Hey guys, it's side hustle Thursdays. Rules For Rebels here with Episode 6 of Side Hustling. Today's story is about a women who turned a hobby project into a successful busines. It's about a single mother who made over $15,000 in a short period of time by creating and selling an astrology calendar.
What I like about today's business is this is a handmade good. This women made the item herself meaning there's likely nothing else like it on the market. It's utilizing a hobby she enjoys doing. And typically the margins on this type of business are pretty good.
When it comes to business I think we all need to decide if we want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and take over the world and if we're ready for that commitment of time and energy, or if we enjoy our lives and just want a side hustle to bring in some extra money. I see a lot of times peoples actions don't match their ambitions. There's nothing wrong with just a plain old side hustle.
What I love about them are it gives you freedom and opportunity. Unlike a job a side hustle is yours and you can do it however you like. I also love that your earning potential unlike a job is completely untapped, you can build your business however large you want to if the market will allow it.
Todays story is about Julie Wilder from Florida. Prior to starting this hustle we're going to be discussing today Julie ran an organic restaurant for a number of years. She enjoyed it but it was long hours and a lot of work.
Even while running the restaurant as kind of a fun side project to blow off some steam Julie would make astrology calendars and every year she would update them. She never thought of this as a business, and never sold them, it was just something fun she did on her own.
One day she heard about Etsy, and a short time later kind of out of the blue she decided to try to sell her calendar on there. People seemed to like it and there wasn't really anything else like it on the market. She decided to delve a bit deeper and and invest a bit more time and effort into the marketing of these calendars and within a pretty short period of time she had made $5,000.
Money continued to roll in, it wasn't long before she made another $2,000. Now this is very low effort, she makes the calendar once per year and then can continue to sell that calendar for the rest of the year until the following year when she updates it, tweaks the design a bit and rolls out the following years calendar.
Now about her product and her niche. There's two good things about astrology. I don't know much about it, but I do know a lot of people are interested in it which is a good thing. It's also something which stirs up strong opinions. It seems like people who are into it are into it, and people who aren't think it's "hooey" or non-sense. This is actually good as well strong opinions or something controversial. You don't want to enter a space where nobody cares. You want people to be passionate about or have strong feelings about whatever it is your doing.
Another interesting thing is I would expect there to be a lot of astrology calendars out there. Now Julies hustle started some years back so this may have changed, but at the time there were not alot of calendars on the market. There were essentially just 3-4 major ones which all were very new agy and kind of the same. Now many people like that but not everyone.
Julie's calendars were different. They were not new agy, they were modern and had a unisex design that would appeal to everyone and that's what really wound up seperating her calendar from the rest.
Now as for the marketing Julie didn't just throw a listing up on Etsy, she made some video tutorials on using the calendar ie content marketing guys I'm always pushing content marketing, its very powerful. Now only videos but she did some blog posts, shared her posts and videos in some Facebook groups, etc. Basically very few costs involved.
This calendar costs Julie $1 to produce and she sells it all day long for $15, pretty good margins, fantastic margins actually. It's also a lot easier than running a restaurant.
Julie says she puts about a week into design at the beginning of the year and the rest of the year is just a little bit of marketing and the rest order fulfillment. She works with her young daughter who sometimes helps her which is pretty cool as well. She gets to expose her daughter to Entrepreneurship and also spend time with her doing something she enjoys, pretty cool..
She took a passion project and found a way to make money off it. She did something different than what others were doing and that's why she succeeded. That's what I want you guys to do. If Julie had just copied everyone else's astrology calendar the project wouldn't have gone anywhere. IT's because she put her own twist on it, that is the reason it was successful and that's what I encourage you guys to do. If I give an idea, a business idea a product idea, don't just copy, put your own twist on it.
This is kind of a unique business so it's not quite like affiliate marketing where I can give you an example of how to copy this business, I do however have a few similar examples for you that may spark an idea within you.
The first is a project I started years ago. I talked about this before but when storage auctions became saturated and I couldn't make any money I decided to find a way to make money off all these people ruining it for me. I started a blog about storage auctions, I would also sell lists of upcomming auctions to newbies who didn't know where to find out about them. My project wasn't creative so much as it was practical but it was similar to Julies in the sense at the beginning of the month I would scour the internet finding all the auctions and then repost them with an autoscheduling tool and sell those lists. I would skate for the rest of the month until the following month came around and it was time to put out another list. It cost me nearly nothing in money or effort.
