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$3,300/month in a tiny niche Down Under 🇦🇺
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$3,300/Month in a Tiny Niche Down Under
Free 5 Day VA Challenge
$74K From a Self-Published eBook in 1 Year
$1.45 Million a Year Helping People Quit Jobs in Japan
Albert Einstein Said This Is Better Than Genius
$10K+ Per Month Sharing His Boots Expertise
$6000/Month VA Business With Little Online Presence
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$3,300/Month in a Tiny Niche Down Under
Emma Todd is the founder of My RIG Adventures, a website about "all things caravanning, camping and road tripping Australia" 🇦🇺
In a recent interview, she shares…
MY RIG Adventures is averaging 130,000 page views per month, earning over $5,000 AUD [$3,298 USD] a month.
She monetizes via display ads, affiliate offers and digital products 🤑
How Emma got started…
I first created MY RIG Adventures in 2016 as I was packing up my life to hit the road as a full-time nomad with my (now ex) husband and two kids.
Once we hit the road, I blogged about my different experiences, plus some camp reviews and helpful tips for caravanning and living on the road.
And…
I was also sharing our monthly budget stats on Facebook, using a spreadsheet I’d created…
That turned out to be so popular that I put it up for sale on the website, which ended up doing really well. It was at that moment that I realised I could actually make some money out of this, which would help to fund our travels.
I'm guessing 👉 this is the same spreadsheet for sale on her site.
After Covid…
As local travel was popping off, my website kept growing.
Since 2021, I’ve been blogging full-time and working to build the website as much as possible.
Love that it’s a tiny niche, focused on Australia, a country with a population of only 26 million.
💬 Last words from Emma…
My biggest piece of advice for those who are embarking on the blogging journey is that it’s a long game, not a “get rich quick” scheme.
Once you set up a good foundation and can keep adding more content to your website, you can definitely make a sustainable full-time income out of blogging.
That’s true of pretty much any business.
If you’re in it for the long run, you have a big competitive advantage 💪
Free 5 Day VA Challenge
Today's email is brought to you by The 5 Day VA Challenge.
This is a free challenge by Hannah Dixon to help you get started as a virtual assistant 🚀
You'll learn…
What skills to focus on
How to find clients
How to sharpen your entrepreneurial mindset
It starts Monday, January 29.
One person who went through it before wrote…
I met super cool people and got a client by the end of the challenge!
$74K From a Self-Published eBook in 1 Year
📖 Sandro Volpicella and Tobias Schmidt self published their book, AWS Fundamentals, which is…
A Book & Newsletter That Teaches You How to Use AWS in the Real World.
AWS = Amazon Web Services, a bunch of cloud computing services offered by Amazon.
And AWS Fundamentals is a digital book, no physical copies available 👨💻
A recent article by Sandro…
There he shares some secrets to the book's success…
Our approach was based on doing everything in public. We talked about writing an AWS book very early on…
We created a very simple landing page on carrd with an initial thought of the table of contents.
We started out with 500 subscribers but grew very quickly up to 2,000 subscribers!
… This validated [the idea] and we decided to write a book ✍🏽
Looks like these were their announcement tweets in mid-2022…
Today, they have a combined following of 24K on X but it looks like they only had a combined 10K back then 👀
Sandro adds…
One amazing benefit we got through writing in public is a shout-out from Jeff Barr!
Jeff is a VP at AWS and he is the OG in creating technical content about AWS. He authored over 1,000 blog posts. Getting a shout-out from him gave us the biggest boost + credibility boost ever.
That shout-out post on LinkedIn has ~2K likes 😎
Unclear how that came about, but I'm guessing Sandro and Tobias' do-everything-in-public approach had a lot to do with it.
More from Sandro…
Via Twitter we shared a lot of progress of the book. We always included CTAs to our landing page which had a waiting list form on it. This channel works out quite well.
💌 Email marketing has been key…
Having a direct connection to the inbox of interested people is the best way… it is still the best-converting tool if you create great content.
Sandro also lists "the three best resources that helped us" 👇
– Adam Wathan's talk and blog post about Nailing your first launch
– Nathan Barry's book Authority
– Rob Fitzpatrick's book: Write Useful Books
Main thing I love about this story: they validated the idea of the book before writing it.
Most people first write a book and then try to figure out a way to market it. But clearly the approach Sandro and Tobias took is far superior 👍
🗂 $1.45 Million a Year Helping People Quit Jobs in Japan
From the archive, published May 2023…
I stumbled across a fascinating article from 2019 about a company 🇯🇵 Japanese people can hire to quit a job on their behalf…
[Exit is] a start-up that offers a bespoke service to employees who are dying to resign but need a bit of help.
“Most of them are scared of their bosses,” says [co-founder Yuichiro] Okazaki. “They know their bosses are going to say: ‘No, you cannot quit’. I think it’s because of the culture of Japan – to quit something is bad. When they want to quit, they feel like they are a bad person.”
That’s where Senshi S and its quitting service, Exit, comes in. For a fee of 50,000 yen ($457, £353), Exit will call a client’s boss and deliver a resignation by proxy. Sometimes it takes several calls. Other times companies don’t want to deal with Exit and say the employee must come in to deliver the message themselves.
But when it’s done, the relief from clients can be immense. “There was one client who told us, ‘you are a Messiah’,” says Okazaki. The man had been wanting to leave for 10 years and “was really suffering from that job”.
