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A free password generator making $70,000 per year 🔒
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Free Password Generator Making $70,000 Per Year
How To Spot Trends Before They Explode
$5000/Month Self-Taught Branding Expert
$407,443 Naming Chinese Babies
TikTok vs Instagram: The Difference in Views is Insane
Books & Courses = $420,000+ Side Hustle
$500+ Per Month From a Mexican Horse Ranch
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Free Password Generator Making $70,000 Per Year
Password Generator is a simple website that generates secure passwords 🔒
According to SimilarWeb, the site gets ~720k visits per month.
It's monetized with Google display ads.
Running the numbers through the official Google AdSense calculator – using the Reference category – the earnings work out to around $70,000 per year 🤑
The site has been live since 2012 and you can see an early version of it here. It hasn't changed much over the years.
2012 was about the time people were becoming more conscious of password security, so the timing was good.
And it looks like they've done a great job of building quality backlinks, which helps them rank well in search engines 😎
Some of their top backlinks come from articles like…
I'm guessing whoever owns Password Generator was very active ~10 years ago, finding such articles, reaching out to the authors and suggesting they include a link to their handy and free little website.
They may also have been using HARO to make such connections 👀
Or in the case of the DreamHost and HostGator links, Password Generator may simply have been one of the only such sites to link to back in 2012, and perhaps the easiest to use.
Another thing Password Generator has going for it: look at their indexed pages, and you'll see that they have the tool translated into multiple languages.
So they're likely grabbing lots of traffic that way as well 📈
Pretty cool to see such a simple and low-maintenance website pulling in $5000+ per month year after year.
And there may still be opportunities to build sites like this.
If you're eager to find one, it'd be worth keeping an eye on a service like Exploding Topics. For every rising trend you see on there, ask yourself…
What simple tool would be useful for people who are interested in this? 🤔
And remember, you don't need to be a great coder to build tools nowadays. You can use ChatGPT, similar to how DeepakNess did to earn himself $275/month passive income.
🔎 display ads | permalink
How To Spot Trends Before They Explode
Today's email is brought to you by Exploding Topics 💥
Yup, that's the same service mentioned above.
Click through and you can see lots of trends for free, and keep up to date with new ones by subscribing to their newsletter.
Also, use my link and you can try out Exploding Topics Pro for only $1.
One founder writes…
Exploding Topics Pro gives us a huge competitive advantage. We use it to spot non-obvious opportunities for products, features, investments and more.
$5000/Month Self-Taught Branding Expert
Matija Kolarič is a branding expert from Slovenia 🇸🇮 who provides naming and branding services on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork.
I came across his story via Nick Loper’s book: $1,000 100 Ways
In the book, Matija revealed that he was earning $5,000+ per month from freelancing 💰
That would have been back in 2021, but it looks like he's still active on Fiverr. He's also earned $40,000+ via Upwork over the years and charges $75/hour on there.
Matija shares how it all began 👇
It all started with the book The 4-Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss showed me how easy it really is to make money online. All you need is a plan and a little perseverance…
This was also the first time I learned about Fiverr, which later turned out to be the platform that changed my life.
My low-paying job and a family to feed motivated me. I graduated in 2013, in the midst of a global recession. I had a degree in civil engineering, but the market was in such bad shape that it was almost impossible to get a job.
It cost him nothing to get started on Fiverr, but it was a while before he was earning a good income…
I earned less than $50 my first month, but I saw money on my account. It was everything I needed to motivate me. I hustled like crazy. I sent as many offers each day as I could. I started my business by replying to buyer requests on Fiverr.
It took 5 months for him to reach $1000 in profit 🥵
Matija's big breakthrough came when he started answering branding-related questions on Quora. He became the most viewed writer on that topic, getting over a million views. Having a link to his Fiverr profile on Quora helped him land new clients.
When asked what he would do differently if starting over, Matija replied…
I would start earlier. My biggest mistake was that I was thinking about starting a business. I was overthinking and overanalyzing everything. It all changed when I actually started.
What I love most about Matija's story is that he didn't do anything fancy.
Sounds like he learned enough about branding to provide value, started off with a low rate to gain experience and testimonials, then just stuck with it for several months until he was earning a good income 💪
The opportunity is still there to do this with many different skills.
A few more Fiverr success stories to get you thinking…
🔎 freelancing | permalink
$407,443 Naming Chinese Babies
🗂 From the archive, published December 2021…
CNBC Make It has the story of Beau Jessup, who started a website that helps 🇨🇳 Chinese parents come up with 🇬🇧 English names for their kids.
