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- She earns $2000/month watching horror movies 😱
She earns $2000/month watching horror movies 😱
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$2000/Month Watching Horror Movies
Newsletters Are About to 10x Due to AI
$250K/Year Helping People Find Sobriety
Orangutan Theory
$1000/Month Super-Niche Shopify App
She Earned $28/Hour From Google Maps (Starting From Scratch)
He Built a $10K/Month Newsletter in 10 Months
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$2000/Month Watching Horror Movies
Check out Katherine Fogler's YouTube channel: KatWatchesHorrorMovies 👀
The channel description…
I'm Kat, and I hate horror movies. They scare the beep out of me. LET'S WATCH'EM!
So it's basically her watching and reacting to horror movies 😱
Her most popular video, with 132K views…
Kat only started her channel in September 2022, but has already amassed 40K subscribers and 3.2 million views with 125 videos 🚀
Impressive growth considering her niche and the fact that she's not big on social media. (Her most popular social media account seems to be Instagram, with 2.7K followers.)
Kat monetizes her channel via YouTube ad revenue and Patreon memberships. Her patrons get access to monthly calls, a Discord community and other perks.
Kat's $10/month tier on Patreon is listed as her most popular. I've checked and that can't be faked, so probably 100+ of her 281 patrons are paying $10/month 😎
She also has $3, $5 and $15/month tiers.
Meanwhile, Kat's YouTube earnings are estimated at $100 to $2000 per month.
All told, I expect she's earning at least $2000/month from this project 🤑
Her story reminds me a bit of Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad. That was basically a travel show featuring a guy who didn't like to travel. Viewers enjoyed watching Karl's reactions to uncomfortable travel situations.
Is there something you hate doing?
Who knows: maybe people would enjoy watching you do it 😂
Newsletters Are About to 10x Due to AI
Today's email is brought to you by Letter Operators 💌
That's a newsletter setup service by Richard Patey, who has built and sold two newsletters on beehiiv's platform.
A recent article explaining why he's bullish on the newsletter business…
Richard is offering $100 off his beehiiv setup service in November, so for only $99 you get 👇
Account setup (sending name, welcome email, custom domain etc)
Newsletter template (choose from a range of popular designs)
Subscribe funnel setup (including survey creation)
Reengagement automation (to keep your list pruned)
The Newsletter Is The Business (highly rated course that usually sells for $147)
$250K/Year Helping People Find Sobriety
Tim Stoddart started Sober Nation anonymously as a blog ~12 years ago, as a way to share his personal story of getting sober 💪
In a recent interview, he shares that he's earning $250,000 a year from the site, primarily via its directory of treatment facilities.
Tim says Sober Nation initially gained traction by sharing user-generated content on Facebook...
when I started [posting on Facebook], people would send me these pictures. Of their sobriety dates. And I called them sober stories. And so I would get pictures from people that I would just post them on Facebook and say like, Hey, Jane has been sober for three years.
And it would just go completely viral… And again, that wasn't necessarily something that I planned. I was just letting other people speak through the site.
Sober Nation now has more than 300K followers on Facebook 📈
A post from 2012 that shows what they were sharing back then…
Most posts were affirmations, prompts, and the sober stories already mentioned.
But Tim soon realized that social media buzz doesn't always translate to revenue 😕
The breakthrough came when treatment centers started reaching out about advertising.
Tim realized he could create a directory to connect these facilities with people looking for help 💡
But there was a problem…
I would say, yeah, sure. You can advertise on my website, but you don't have a website. Like you don't have anything.
I don't even know what you want me to do for you. And so I thought, huh, why don't I just create a service business that serves these.
So Tim launched Stodzy, his marketing agency to help these facilities with their marketing needs.
He did a similar thing after acquiring CopyBlogger.com, seeing it as a way to generate leads for his new SEO agency, Digital Commerce Partners 😎
Tim’s model could be laid out as…
Build an audience and community around a specific niche
Transition it to a directory model to generate revenue
Use the audience and authority to attract clients for a specialized service business
Could you do something like this in your niche? 🤔
I really like the idea of service providers starting directory sites as a way to connect with potential clients.
For example, if you wanted to provide marketing services for realtors, how about creating an online directory of realtors in your area?
That'd be one way to get on their radar, and you might ultimately be able to monetize the directory itself like Tim did 🤑
Orangutan Theory
Katharine Graham is a legend in the newspaper business, leading The Washington Post as it reported on The Watergate scandal back in the 1970s 📰
She was good friends with billionaire investor Warren Buffett, and writes in her autobiography…
[Warren] later told me that he subscribed to Charlie Munger’s “orangutan theory”—which essentially contended that, “if a smart person goes into a room with an orangutan and explains whatever his or her idea is, the orangutan just sits there eating his banana, and at the end of the conversation, the person explaining comes out smarter.”
Warren claimed to be my orangutan. And in a way he was. I heard myself talk when I was with him and I always got a better idea of what I was saying.
