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ChatGPT helped her build this $30K/month blog 🤑
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Uncertified Author Earns $3 Million in 2 Years (via TikTok)
How To Monetize Your Travel Content
$50,000 Profit From A Side Project
How She Gets 10 Million Views Per Video
ChatGPT Helped Her Build a $30K/Month Blog
Fast-Growing Travel Deals Newsletter
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Uncertified Author Earns $3 Million in 2 Years (via TikTok)
💬 Random tweet I stumbled across recently…
This is the Shadow Work Journal's sales on TikTok shop between 7pm EST and 11pm EST
2,300 orders x $17 product price = $39,100 in 4 hours
Here's the Shadow Work Journal on Amazon, with 2400+ reviews 🤩
Keila Shaheen is the 24-year-old creator of the journal, which was first published in 2021.
From a recent article…
TikTok users have gone rabid over her journal. Some have raved that the workbook is 'cheaper than therapy' and posted dreamy videos of themselves filling it out on a sunny day.
TikTok has indeed been big for popularizing the product: the term ‘Shadow Work Journal’ has amassed 1.6 billion views on there 👀
The journal is based on the concept of shadow work by Carl Jung. It contains prompts and exercises aimed at exploring and understanding your unconscious mind.
😡 There has been some criticism...
Shaheen isn’t a practicing therapist, and her traditional mental-health credentials are limited: She graduated from Texas A&M University in 2020 with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and marketing, and took a training course in cognitive-behavioral therapy…
Shaheen’s background is in marketing and brand strategy.
Indeed, Keila's knack for storytelling has seen her official page on TikTok rack up 276K+ followers.
Her response to the criticism…
I firmly believe everyone deserves access to mental-health resources and the chance to embark on a healing journey
Sounds like the journal's popularity has been aided by TikTok's affiliate program, which lets creators earn commissions for driving sales 🤑
Keila says…
One 20-year-old part-time student I emailed told me she’d made about $1,000 off of her video about the book.
Apparently 45% of Keila's journal sales in the last 6 months have come via TikTok.
As I'm writing this, the product page (accessed via USA VPN) shows that it has 454,000 sales 🤯
The price of the journal on that page is $7, but the tweet above said the price was $17 (same as the price on Amazon). So they might be experimenting with the pricing.
Regardless, let's say Keila earns an average of $3 profit on each book, and 454K = only 45% of her total sales… then her profit since launch would be around $3 million 💰
Two takeaways here…
First of all, TikTok is insane for marketing, especially for products that can get some kind of emotional reaction.
Other examples of this…
Second takeaway: you don't need advanced credentials to be seen as an expert online.
Keila created her journal based on what she found helpful, and it has resonated with a lot of people 🎯
Could you do something similar?
How To Monetize Your Travel Content
Today's email is brought to you by Travelpayouts.
They help travel bloggers monetize their content, to the tune of $46M+ since 2011 🤑
Travelpayouts partners with big travel brands like Tripadvisor and Agoda, giving you access to 100+ affiliate programs all in one place.
Plus a single wallet for withdrawing your earnings 😎
Travelpayouts have tons of positive reviews online, like this one from Rose Munday…
I have been working with Travelpayouts for 6 months and I’m already earning more than with any other affiliate company. I’m really happy with the affiliate tools and the help from the team. They’re speedy to reply, offer personalized suggestions and help me boost my income even further!
If you're ready to monetize your travel content, check out Travelpayouts 👈
$50,000 Profit From A Side Project
🗂 From the archive, published June 2022…
Pawel Urbanek writes about his experience building a Slack app.
It’s called Abot, and it allows team members to anonymously post feedback and polls.
Pawel started building the app about 5 years ago and says it has mostly been running on autopilot the last 2 years 🤖
It’s now earning him about $4000/month with very little expense or time to maintain…
Abot is sitting on AWS, and the monthly cost of EC2, RDS, and Cloudflare are ~$50. Required time involvement for occasional demo calls, invoicing, security updates, and housekeeping is around 5 hours a month.
Pawel’s write-up is well worth reading as he’s brutally honest about the ups and downs of being a self-employed solo developer…
I’ve released a dozen commercial side projects. Most of them suck up hundreds of hours, made a few dollars and died out. But every $ they made has always felt different than my 9-5 salary.
Abot is the only one that kind of made it. 50k profit might seem like a lot. But if you divide it by the nolife after work hours I’ve spent to generate this “passive” income, you’d hardly get a junior dev hourly rate. But it’s fun.
Also, I’m guessing all that experience building his own apps is a big reason why he can charge $10,000+ for consulting projects 🤑
(Pawel also seems to have gotten a lot out of Y Combinator’s free Startup School, which is now open for registration.)
How She Gets 10 Million Views Per Video
Jenny Hoyos is an 18-year-old YouTuber with 1.6M subscribers.
She has been absolutely crushed it with YouTube Shorts, with over 600 million views in the past year and averaging 10 million views per video 🤯
A prime example of her work: Mr Beast on a Budget (18M views)
In a recent interview, Jenny shared her insights on how she's able to consistently create viral shorts…
I don't ask if it will go viral. I can figure out how to make it viral.
She believes you can make any video idea go viral if you add an intriguing story and twist to it…
I'll give you an example.
I actually did this in a long form. In the video, I cooked for strangers to make money… Why should [the viewer] care?
Well… my kitchen's broken, so in order to fix it I have to cook to make money…
That's what makes people invested: having some sort of personal why or goal, and irony too is pretty funny.
🧠 Some of Jenny’s suggestions…
Hooks should be visual and simple enough for a 10-year-old to understand.
Every second counts in a short. You want high retention with viewers ideally looping and rewatching.
Length matters. For her audience, videos under 30 seconds don't perform as well. She's found 34 seconds to be the sweet spot for her channel.
Foreshadowing helps set expectations so viewers know what's coming. Jenny dedicates a few seconds in each video to foreshadow the ending.
She structures her shorts using templates like: hook, foreshadow ending, transition, problem/solution storytelling.
Worth noting that Jenny started out on TikTok, where she has 92K followers.
She eventually switched her focus to YouTube after noticing differences in how the platforms' algorithms favored certain types of content.
But here's the key thing 👇
Jenny gained her expertise by analyzing and studying 1000's of successful videos to uncover what makes them work…
I've analyzed all of MrBeast's shorts, all of Ryan Trahan's shorts.
Who is crushing it in your niche? 🤔
Might be a blogger, a YouTube, a freelancer, someone building a massive audience on social… whoever.
What if you spent some time studying their approach, deconstructing their content.
You'd surely learn a few things you could use to boost your own business.