Now one thing I want to add about handmade goods, not always do they make a good business. My girlfriends mom for example croches really nice blankets and hats. The problem however is that you can buy a cheap blanket made in China. The amount of time as well as the cost of yarn for her probably woudln't make it feasible to sell these as a business. Another example is down by my parents house in South Carolina they are famous for these sweet grass baskets. They are very nice baskets but even a small little basket could cost upwards of $200 because the amount of time it takes to make them. What's nice about Julies business is while she designed, drew, and created the origional calendar, obviously what she was selling was reprints which allowed her to scale this. Had she had to individually draw every calendar this would not be feasible or profitable.
One last example and this one comes from the book the $100 Startup. It's been a while so I'm a little sketchy on the details but here's basically the story. A group of friends wanted to create a map for themselves. THey wanted to create an interesting, old school, sorta lord of the rings style treasure type map for their city, something different and more artsy than just a road map.
They designed it themselves as they were both artsy and I think one had some schooling in design. They created their map and wanted to get a couple copies printed for themselves to hang on their wall. Unfortunately the printer they found would only print a minimum of 10 maps and they only needed 3. Whatever they bought the 10 maps, the 3 of them took 3 of the maps and they gave another map or two away to some other friends.
It turned out people loved the map. A couple of their friends friends asked if they could buy a copy and they wound up selling out of their 10 maps. They realized they may be onto something and had more printed, those sold as well.
Basically this turned into a business where they would make these old school style like Treasure maps for various cities, locations, etc.
Anyhow guys, I hope this story maybe stirs some ideas up within you and maybe inspires one of your own. Until next time thanks for watching and if you liked this video please thumbs up, share and subscribe. If you have anything to add or discuss drop a comment below. Thanks guys and I'll catch you next time.
Showing posts with label Side Hustle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Side Hustle. Show all posts
How to Make $700 Per Month Like Max | Affiliate Marketing Plan Over The Shoulder Step By Step
How To Make $700 Per Month Like Max
So last Thursday we did Episode 3 of the Side Hustling series. We talked about Max, a Scottish dude who setup a quick blog about fish tanks, and forgot about it until he had a $200 check show up in the mail from the Amazon Associates Program.
I wanted to do a quick write-up and screencast showing anyone who isn't already an Amazon Associate or someone who isn't already into Affiliate Marketing the very basic steps in replicating this method.
Step 1
Sign-up for the Amazon Associates Program. I would recommend throwing up a quick blog with 5-10 posts prior to applying. If your completely new to blogging or have never built a site I'd recommend Blogger. It's free and very easy to use, and if you have a Google account or a Gmail account you already have a blogger account, just visit Blogger.Com.
Step 2
Settle on a niche. If you're first getting started don't worry too much about keyword research and researching niches extensively. While niche is incredibly important, as a complete newbie what's even more important is just getting started, getting used to building sites, promoting things on social media, etc.
Step 3
Setup or add content to a blog or website. Share your content on social media and create content for social media. Start building an e-mail list. Start making Youtube videos.
There's a heck of a lot that goes into this strategy. There's systems to automate these processes. There's analytics programs like LongTailPro, Terapeak, Jungle Scout and others that can help you do keyword research, find hot selling products to promote, etc
At first just focus on creating quality content. Don't just copy and paste Amazon descriptions and specs and add a picture and call it a day. That adds no value.
Price Point
Different people have different strategies when it comes to price point. Many people choose to focus on products which sell for at least $60. Other people do well with $8 Kindle downloads and cheaper products like lower end headphones while others choose to go for high end electronics or jewelry.
It's typically easier to get someone to spend $10 than it is $199, however with Amazon's relatively low commissions it takes a whole lot of small commissions on $10 items to add up to something big so if you work in a smaller niche or aren't driving that much traffic it may be worthwhile to focus on higher value items. Some people even focus on VERY high end items like patio gazebos, hot tubs, high end jewelry, etc. The commissions can be very large, but it's tough to make a sale. I can tell you from experience as someone who has ranked for the term "Rolex" in Google, VERY FEW people buy Rolex's on Amazon. Let's quickly take a look at the numbers.