Beau started the business in 2015 and the CNBC article is from 2019. Beau’s website is still online but it looks like it’s free to use now.
In a 2017 TEDx Talk, Beau reported that she was charging £0.60 for the service and naming about 850 babies daily – on autopilot, via an algorithm – which would have earned her $600+ per day 🤑
Beau came up with the idea for the site when a Chinese business associate of her father asked for help in naming her daughter.
Most people would help out with a request like that, then move on with their lives. But Beau realized the value of the service she had provided and figured there were many more Chinese parents who would pay for it.
Next time you help someone out, ask yourself if other people might value the same service. You never know what might come of it.
TikTok vs Instagram: The Difference in Views is Insane
In a recent Reel, Katerina Kulp highlights how the same content posted to TikTok and Instagram can achieve very different results…
Tiktok and Instagram are freaking me out. Sometimes the difference in views is just insane.
I posted a video about coffee on Instagram and I got 14.2 million views. I posted the same exact video on TikTok at the same exact time, 75.2K.
I posted another video on Instagram about sleep deprivation, how we act when we sleep less. It got 10.8M views on Instagram. It got 250k on TikTok.
Katerina goes on to say that she would sometimes post on TikTok, get very few views, and start to think her content was subpar 😔
But when she'd post the same videos on Instagram, some of them would go viral 📈
Or vice versa.
She adds…
My point is that the internet is literally insane and you just do what you're doing. You keep doing your thing and enjoy the process.
Given that, be sure to try posting your content on different platforms and in different formats.
One video might do better on TikTok while another might do better on YouTube Shorts.
Or maybe the same message you share in an Instagram Reel would do better as written text posted to Twitter 🤔
You never know what will work best, so keep experimenting.
Books & Courses = $420,000+ Side Hustle
Hassan Osman is an author who has managed to publish over 20 books and 12 online courses while working a full-time job 💪
He recently tweeted…
Everything I know about creating on the side in 5 simple ideas
All on the side while working a demanding full-time job (and not sacrificing family time)
Best I can tell, he's been working this side-hustle for 10+ years.
His courses have been taken by 320K+ students and his books have apparently had 100K+ readers.
Hassan sells the courses via Udemy and the books via Amazon.
Even if he made only $1 for each sale – a very conservative estimate – that would be $420K+ he's earned on the side 🤯
His first piece of advice is a concept coined by Gary V: Document, Don't Create.
Hassan writes…
I've published in multiple categories:
• Management: I just documented what I already knew about managing virtual & hybrid teams, and about leading people
• Travel: I just documented my weekend family trips to Rome, Paris, London, and most recently, Montreal
• Authorship: I just documented how I wrote, published, and marketed all my books
With that in mind, what knowledge or experience could you document or package up in a guide, ebook or course? 🤔
Hassan continues…
you probably won't have a lot of time to market and promote your stuff.
I use two primary platforms:
• Amazon for books
• Udemy for courses
… Although both platforms take a higher margin cut (and they have several other disadvantages), they make up for it by marketing my books & courses on my behalf so that I can focus on creating.
Hassan also repurposes a lot of the content he creates…
Do the hard work once, and then repurpose (and reuse).
For example, he turned one book he wrote into 👇
An audiobook
A webinar
A paid course
A podcast
Blog posts
Social media content
He later adds…
The key to publishing on the side is volume.
I don't go all in on one book or one course…
Focusing on volume makes me a bit more immune to failure
Lastly, Hassan says the most important thing is to enjoy what you're doing 😍
What I do is super-fun for me. I genuinely enjoy the process of writing books… If I was creating just for the sake of starting a side hustle, I would have quit 10 years ago.
$500+ Per Month From a Mexican Horse Ranch
🗂 From the archive, published February 2023…
Josh Brody with a story posted to Hacker News…
During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They’re not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they’ll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn’t).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 […] and that’s without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone’s happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
So he basically helped out a business he liked with their online presence in exchange for a cut of each online booking 😎
Someone commented on Josh’s post…
Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the early 2000s.
Most business’ official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
Someone else commented that there are plenty of opportunities like this in the USA as well 🇺🇸
Is there a business you like that could use some help along these lines?
Just be sure to apply some riskiest assumption testing to the idea before diving too deep.
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. Today's email is brought to you by Exploding Topics 💥
It's a website that shows you growing trends 12+ months before they take off.
Use my link and you can try out Exploding Topics Pro for only $1.
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