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What It's About
A man sets a goal to start five side hustles that earn $2,000/month to help him achieve a better lifestyle for him and his family.
Business Model
Affiliate
Skills Required
Research & Analytical Thinking
Complexity
Medium
Profit Potential
Medium
Words of Wisdom
SEO for small projects is easy. Paul follows four steps:
- 1. Research the keywords you want to rank for.
- 2. Use the keywords in the title tags on your page.
- 3. Make sure the content on that page is relevant and high quality.
- 4. Promote those pages and get links.
Fun Fact
Paul admits that he is a victim of “The Shiny Object Syndrome,” he said. He’ll start chasing a new idea before completing his other projects. It’s part of his desire to try everything, but he’s realized he can do all the projects he wants, he just needs to focus on getting each one up to speed, then moving on to the next.
Notes from Chris
Episode 335
Paul Dessert is on a mission. The Airbus Defense and Space web developer is working towards his “5x2000” goal. That is—he’s aiming to create five side hustles in the form of small online businesses that will each generate at least $2,000 per month, and his first two—Resume Beacon and JungleFlip—are well on their way. The first one, Resume Beacon, came about after friends and family kept asking him, as the resident computer guy, to help them with formatting their resumes when word processing software was proving to be less than user-friendly. It was a technical obstacle, but one for which Paul had a solution and the knowledge to implement that solution. That’s when he created this project to help people create a professional layout for their resumes. To create the site, Paul just started writing code. Fortunately, when you are a web developer you can do that. His startup costs were minimal, it was just a matter of registering the domain, then investing time to get the site up and running. On average, monthly expenses for Resume Beacon are about $80 and it generates at least $500. Paul’s second side hustle, JungleFlip, is a website featuring discounted goods—returns and open-box items—from Amazon.com’s Warehouse. It boasts deals start at 30% off retail with new items added every hour. JungleFlip generates its revenue through an affiliate advertising program earning money by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. If visitors make a purchase through one of the links, it may also generate a commission. Just like with Resume Beacon, the startup was more a matter of time over money. The only hard cost was domain registration and the monthly expenses are about $40 to generate an average of $300 a month. As with so many people featured on Side Hustle School, and perhaps like you as well, Paul wasn’t trying to recruit investors or partners, or hire a bunch of employees. He wanted to be in control of his life. He wants something that will support his family—a “lifestyle” business that will bring him more freedom of choice. Paul is dedicated to reaching his overall goal of 5x2000. Focusing on his two current side hustles, his next ambition is to get ResumeBeacon to $2,000 a month, then begin the third project, a goal he’s aiming to achieve in early 2018.MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- JungleFlip & Resume Beacon: Learn more about Paul's side hustle projects on his websites!
- Reddit: The "front page of the internet" where Paul received some additional traffic as a result of his content marketing efforts
- Amazon Warehouse: Where Paul finds the discounted goods, returns, and open-box items he highlights on JungleFlip
- Lifehacker: The online publication that picked up Resume Beacon and brought in some additional traffic for Paul
- SEO 101: If you're looking to separate yourself from the pack, here's a Beginner's Guide to SEO
- Diamond in the Rough: Engagement Ring Hunt Turns Into Hustle: A search for the perfect engagement ring leads a software engineer in Baltimore on a mission to discover the algorithm for the ideal sparkly diamond. Along the way, he creates an affiliate side hustle with major potential
- Weekend “Book Registry” Site Earns Passive Income from Amazon.com: After a discovering a trend on Pinterest where expecting mothers ask for baby books in lieu of greeting cards at baby showers, a developer in Pennsylvania decides to create a book registry website to cater to it bringing in a new stream of passive income
Quote of the Day
"Don't treat SEO as black magic—it's just an extension of PR and marketing. It can be an important part of your strategy, just don't build everything around it. If you're doing everything else correctly SEO will fall into place, so don't rush out and buy a bunch of tools when you're starting out because you don't need them."
—Paul Dessert #SideHustleSchool
