This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Sadduceville School. This is Chris Guillebeau here. Now, just a quick little content warning right at the top of this episode. This episode is for adults only.
So I think it's super cool that we have families and kids listening to the show, but for all those families with young kids in particular, you might want to just kind of skip over to a Frozen soundtrack or something and maybe join us again tomorrow or listen to this episode a bit later. So I'm just giving you that little warning now. I don't want to be responsible for any early conversations in your household that you don't want to have yet. So that's your responsibility. And now for everybody else who's like, oh, tell me, now I'm listening.
Well, indeed we are talking about sexy time on Sadduceville School today. An art school model starts a sexually stimulating side hustle. If you've ever wanted to blog about intimacy aids and other physical products associated with sex, I am indeed talking about sex toys today and get paid for it, well, you'll want to pay attention. And if you're like, no thanks, not me, but it's cool that she can do that, well, pay attention too. This biology student turned model has always had a penchant for writing about sexual wellness.
She just had to find a way to make money with it, and she did. So now that we've had the disclaimer and the introduction, here's our thank you to our sponsor, and then let's get physical. [Music]
Sexual positivity is a crucial part of size identity. And we're just going to use that one name throughout this episode, her name is Si. And she started her first ever sex blog while still in high school.
A Tumblr page called Smash Cash, where she could reblog the erotic content she was reading. And the more she read, the more she felt compelled to tell her own story and leave the curated content behind. So in 2016, alongside studying for her biology degree, Si evolved her blog into Super Smash Cash and created a free WordPress hosted website. This would be a fresh canvas where she could review sex toys, share a body positive message, and discuss taboo subjects which might get her banned from Facebook. Si posted a lot of content on the blog, but the content she was most passionate about was those reviews of toys.
She loved getting her hands on a new product, testing it out, and publishing her findings. It was the perfect synergy of the scientific and personal parts of her life. Problem was, Si didn't have a lot of business connections, and was reviewing only items she'd bought herself. So in late 2016, she decided to put the blog on pause. She'd found work as a life model for art classes, which she still does to this day, bringing in a more immediate income and freeing up time to focus on her studies.
The blog remained untouched for the best part of a year, until the end of 2017, when she decided to revive it. Her life was changing, she was going through some personal stuff, and she found writing as a way to process it all. It provided solace, comfort, and distraction. She knew that if she was gonna start writing the blog again, she wanted to take it more seriously and turn it into a real business venture, a side hustle, if you will. So she buckled down and began looking for ways she could make it work.
She upgraded her website and invested $200 into a customizable theme. One of her first steps was to network with other sex bloggers. She'd contact them, make friends, and find out who was offering up sample toys to review. She would then reach out to those companies, review their toys, and add an affiliate link in the post to generate income. However, she wouldn't review toys from just any company.
Part of her mission is to help people find safe, non-toxic, and skin-friendly sex toys. There are no strict industry standards for these items, so she wants to ensure her readers make an informed decision. Every side hustle has challenges. Here's one that I never thought I would consider and talk to you about, but here it is. Although receiving free sex toys may sound like a good deal, that's not always the case.
If Psy gets one and it feels awful, she's still gotta test it thoroughly and put together the review, which in the understatement of the year, can make for a bad day at the office. All right, there you have it. This model of getting free products and adding affiliate links generated enough income to cover the month-to-month cost of the blog, but it wasn't sustainable. There was a lot of competition for traffic, and Psy didn't enjoy not feeling in control of her income. So she began to explore other ideas.
And in doing so, found two more profitable income streams for Super Smash Cash. The first was to offer advertising space on the blog to manufacturers. This allowed her to control the cost of the space and offer on-brand products, which wasn't available with advertising programs like Google AdSense. The second was to offer sponsored posts. These are blog posts which have been paid for by a third-party company to advertise products or brand ideas.
For example, a couple's sex toy shop paid for Psy to write a post about a sexy couple's night, which included their brand message and a link back to their store in the post. Since she has remixed the site, she's been making around $600 a month. When it comes to building an audience in this field, Psy finds that being honest and transparent is key. You have to balance personal opinions and experience with objective facts, and understand that what works for you might not work for someone else. The goal of her review is to help someone reach their own decision.
If you get this right, people will naturally begin to trust you. Although she loves having a growing audience, privacy is also important, so she keeps her real identity a secret. She's careful to never share her face on any of the images she posts on Instagram. She also avoids email forwarding, or even using the same browser for research to avoid any accidental sharing in her real life. Psy would like to transition out of modeling and explore more of her creative and artistic passions.
Whatever happens next, she'd like to grow the blog while she explores other options. [Music]
All right, so a couple of comments, and in fact, I have a suggestion for Psy, and by proxy, this suggestion may apply to some of our listeners as well. My suggestion in summary, and I'm gonna delve into it a bit, but in short, it is that she should raise her prices, because right now, her whole model is through advertising and sponsored posts, and she's making $600 a month, which isn't bad at all, having just revisited and remixed the blog recently, but she's charging $20 for a text link on the site, and a sponsored post costs $65, or at least that's the base rate. I think it does go up from there depending on what the company wants, but still, these are pretty low prices, and I think when people are getting started with something, they think, "Oh, I have to start really low," because otherwise, who would pay attention to me? Who would care?
What company would want to give me their money? Well, this is a field in which there are a lot of products, and these products aren't cheap, and there is a big demand for them. So if she has an audience that is growing, and she's able to build this trust and rapport with the audience, and essentially, if she recommends certain products, people are gonna go and buy them, that has a lot of value, and that value is worth a lot more than $20 a month to the right company, and here's how you can think of it as an example. Let's say, instead of charging $20 for a text link, she charged $200. Imagine that she raised her prices 10x, okay?
Is everybody out there gonna pay the $200, like every manufacturer or company or whoever's been paying so far? Probably not. A lot of them would probably say, "Oh, that's too rich for me, I'm out," but the thing is, you need 10 clients at $20 to match only one at $200. So in other words, even if 90% of the buyers dropped out, she would still be making the same amount of money, and if 80% of the buyers dropped out, then she would be making, what, twice as much money, I think. I might've got that wrong.
I think that's about right. The point is, in raising the price, especially from such a low price to begin with, you might lose some people, but you might also be much better off in the long run. Now, I'm sure in this industry, there are $200 clients. I'm sure there are clients that will pay a lot more than that at a certain point as her audience grows, and people are sometimes afraid to charge more because they feel insecure or because, again, what kind of value am I really providing, but, as I said, obviously she's providing a lot of value to the visitors that are coming to the site, and the same holds true with a sponsored post. I mean, that just costs $65, at least as the base price.
I think it should cost a lot more than that. So that's my suggestion. Of course, I don't know the intimacies of her business, let's say, but from the outside, I think she could be doing a lot more, and one of her goals is to grow the blog and to make more money from it, so perhaps that's something to look at or consider. All right, listeners, at least my fellow adult listeners, I hope you enjoyed this one. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
If you want to check out the show notes, including, of course, a link to Side Shop, just go to sidehustleschool.com/693. That is for episode 693. You can also check out a collection of my own personal reviews of various intimacy aids. Actually, I don't have that yet, but I'm working on it 'cause I got a side hustle. I'll keep you posted, and I can't wait to share my first reviews.
Wow, exciting times. All right, friends, listeners, community, you are awesome. I'll be back again tomorrow, and I hope you'll join me for the weekly recap and so much more coming next week. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
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