack of formal education has not been a limiting factor for Lucas. For the most part, clients aren't interested in training, education, or certifications. They are interested in how he's helped other clients, especially ones in the same industry. They are looking for results.

They're looking for something that's effective. Of course, there have been a few struggles along the way. As can be the case with any type of freelance work, he's encountered clients with unrealistic expectations. So he says if he could go back, he would work more on clarifying his sales pitch, just being super clear about expected results and time commitments. But so far, so good.

Lucas now has this thriving side hustle with an average monthly profit of about $3,000. The business has not only given him a solid income, it is also an amazing resume builder, both professionally and personally. [Music]

Awesome, congratulations to Lucas. I always love stories of college students who are pursuing entrepreneurial projects and making thousands of dollars a month. We got some high school students doing it too, which is of course pretty incredible.

So here's the process. If you wanna do something like this, whether it is digital marketing, managing Facebook campaigns, or something totally different, first step is to learn the skill. And you learn the skill by watching YouTube, by reading blog posts. However you can acquire the technical proficiency to at least do it to a minimum standard. And then right after that, your next step is to experiment and to try to get your first client however you can.

And Upwork.com, or there's some related sites like this as well, in this case, it can be a great resource for doing something like that. You might wanna work for free or for really low cost at first. Now I don't actually recommend that most people think about building a business on a platform like Upwork because it's essentially a race to the bottom. There's a lot of competition there. A lot of people willing to work for low prices.

But when you're getting going, it can give you some experience. It can help you get those endorsements and reviews, those testimonials, which are critical. And then from there, an important next step is to charge more, to start charging much more of a fair fee for that service. And hopefully along the way, you're gonna actually get better and better at that service through different experience and through exposure. Over time, you wanna focus on results, focus on being effective.

And as Lucas learned, clearly communicate your expectations and your time commitment upfront. That is the path, that is the process. That's what he followed. And that's perhaps what you can do as well. Maybe not with this skill, but maybe some other skill.

Maybe there's something out there that might be worth experimenting or looking into. So I'll leave you with that today. That's my encouragement. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/790, 790.

Again, welcome to the month of March. Got a lot of great stuff coming out for you this month. And I hope you'll join me for it. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.