This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello, welcome back to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. As a listener of podcasts, you might wonder, do podcasts actually make money? Well, it's kind of like asking, do websites make money? Some websites make a lot of money.
Some websites make no money. And there is, of course, an incredible range between no money and a lot of money. But yes, at least you can make money with a podcast. So today I'll take you behind the scenes of a show that is all about essential oils. Now that may not be what you think of as a business topic, but it's been able to earn one woman nearly $2,000 a month on the side.
[Music]
Today's story comes from Samantha Lee Wright. She's a stay-at-home mom whose family struggled for a while living on government assistance for several years. But she found her way out through the world of side hustles. Samantha is a doula and recently launched a full service doula agency. But the most successful of her side hustles is the Essential Oil Revolution, the world's leading podcast on the topic of essential oils.
Through this free podcast, she earned sales and product, affiliate fees, money and advertising, and even people who sign up for her own online course on hustling while your kids are napping. That last topic, building a business while your kids are asleep is something Samantha knows a lot about. She spent every spare second of her kids' nap times working on her hustle, listening to podcasts about online business and internet marketing, sometimes staying up until 3 a.m. She was also a careful observer. As a self-described podcast addict, she noticed that there were very few about her topic of interest.
And the ones that did exist were salesy and low quality. So she thought, well, I like this medium and I know a lot of people who are interested in oils. Someone should start a better show, why not me? And so she did. To start her podcast, Samantha bought an $80 microphone and signed up for hosting the site with Libsyn, which costs about $15 a month.
Because sound quality and consistency were important to her, she hired a sound editor and a virtual assistant through Upwork.com. Her sound editor adds music, does the final edit, and then her VA in the Philippines creates show note graphics, fills in show info, and does some post-production work. When she launched the podcast, she advertised it to a Facebook group of Essential Oils fans. That group had about 1,500 members. And in thinking through her show, she chose to use an interview format in hopes that her guests would share the interviews through their networks when they're featured on the podcast.
But she actually attributes a lot of her growth to the growth of the iTunes podcast network itself. Through this free podcast, she gets customers who sign up for an Essential Oils company that she distributes for. She also gets money from advertisers and affiliate relationships. Last, she also sells her own online course called "Naptime Boss" that she mentions from time to time on the show. It teaches stay-at-home moms how to build their own online business while their kids are napping.
Each episode of the show costs her about $50 to produce, and her net income is about $1,800 per month, sometimes a bit higher, sometimes slightly lower, depending on the performance of the affiliate campaigns. The first time a customer purchased something because of the podcast and she earned a commission, she ran into the living room where her husband was sitting and did a happy dance. But it was a quiet one because her kids were asleep. She was excited for the rest of the night, had this feeling of euphoria, that she still gets to this day every time she sees a new customer. Samantha combines her monthly income with her husband's.
He works as a carpenter, making about the same as she does, but working more than twice the hours. Her dream is to keep growing her hustle so that he can create an asset for themselves as well, maybe starting his own podcast or another kind of side hustle. [Music]
So can you make money from a podcast? Well, you certainly can. And I love that Samantha's topic is so specific.
If you like essential oils, you're into it. If you're not, it's not for you. And I think when it comes to doing something like this, the more specific, the better, because the world does not need another general interest interview podcast. It's not that those are bad, it's just that there are so many of them. And a lot of people don't have time to listen to a 30 minute or a 45 minute or even longer podcast.
That's why side hustle school is deliberately under 10 minutes long. Now doing this is not usually a quick path through riches. I think it's good to have another motive for starting your podcast, whether it's education or building community or just sharing your knowledge. That's what Samantha did with her topic. She definitely wanted to make money, which is great of course, but she also had some other goals as well.
And as she's grown the podcast, she's also grown the rest of her business at the same time so that there are resources and products her listeners can take advantage of. She's done that organically. It's not super salesy like those other shows she found before she started hers. And right now she's making about $21,000 a year from something that is a side project, but as she pointed out, represents about half her household income. And hopefully that will just continue to increase as she nurtures this project.
And it may not happen quite that way for you, but if you're listening to these stories every day, and you think about how you could apply them to your own hustle, you'll see positive results too. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. This is episode 97 of Side Hustle School. So if you wanna see the show notes for today's episode and learn more about some of those things I mentioned, like how to host your podcast, how it works with iTunes, just go to sidehustleschool.com/97. And as we roll toward episode 100 and beyond, I want you to know I'm so glad you're listening and I'm also cheering you on.
I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
