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This turbulence forecaster earns $15,000/month ✈️
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
This Turbulence Forecaster Earns $15,000/Month
The Best Affiliate Marketing Course
His Resurrected Project Now Makes $1000/Month
He Made $800,000 Freelancing on Upwork
1 Percent Better Each Day
$4,000/Month After Getting Laid Off From His 9-to-5
This California Ghost Town Earns $30K a Month
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This Turbulence Forecaster Earns $15,000/Month
Peter Murray is the founder of Turbulence Forecast ✈️
I first came across Peter's website a few years ago, specifically this page…
I assume it's mainly a service for nervous fliers, so they know how bumpy their next flight might be 🙈
This text was on the page back in 2020…
My name is Peter, the founder of Turbulence Forecast. I've been forecasting turbulence for over 15 years, and I will personally give you a one on one briefing of what you might expect on your upcoming flight via email. I write each and every forecast personally, with about 12,000 written so far. Where else can you talk to the founder of a website every time? No questions asked refund policy!
The minimum price for a forecast in 2020 was $40, and the price was only $15 back in 2013.
Let's be conservative and say the average price over the years has been $25, including upsells.
$25 x 12,000 = $300,000
Over 15 years, that's an average of $20,000 per year 🤑
So Peter was likely earning at least $20k/year by writing personalized turbulence forecasts for nervous fliers.
(Btw, to have written 12,000 such forecasts in 15 years, he'd be fulfilling about 15 orders each week.)
Best I can tell, for a long time the email service was the main way Peter's site made money 🧐
But now they also offer a Turbulence Forecast iOS app, free to download, with lots of in-app purchases.
SensorTower (free account required) estimates that app to be earning $10K/month 💰
The site also makes money nowadays via subscriptions and donations.
They get about 100k visitors per month and rank #1-2 on Google for terms like…
turbulence forecast
turbulence map
flight turbulence
Oh, and it's no longer a one-man show: Peter has been hiring help along the way.
All told, I expect Turbulence Forecast is earning at least $15,000 per month nowadays, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually double that 😎
Such a weird little niche business.
Gotta love it 😍
The Best Affiliate Marketing Course
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His Resurrected Project Now Makes $1000/Month
Franco Valdes is the founder of Carta Maps, software that lets you build custom maps and embed them anywhere 🗺️
For example, you could upload a list of all parks in your country/region and Carta Maps would create a visual representation of them.
In a recent tweet, Franco shares that the tool has been making ~$1k/month for several months now 🤑
Elsewhere he shares…
About 4 years ago… we had a client with a pretty complex requirement for their new website. They were a nationwide service-based company that offered commercial cleaning services.
They wanted to dynamically show coverage areas based on a list of zip codes or counties onto a Google map.
🎯 He helped achieve the goal and…
I figured other companies would want to display their footprint similarly so I bought a domain and planned on monetizing the API.
While he did build it…
As many other ideas I have had, this one too, fell short… I never really finished the project.
But then…
[In] 2022, a friend of mine was asking me about how he could plot postal codes on a map. Took me a minute but then realized I had already built this!
This reenergized Franco and he re-built Carta Maps as a complete no-code solution 💪
Based on another write up, it looks like he's mainly been finding customers via search ads.
Also…
Churn is high but expected since I really haven't found [Product-Market Fit].
He's sticking with the project though and I can see him achieving much greater success with it down the line.
Two takeaways from Franco's story 👇
First, he came up with the idea while working on a client project, which is a common theme among the stories we cover in this newsletter.
So if you're not sure what idea to pursue, consider taking on some freelance work. A client project is likely to spark something ⚡️
Second, think about the projects you worked on in the past, perhaps some you even abandoned.
Could you resurrect one and give it another shot? 🤔
🗂 He Made $800,000 Freelancing on Upwork
From the archive, published January 2023…
A short video from Josh Burns: How I Made $800,000 Freelancing on Upwork 🤑
Check out his Upwork profile here.
Josh's first tip from the video is to choose and learn a high-paying skill. He researched high-paying skills and picked the one he liked the most: database administration.
He now charges $150/hour on Upwork and has billed for almost 10,000 hours on there 💪
Browse these lists of high-paying freelance skills and see if any resonate with you…
Another tip from Josh…
Never give up. It actually took me around 3 months to win my first job on Upwork. However, the more jobs that you complete successfully, the more you get noticed and the more jobs that you get invited to. Upwork is a marathon, not a sprint.
Josh also has a 50-minute Upwork beginner's tutorial that you might find useful.