In other words: don't keep your ideas to yourself.
Run them by other people. Those people don't even need to respond. Just speaking your ideas aloud will help you evaluate them.
A variation on this is to explain your ideas in writing 📝
I regularly do this to work through challenges in my business. After a few minutes of writing about the problem and possible solutions, I always have a much better sense of what I should do.
$1000/Month Super-Niche Shopify App
🗂 From the archive, published October 2022…
That’d be Zippy, a zip code validation app for Shopify stores.
Founder Ashish Gupta reported a few weeks ago that he started it as a learning project while in lockdown, and it took about 16 months to get to $1000 in monthly recurring revenue.
He also tweeted…
I started Zippy with no clear vision and realized that It’s always possible to grow any low-competition app to $1k-$2k MRR.
It’s interesting to look at the Shopify app store and see how many of the “most popular” apps listed there have pretty bad ratings. Looks like Shopify themselves offer a load of free apps but many of them have poor ratings (prime example).
Could you build something better?
She Earned $28/Hour From Google Maps (Starting From Scratch)
Laura Lacurezeanu runs SuperHumans Life, a YouTube channel with 270K+ subscribers…
We talk about freelancing and working from home, about career, success and happiness, about personal development and success habits, about work life balance and working from home.
💬 In a recent video, she says…
My team just challenged me to make at least $800 as quickly as I could, but I cannot use any of the skills that I already have, and I have to do it in a way that anyone could.
After considering various online business models, Laura decided to offer a service helping businesses set up their for Google Business Profiles.
These are the profiles you see when you open up a business listing on Google Maps 🗺️
Since Laura was new to all this, she started off by taking this free 42-minute Google My Business course.
With that basic knowledge under her belt, she went looking for businesses to pitch her service to 🧐
She searched Google Maps for plumbers and painters in small US towns that met certain criteria…
No claimed Google Business Profile
Low reviews and ratings
Minimal info and photos
No website
(Worth noting that Laura is based in Switzerland 🇨🇭 but that didn't stop her from working with businesses in the USA 🇺🇸)
Laura found the contact details for ~20 companies that fit her criteria.
Then came the hard part: cold calling and pitching her service ☎️
After more than 20 phone calls….
I managed to actually sell three. I was able to sell to two companies for $250 and to one company for $200 after some negotiation.
Laura talks about fulfilling those orders in a follow-up video.
Turns out she spent ~10 hours on the first…
It takes probably 3-4 times longer than it should because you're just figuring things out.
But she got faster and was able to fulfill the third order in 3-4 hours.
In total, she spent ~25 hours on everything and earned $700, which works out to $28/hour 🤑
That's impressive, especially given that Laura was cold calling and learning a new skill on the fly.
This approach could also work to sell other services, such as 👇
Web design
Lead generation
Google ads
Social media marketing
The cold calling part is what will scare off most people, but if you can push through and get good at that, you'll have a huge advantage over competitors.
There are some solid cold calling tips in this comment on Laura's first video.
And check out Benjamin Dennehy's 10 minutes of cold calling for more inspiration.
He Built a $10K/Month Newsletter in 10 Months
🗂 From the archive, published March 2023…
Richard Patey used to build websites, now he launches newsletters 🚀
Having previously built and sold content sites between 2016 and 2019, including a six-figure exit on Empire Flippers, in 2020 he was looking for a business model that wasn’t so dependent on search traffic from Google.
He was also looking to move on from client work…
I was working with investors, helping them to acquire and operate revenue-generating content websites, but kept running into myself as the bottle neck. I wasn’t scalable, and I’ve never truly enjoyed consulting. Instead of charging ~ $1K/m and working with 5 clients at a time, I could instead charge $49/m and aim to get 100 paying customers.
Richard launched the Website Investing newsletter on Substack (a new platform at the time), and within 10 months he had over 100 people paying a $49/m subscription, “plus a similar level of revenue from advertising/affiliate.”
He then sold the business for six figures 💰
At the end of 2021, Richard launched the Alts Cafe newsletter and Discord community. That caught the interest of Flippa and turned into an acqui-hire.
Richard then launched a newsletter sponsorship network of online business, investing and web3 newsletters at Acquire.GG which he sold earlier this year to Scott Oldford’s The Wisdom Group.
He also released a product on how to launch editorial newsletters called The Newsletter is The Business, and I really like this tip he shares there…
Identify niches that you’re personally interested in (so that you enjoy the grind and don’t quit) and then pick one where a lot of money is being spent (the value of subscribers is high). If I can’t identify 5+ legitimate, repeat sponsors in a niche, I won’t enter it, even if the intention is a paid subscription rather than advertising.
(Btw, as of Nov 2023 you can get that product for free as part of Richard’s $99 Beehiiv Done For You offer.)
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. If you're thinking to start a newsletter, check out Beehiiv Done For You. Only $99 and they'll get you set up quick on the same software I use for these emails 😎
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