The $8000/month blog that replaced her teaching job 🥳

As a full-time creator, I have months where I’ve made up to $30,000 and months where I barely make $3,000.

At the time, I was about 6 years into my teaching career and feeling all sorts of burnout. As much as I loved teaching my students, I felt all of my creativity and passion for music (and life, to be honest) be completely drained out by the stress that a career in education inevitably brings…

After doing a bit of research on my own, I realized that blogging was something that I could potentially be successful with! So during my last few weeks of summer 2017, I gave it a go.

I thank myself for never giving up!

In 2021, barely 4 years after starting my blogging business, I was able to quit education. My blogging income had already surpassed my salary as a teacher for the second year in a row, and I felt confident enough to take it full-time.

All things included (blog, LTK, amazon, ads, Etsy), I earn anywhere from $6,000-$10,000 a month.

Utilizing Pinterest has always been my top marketing strategy for my blog/business…

One solid Pinterest pin that links to our blog can be seen and be successful for months and even years whereas sharing anything on Instagram has somewhat of an expiration date until your content gets buried.

The most important and vital thing for any entrepreneur trying to build their online business is to simply not give up.

In the beginning, you will feel like growth and success are close to impossible. You will see other bloggers and creators taking off with success and question whether or not this career is even attainable for you.

Focus on your goals and accept even the smallest amount of growth as progress.

In Carter’s first year, he landed 3 clients and earned a few thousand dollars.

The next year, he tripled his client load to 14 students and broke 5 figures in sales. And from then on, Carter has reached the $100K+ mark working with around 25 to 30 students.

That was more than his income from his full-time corporate PR job—the tipping point that led Carter to quit and go all-in on his college essay consulting business.

Carter started out tutoring different subjects as a side gig in grad school, from SAT/ACT prep to history and even pre-calculus.

But he enjoyed the actual writing and language arts side of things the most, especially helping students craft their college admissions essays….

When he launched his essay coaching services, he undercharged at $75 per hour…

But Carter soon realized prospective clients might be skeptical of such a low price point for a specialized service. He raised his rates to a more appropriate $225 per hour eventually.

This industry is so odd in that people view it almost like a luxury good. It’s this sort of premier consultant, a premier tutor sort of thing. This is a special person. This is someone who’s almost hard to find because they’re so good and they don’t need to advertise themselves.

His year follows a pattern—periods of intense work followed by months of much-needed downtime.

But come late summer and early fall, it’s the complete opposite story. Carter has to put his head down and grind.

He reached out to established, successful college admissions consultants and counselors in his local area. His pitch was simple: “Could I help you out? If you have some overflow clients who you can’t get to, maybe pass them my way.”

And it was a win-win partnership. If you think about it, these consultants were already fully booked anyway, and writing essays often wasn’t how they wanted to spend their time.

From there, the word-of-mouth referral engine started spinning.

I’m now working with students on professional coaching and consulting, folks who want to become tutors or even college essay specialists. I’m working with them to kind of talk about how to do it.

In Somalia, a new dating app is enjoying great success. But in this conservative Muslim society in the Horn of Africa, Guurdoon isn’t a new Tinder for multiplying conquests: it’s aimed at finding a soulmate to start a family.

Launched in October 2022, the application already has tens of thousands of subscribers, according to its founders.

Rahma Hussein has no regrets about paying the 23,000 Somali shillings (less than one euro on the black currency market) to access the application.

Due to its political and financial situation, Somalia is considered one of the least developed countries in the world.

With an average annual income of 430 USD it is one of the low-income countries.

The app was created by the Guryosamo association, founded in 2012 to encourage marriage and help young people wishing to marry but lacking the financial capacity to do so, in this poor country ravaged by civil war…

“Everything society needed has collapsed, including the family, which is its backbone,” explains its director Ahmed Abshir Geedi.

“We have big problems today with marriages. Our young people are rushing to get married and then immediately getting divorced”, he adds.

Meetings with religious leaders, elders, and intellectuals on the subject gave rise to Guurdoon’s idea.

“We understood the need to promote a platform where people of all ages can meet and find each other as partners since our young people are mainly on social networks these days,” he explains.

We're monetizing human interaction by having customers tip workers making the equivalent of $3/hr across the world just for taking an order. It displaces local jobs and feels like outdated labor arbitrage run amok in the digital age.

Today, this is a Filipino woman behind a screen, controlling a POS system — but it’s not crazy to believe that probably in the next six to twelve months, this could be an AI avatar doing all the same things.

Started before eight, ended up being an 18km loop. No snow to start but ended up knee deep in it atop the mountain, struggling to find the trail markings. Saw squirrels and deer and tons of tracks. Lunch by an idyllic frozen lake. Didn't see another human for almost six hours.

Roughly two years ago when the pandemic had people shifting to a WFH environment, I started a twice-weekly newsletter called Workspaces that gives readers a behind the scenes tour of their favorite entrepreneurs, designers, developers, etc. new desk setups.

I published the first 117 editions of the newsletter without a sponsor… With the new year, I shifted this focus slightly and began offering one sponsor slot per newsletter edition. Since then, the newsletter has been sold out weekly and the price has risen from the initial $150 to $250, earning $2,000 per month from sponsorships.

I made it a point to lean on my guests’ Twitter audiences. Early on, I was looking for people with 1,000+ followers so that when they re-shared the content I had the opportunity to convert some of them into frequent readers.