Cheap Product $10 Mid Level Product $60 High End $200
4% Commission = $0.40 $2.40 $8
To Make $100 You Would Need This Many Sales
2500 Sales 41 Sales 12.5 Sales
As you can see from the numbers above, it takes a heck of a lot more sales to equal $100 selling $10 products as it does $60 prodoucts, and even less with a $200 product. .
Some Misc Tips
- Add value, don't just post an Amazon title, description, and specs, that adds no value to the reader. Add some value, tell them why they should buy the product, do a tutorial, an unboxing, something.
- Longform content not only helps shoppers and readers, but also search engines, it's viewed as quality content. Don't sell features, sell benefits, or don't sell at all. If I was trying to sell a Nutribullet I wouldn't talk about the blades and the motor, people don't care about that. I would post juicing recipes, weight loss stories, stories about healthy eating or Kale or something like that. Give people content that's informative or entertaining or provides some value and subtly mention products.
- Focus on answering common asked questions in both social media and long form content. A bag for example, will it fit an ipad? A laptop? etc.
- Use Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and Periscope to show off products, show product photos, etc. They drive a lot of traffic and can be great for marketing purposes.
- New products. When a completely new product comes out sometimes if your early to creating content you can rank fairly easily. Sure new hot products or trends can be competitive but it's an even playing ground. Your not trying to outrank someone with years in the niche and hundreds of articles.
Types Of Ad Units
There's a couple types of ad units.
Links - Links are easy to create using the sitebar at the top of the screen. From any page on Amazon or any product you can create either an HTML icon or an affiliate link with the click of a button. You can even select to have the link shortened for you. You can create your own banners or icons for
Native Ads - Native ads are a type of banner ad. They are dynamic in the sense wherever you place it it will automatically modify to fit that format as you can see from the example of hte ad being dragged from a header add to a skyscraper.
CPM Ads- These are somewhat new. It may or may not be available to all affiliates. A while back when I was playing around with these they were slowly being rolled out in a beta test. These can run in conjunction with Amazon ads.
Amazon Associates Isn't The Only Game In Town
Amazon's Affiliate program definitly has it's benefits. Amazon is a known and trusted site, customers don't think twice about making a purchase from there or about the return policy. This is a huge plus.
Amazon also has almost every product under the sun meaning no mater what your niche, there are products to market. Even if not a physical product there's always a book or software.
While Amazon is good for the above reasons, it does have it's downsides. The biggest being the low commission rate, you can view the most recent updated rate schedule on the chart below...
 |
| New Amazon Commission Rates |
Amazon also has a relatively short cookie period of 24 hours. That refers to how long after a reader/viewer clicks a link do you have until your no longer paid a commission for sending them over. While Ali Express is a session based cookie, Amazon at least gives you 24 hours. That said there are affiliate programs with 7 day cookies, 14 day cookies even month long cookies are fairly common. The longer the cookie the more likely you are to convert.
Other Affiliate Programs
When it comes to affiliate programs you have affiliate networks like CJ.Com which are a collection of hundreds or even thousands of affiliate programs from various niches. You can search by travel, 800 number, softwares, luggage, about any topic you could think of.
Then you also have affiliate programs run by companies or stores off their own site and they run and manage their own program. Big Box stores like Target, Walmart, Best Buy and others have affiliate programs. Smaller niche products often have their own affiliate programs. Even something like the Snoop Dogg Vaporizer Pens have an affiliate program that pays 15% if your into the weed or vape niche.
These programs typically pay much higher commissions. For physical products 10%, 15% or even 25% isn't uncommon. For digital products 50% to 100% is common as there's no physical cost for making or manufacturing an item so commissions can be up to 100% if that program, course or software is a lead or an upsell product for a seller and they just want to hook the buyer.
Additional Monetization Methods
While in Max's example he was affiliate marketing, we saw that later he changed his site FishTankBank.Com to more of an ecommerce site. Whether he stocks or dropships those items we don't know. The point is you can grow an affiliate business into something else.
If you discover a handful of affiliate products which sell consistantly you can turn into an ecommerce store, stock and sell those items yourself and make better margins than just affiliate marketing.
In the case of Max he could have started an online course or ebook or video series in which he teaches people how to setup their first fish tank. He could have sold ad space on his site to operators of aquarium ecommerce sites directly.
Once you have an audience, it's very easy to find additional ways to monetize.
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