The Travel Blog That Pays for a House

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Can you earn enough money from your blog to buy a house? Well, that's what the Australian woman in today's story did, growing her personal travel blog to the point where it earns tens of thousands of dollars a month from affiliate income, sponsored posts and core sales. She also creates a number of other topically focused sites that she then sells a few years later. The proceeds are enough to buy a house, and we're not talking about a tiny house or a trailer, or a house in one of the poorest countries in the world, but rather a home in pricey Melbourne, Australia. She does this by focusing on one specific skill instead of trying to do it all.

Let this be a reminder that you also don't need to learn everything. You don't need to be everywhere. In fact, you probably won't succeed if you try. So what do you do instead? Well, you discover what's essential to your business or your side hustle idea, and you do that thing to the exclusion of everything else.

Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Excited to tell you this story, the travel blog that pays for a house. That story is coming up in 30 seconds. [Music]

So how much money can someone really make blogging?

Would you believe that a monthly profit of up to $50,000 was possible? Well, for today's side hustler, Sharon Gorley of Australia, that figure is real. Granted, $50,000 was Sharon's best month, and it came from growing a multitude of blogs over several years. But as we dive into her story, you'll get a sense of what's possible with a blogging business if you focus on the right things. So let's go back to 2013, where Sharon was a part-time graduate teacher and full-time mother to a one and three-year-old.

She was stressed, way too busy, and watching every cent her family spent. She wanted something better for her life. Tired of being so tired, Sharon decided an online business was the answer to many of these problems. She had been reading family travel blogs and noticed that some of them seemed to be working well. If they could do it, she thought so could she.

So she embarked on a quest to monetize her blog, where's Sharon.com? She had started this blog eight years earlier while traveling on a break from work, but by her own admission, it was poorly written. It had been more of an online journal and page views and visitors had dwindled to zero. To turn things around, she got busy researching what to do with it. Start-up costs were minimal, but she worked on the site with every spare moment in her hectic schedule.

At the time, Sharon also started digitalnomadwannabe.com to track her journey from having no idea what to do to building a successful online business. By the following January, her family received free accommodations worth $500 in exchange for a review on the travel blog. The next month, the blog earned $30. In March, a company sponsored a post on the site for $250. It was a slow start, but income and travel opportunities grew from there.

By mid-year, Sharon convinced her husband that the family should become digital nomads, and they left Australia on December 31, 2014. The two blogs in her husband's online product were bringing in roughly $1,000 a month. With their lower cost of living in Southeast Asia, this income was enough to support their family's new lifestyle. And then by the next month, the travel blog was bringing in over $1,000 on its own. Plus they were earning a few hundred dollars from additional more targeted sites.

Now let's talk about this. These targeted websites are really key to Sharon's success. They're also called niche sites or niche sites. And as you might guess, they're websites with a really specific focus. The important piece for making money on this kind of site is that it targets specific terms that people are searching for online.

The site then answers the questions people have about that topic or otherwise solves their problem with helpful, high quality content. In Sharon's case, she would review and recommend products in specific parenting fields with affiliate links to Amazon. Building these sites was a great learning experience for her. Most important of all, she began to understand how to use SEO or search engine optimization combined with affiliate marketing. When she applied what she had learned through her niche sites to her travel blog, things really started to pick up.

It was then that she learned a valuable lesson. It's far better to concentrate on one of these tools, tactics or strategies and get that thing working super well than to try to be everywhere. And for Sharon, her one thing is SEO. In her view, it's essentially market research. You have to understand what people want and need and then use SEO to give it to them.

About 18 months after getting serious with the sites, Sharon gave birth to her third child. By then their online income was enough to support a higher cost of living and they were able to move back home. She took advantage of Australia's paid maternity leave. But even while taking that four months off from blogging work, her income kept growing. Before long, she was making eight to $15,000 a month from affiliate links on her travel site alone.

Meanwhile, the expenses for that website were less than $100 a month. As I mentioned earlier, Sharon's best month was $50,000 in profit. And that was when she started selling a course on digital nomad wannabe. Then toward the end of 2017, Sharon actually sold her travel blog as well as a couple of those smaller sites she had started a few years earlier. Thanks to SEO and affiliate marketing, those sites were generating passive income which is exactly what potential buyers want.

Even though her travel blog may seem like a more personal project, she was able to sell it for more than three times her annual profits. And with the proceeds from that website sale, Sharon's family bought a house in Melbourne, Australia in 2018. She says, "Now it gives me immense pride that I've been able to build this business out of nothing. I love that we now get to live a life structured how and where we want and not be held back by money or traditional jobs. Both my husband and I are at home full-time with the kids.

We travel when we want and the kids go to the school we want." And she's not done. Sharon continues to launch new sites. Her latest is called Dive Into Malaysia. Although it's still relatively small for now, she can see it becoming her biggest project yet. [Music]

So there you have it.

A family completely transforms their life through the power of an online business. Being able to go from their home life in Australia to living in Southeast Asia for a while, creating this financial independence that allows them to move back home and eventually of course buy the house from the blog income. Thanks in part to that decision to really focus on that one thing. Instead of trying to be everywhere and trying to do everything, really focusing on that search engine optimization in her case. Now for somebody else, that might be a different tool or tactic or strategy.

But I did want to share a quote from Sharon that I especially liked in our notes, our research process. We often ask people like what your biggest mistake was or what went wrong along the way. And she said something interesting. She said, "The biggest mistake I made was listening to the wrong advice. I look back now and wonder why I didn't realize that I shouldn't listen to people who didn't have the success I wanted.

But I did, at least for a while. And it led me to doing the wrong things like chasing page views rather than my actual goal of making money." So I've talked before about how you should be aware of the power of bad advice. Be careful who you ask for advice because not everyone is qualified. And if someone doesn't have the success that you are seeking, just like Sharon said, why would you listen to their advice? Why wouldn't you either get advice from someone who is successful in the way, in the field, in the area, the arena, whatever it is that you want to be successful in or why not also alternatively just pursue that path on your own, chart your own course, see what happens.

So beware of the power of bad advice and also beware of not starting because none of these things could come to fruition, this story or any of the other stories that we feature if the person hadn't actually taken action. So that's my encouragement to you. I hope you will do something. Just one thing, one small thing to get closer to a goal that you believe in today. Our show notes are at sinusleschool.com/903.

We'll include links to Sharon's projects and anything else that I mentioned. And of course I'll be back tomorrow. Weekly recap is coming up along with a all new set of stories next week. Be sure you're subscribed, tell your friends, it's all completely free. Thanks so much.

My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is "Sidusleschool." [Music]

From the Onward Project.