🔎 freelancing | permalink
1 Percent Better Each Day
📖 From the book Atomic Habits by James Clear…
The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
A mistake we often make at the start of a new year: taking on too many habit changes at once.
Try to avoid that trap.
Think about the one habit you could improve that would make everything else in your life easier.
What would that be? 🤔
What if you focused every day this year on getting just 1 percent better at that habit?
Back to the book 👇
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.
It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
I quit my last job back in 2010, which means this is my 14th year working for myself 🥳
Earnings my first year: $10,044
Earnings my last year: $306,840
That's the effect of my habits multiplying over time 📈
You can do similar.
$4,000/Month After Getting Laid Off From His 9-to-5
Paul van Oijen is the founder of Incomparable, which he describes as…
A tiny design studio helping you build big software.
📝 In a recent article, he writes…
I reckon a lot of you are familiar with — and probably bored to death by — the idea of the "productized" consultancy by now…
As a long-time freelancer I'd been intrigued by the idea of "productizing" myself for a while…
After being laid off from my 9-to-5 some months ago though, I figured it was worth the risk to take the plunge.
Paul mentions DesignJoy, a famous productized design service that earns $100K/month 🤯
But Paul noticed something about the "agency subscription" business model…
while the market was in fact quite saturated… [existing providers] were largely focused on marketing design. Landing pages, email, copywriting, leaflets, etc.
There was a gap in the market for a purely product-focused setup, backed by 10+ years of experience in the industry.
Which is exactly where I've managed to carve out a niche for myself (and my occasional front-end development partner).
To the point where Paul is now earning $4000 per month 🤑
He says Twitter (X) “been straight up garbage for leads” but…
LinkedIn has been the best source of traffic bar none…
I made it my objective to post at least twice a week, sharing insights, new updates, and generally connecting with my audience.
I like how Paul saw a business model that worked well for someone else, put his own spin on it, and is now reaping the rewards.
As you're reading the stories in this newsletter, think about how you could tweak the ideas / business models / marketing strategies to work for you 🤔
Keep experimenting and you'll eventually hit the jackpot.
🗂 This California Ghost Town Earns $30K a Month
From the archive, published June 2023…
It's an old mining town called Cerro Gordo, located in the mountains of California, not far from Death Valley (map link).
Brent Underwood and a few friends bought the town for $1.4 million back in 2020 💰
One of those friends is Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit.
A few weeks ago Nathan was on a podcast where he revealed how they're monetizing the town 🤑
Paraphrasing him from about the 37-minute mark (transcript)…
You have this piece of property up in the mountains of California… it's in the middle of nowhere.
What could that be worth?
You could rebuild this old hotel, maybe you could run an Airbnb business.
[But] I don't think people realize that the business has 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube.
It has an email list of a hundred thousand people. There's a podcast coming out soon. It does $30,000 a month in merchandise sales.
Here's the YouTube channel, featuring 79 videos, including the first one from April 2020.
That's about 2 videos per month on average. 32 of the videos have more than 1 million views 👀
Cerro Gordo also has 112K followers on Instagram, and Brent himself has 214K.
And here's their online store, where you can buy products like…
T-shirts / hats / hoodies
Mugs
Coins
Pins
Patches
For $10 apiece, they were even selling old square nails from a hotel that burned down in the town.
Those are now listed as sold out, but there's a photo showing 100s of them in a couple of buckets. So they could easily have made a few $1000 from selling some 200-year-old scrap metal 🤯
Or, as they pitched it, "a piece of American History" 🇺🇸
Ultimately the key to making this kind of thing work is storytelling.
Brent does a great job sharing the story of Cerro Gordo and his efforts to rebuild it.
Another factor here is simply showcasing a place and/or lifestyle that's very different from what most people are used to.
3 other examples of that…
Cecilia Blomdahl
600K YouTube subscribers documenting her life in Svalbard, an island close to the North Pole.The Sheekoz Family
280K YouTube subscribers documenting everyday family life in Russia. The channel started with the guy giving a tour of his $100/month apartment in broken English.Brian Barczyk
4.6M YouTube subscribers sharing his love for reptiles. He was earning $20k/month last I checked.
Do you…
Live in an unusual place?
Have a strange hobby?
Follow an atypical lifestyle?
If so, you could probably build a big following and earn a good living by sharing online 👍
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. Quick reminder about The Authority Site System.
It's truly a great course, but don't take my word for it. They've got a 30-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. So you can try it out for 4 weeks and still get your money back if you're not feeling it 👍
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