Five Lessons from a Real Side Hustle Making $6,000 per Month
Shining a spotlight on successful side hustle strategies
Here, we break down the story of how a 50-year-old mum of two started a blog as a side hustle that now makes $6k per month.
Let’s be honest, most articles about side hustles are full of clickbait and lacking in substance. We’re here to flip the switch.
At Side Hustle Spotlight, each week we’ll tell you about a real side hustle, break down its playbook, and summarise the key tactics they used to make their side hustle a success. This breakdown will include key facts and figures (because everyone loves reading how much money other people make), as well as specific and actionable tactics that make this side hustle a success.
Our goal is to create a side hustle playbook so that you can understand the tactics that made this side hustle a success, and use these tactics to start your own successful side hustle.
If that sounds like your shtick, then let's get stuck in!
In this article, we’ll go through the following:
- Side hustle spotlight: a blog making $6k per MONTH
- Breakdown of specific strategies that make this side hustle a success
Side hustle spotlight: a blog making $6k per MONTH
First up, we have a blog, because let’s face it, you’re currently reading this on a blogging platform and blogging is one of the most accessible side hustles around.
But this side hustle is more than just a blog. It’s a revenue-generating machine. With multiple income streams for monetising readers that find the blog.
Blogs are one of the most accessible side hustles to start — they don’t require any initial investment or any physical products. And blogs are a great way to learn about many of the online income streams that are at the disposal of a serial side hustle starter like yourself: ad revenue, affiliate marketing, e-books, and more!
Let’s dive into this week’s Side Hustle Spotlight — a blog making $6,000 per month.
The blog is called KatieGoesPlatinum.com, Katie Emery started it in 2018 after her hair started going grey at age 50. Katie is a mum of two and started this blog as a side hustle alongside her full-time job as an aerospace manager (what a badass!).
Being an aerospace engineer, Katie didn’t know the first thing about blogging. So she decided to hire a WordPress tutor to teach her the basics (that’s a side hustle for a whole other article!).
But this wasn’t Katie’s first blog.
She had previously started two blogs after her husband lost her job with the goal of increasing her income in the uncertainty of her husband’s. During this stressful time, her hair started to go grey, and she realised that most of the online content about going grey was negative. There was very little advice on going grey, so Katie started blogging about it. And Hey Presto, KatieGoesPlatinum was born.
Instead of spending weeks writing tonnes of content and learning how to design a website, Katie spent $100 to outsource the web design to a freelancer, who set her up with a domain and web hosting. Meanwhile, she got to work on writing her first few articles.
Before long, her blog was live!
The next challenge was driving traffic to the blog.
So what did Katie do? She used the best form of marketing… free marketing!
Katie used social media to drive traffic to her blog, mostly using Pinterest since there was little communication on this platform for content related to going grey. This helped her to start generating some serious traffic: 25,000 users per month! With this kind of traffic, Katie was then able to apply to an ad network (MediaVine) to start monetising her blog.
With the current traffic, she was able to start generating $500 of ad revenue per month.
Not bad at all! But Katie’s goal was to get to $1,000 per month, so she started to get creative with increasing traffic to her website and creating additional revenue streams.
She started a youtube channel and started publishing twice per week.
She created an email list and sent them a survey asking what type of content they wanted to see.
Before long, she hired her first employee, a virtual assistant for $900 a month to help grow her Instagram following to drive traffic to her blog.
Fast forward a few years and Katie is generating $6,000 a month from her blog from a bunch of different income streams:
- Ad revenue on the blog
- Youtube ad revenue
- A $27 e-book
- A $5 cheat sheet on how to handle comments about going grey
- A directory of recommended salons for hair care (most likely a partnership with a revenue share model)
- Amazon affiliate marketing with a list of her favourite products for grey hair
On top of these 6 revenue streams, Katie collects emails from her blog with a free PDF on how to successfully transition to grey hair. This allows her to then market directly to her fans, and send them surveys to continue creating content that her fans want to see.
Not bad for a side hustle, huh?
Now that we’ve been through the key details of her blog (read: revenue-generating machine), let's unpack the specific tactics that Katie has used to make this blog a success.
Successful side hustle strategies
- Scratch your own itch — write about what you know
- Going grey is not a problem that everyone has. But that is the beauty of creating a blog that is personal to yourself. A blog that scratches your own itch. Because with 8 billion people on the planet, it’s highly likely that many people will be facing the same problems as you. And by having that problem yourself, you are likely to understand the types of content that other people want to read.
2. No niche is too small — a small niche means less competition
- There are tonnes of blogs about health and beauty, thousands of blogs about hair care in women, but how many about going grey? Before Katie’s blog, there was probably none. This just goes to show that no niche is too small. In fact, the smaller the niche, the more likely your blog is to be found when people Google their specific problems. A smaller niche just means less competition!
3. Launch quickly — outsource time-consuming tasks to freelancers
- Katie could have spent a bunch of time writing 20 articles before launching. But she didn't. She launched with just a few articles and focused on using Pinterest and other social media sites to begin driving traffic to her blog. Use sites like UpWork or Fiver to find freelancers to outsource tasks that you are not familiar with, such as web design, copywriting, digital marketing and more!
4. Get help — hire someone to teach you the basics
- Katie was new to blogging and could’ve tried to figure it all out alone. But by investing $300 in a word press coach and paying a freelancer to design her website, she likely avoided making many errors that most first-time bloggers make. This meant her blog could start making generating revenue in less time. Consider hiring someone from a site like UpWork to teach you the basics!
5. Talk to your customers — it’s the easiest way to find out what they want
- After her first few successful articles on her blog, it would’ve been easy for Katie to keep assuming what her readers wanted. Instead of playing this guessing game, she collected email addresses by providing a free product (a PDF guide), and then sent a survey to her readers to ask what they wanted more of! So instead of writing a bunch of articles and guessing what her readers wanted, Katie could directly answer their questions with new articles that keep the readers coming back!
Closing
As we have seen from Katie’s blog, writing online can be a great source of side hustle income. This is especially true when a blog acts as a funnel to monetise users in a number of ways such as through affiliate marketing, e-books and more.
Now that we have unpacked Katie’s playbook for a successful blog, you can start your own and begin your journey of generating side hustle income. You just need to find a niche that you can write about, and then focus on launching as quickly as possible and getting those first all-important readers.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! We hope that you enjoyed the first instalment of Side Hustle Spotlight and have learned some useful tips about starting a successful blog as a side hustle.
We heard about Katie’s blog on episode #1732 of the Side Hustle School podcast, with which we are in no way affiliated.