The company’s website is taishokudaikou.com
Taishoku daikou literally means “retirement agency” in Japanese, and retirement in this context seems to mean quitting a job, not full-on career retirement.
The price listed on their website is now only 20,000 yen, which works out to $145.
They also say on their homepage…
We handle more than 10,000 cases every year
If they’re truly handling 10,000 cases per year (ie. 27 per day), that works out to $1.45 million in annual revenue 💰
And it sounds like a pretty simple operation to run. It’s probably just a small call center with several assertive employees trained to have the same conversation multiple times a day.
I guess you could call this type of business: quitting as a service (QaaS) 😜
And it begs the question…
What are some other things people are scared of that you could do on their behalf? 🤔
Albert Einstein Said This Is Better Than Genius
💬 From a speech by Peter Kaufman…
Albert Einstein once listed what he said were the five ascending levels of cognitive prowess…
Number five he said, at the very bottom, was smart. Okay. That’s the lowest level of cognitive prowess is being smart.
The next level up, level four, is intelligent.
Level three, next up, is brilliant.
Next level up, level two, he said is genius.
What? What’s higher than genius? He must have that backward. No, he doesn’t. Wait until you hear what number one is according to Albert Einstein…
Number one is simple. Simple transcends genius.
I've noticed this with many of the stories we've shared in this newsletter.
It's rarely the "genius" ideas that become successful businesses. It's more often the simple ideas executed consistently at a high level 💪
Translation: you don't have to be super smart or talented to build a successful business.
It's enough to just focus on a simple idea for a long time, and strive to execute better than your competition.
$10K+ Per Month Sharing His Boots Expertise
Nick English is the founder of Stridewise, described as “Boot Expertise for the Modern Man” 🥾
In a recent interview, he shares…
The site generates 5 figures per month.
The income is from many sources: affiliate commissions, on-site ads, YouTube ads, and more.
Before Nick started his site…
I worked as a health and fitness writer, mostly covering nutrition for outlets like Men’s Health, Popular Science, and World’s Strongest Man.
After a few years of working at a fitness content startup, I had a decent idea of how to grow a profitable website and decided it was time to strike out on my own.
👂 Sound familiar?
I've profiled a good number of people who’ve turned their previous job experience into a profitable side-hustle.
Could you do something similar? 🤔
How Nick came up with the idea for his site…
Found a consultant to help me find out what I had the best chance at making a living from.
The consultant noticed my boots and asked if that was an idea I’d be comfortable pursuing. I thought that was a great idea, he ran the numbers, and Stridewise was a go-ahead.
If you can't afford a consultant, try chatting with friends and family, see if they have any good prompts or suggestions.
You could also try using ChatGPT for this 🤖
How Nick's site evolved…
I thought it’d just be my hands holding a pair of boots and talking about the pros and cons, but as video became a more and more important part of digital marketing, I wound up doing videos on everything.
He started his YouTube channel in March 2018 and has since grown it to 87K+ subscribers 📈
As of this writing, I see 371 videos on the channel, so Nick's been cranking out a video each week for almost 6 years now.
The most popular video on the channel is from August 2018, with almost 1 million views…
Keys to the growth of Stridewise, according to Nick…
Publishing regularly, maintaining a YouTube channel, and working with link building agencies
💬 Advice for anyone looking to follow in his footsteps…
be prepared to go years without making a profit!
… It took about three years of part-time work on my weekends to get to a point where I could quit my job.
If you're eager to make money right away, consider doing some freelance writing like Nick did to start.
You'll learn a lot while earning a decent income much faster 😎
🗂 $6000/Month VA Business With Little Online Presence
From the archive, published August 2023…
We review lots of virtual assistant courses on eBiz Facts 🧐
A student named Bri McDonald recently commented on our review of a course called Launch in 30 Days…
Right now I’m up to lucky client number 6…
During my first month [as a virtual assistant] I brought in $7,000, excluding GST. Several months in, I am on track to earn $10,000 (excluding GST) monthly.
Bri is based in New Zealand 🇳🇿 so those figures are NZD.
Approximate conversions…
$7000 NZD = $4200 USD
$10,000 NZD = $6000 USD
(Also, GST is a goods and services tax, like VAT in Europe.)
I find Bri’s results remarkable considering she doesn’t have much of an online presence.
A post on her Facebook page reveals how she landed her first client 👇
We have just spent a couple of days down in Franz Josef visiting my first client (Franz Josef Top 10 Holiday Park – aka my mum) 😎
The idea for my business steamed from the work I have been doing to support my mum remotely in her business. The thought of being able to provide remote admin support to multiple businesses across the country was super exciting.
So I ran with the idea and here we are!
Most likely, Bri used the results she got from helping her mom’s business to land other clients.
I suspect she also leveraged her existing network, which isn’t very big; Bri has less than 300 connections on LinkedIn as of this writing.
But despite not having a website or a significant social media following, she’s managed to build up a profitable VA business in a few short months 💪
My takeaway: your existing relationships and some word-of-mouth can be enough to get a simple service business up and running.
Does that uncle of yours need a website or help with Excel?
That little opportunity could well be the start of a new career 🚀
The key is getting results for that first client or two, then leveraging those results to land more clients.
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'd like some help getting started as a virtual assistant, check out Hannah Dixon's free 5 Day VA Challenge.
It starts on Monday, and people say things like this about it…
The 5 day VA Challenge was the tipping point, that was the end of the old me and the beginning of my new life, literally.
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