The Side Hustle Show: The Blogging Mixtape Nick Loper, Blogger at Side Hustle Nation

Just because a niche is insanely competitive, it doesn’t mean you can’t start an affiliate site and claim a slice of the revenue.
At least, that’s what Sa El of SimplyInsurance.com has done, and the way he lays out how he’s done it will pique the interest of affiliate marketers out there.
Sa was a door-to-door insurance salesman in Atlanta. He wanted to get into the online space and build an affiliate site, and with more than 11 years’ experience in the insurance industry, it made sense to enter the insurance niche.
He took Brain Dean’s SEO That Works course to learn the ropes. But, when he told Brian he was going to build a site in the insurance niche, he was advised against it.
Did Sa go back to the drawing board and look for a new niche?
Nope.
Sa told me there were two reasons why he decided to go ahead and build his site:
He likes a challenge, and If the niche is that competitive, most of his competition is already at the top, leaving room for him to work his way up. That was 2 years ago.
Today, Sa’s site is bringing in 6000 visitors a month and $13k-$15k in revenue.
Note: Click here to download Sa’s top tips for starting and growing an affiliate site in a competitive niche from this episode.
These numbers prove how competitive the insurance niche is. That’s a huge revenue number for 6k visitors, and Sa told me that only around 4.5k of those visitors are landing on his “money pages.” (Some examples linked below.)
Tune in to hear how Sa strategically built out his content to capture longtail traffic, how he builds backlinks (lots of them) to rank his money pages, and the tools he’s using to accelerate his efforts.

Kimberly Gauthier has been running KeepTheTailWagging.com since 2011, but things really started to take off when she niched down her focus to raw feeding for dogs.
Raw feeding is basically the paleo diet for dogs -- attempting to mimic their ancestral diet.
Her blog had than 2 million page views last year -- almost entirely from organic search in Google, and she’s monetized the traffic with a few different income streams.
Tune in to hear how Kimberly arrived at his niche, what drives content and marketing today, and how the business makes money -- all on the side from her day job.

Meredith Marsh is a “total introvert with over 3 million views on YouTube.”
When Meredith started VidProMom.com she didn’t set out to be a “YouTuber”. She started a blog and YouTube channel because she wanted to help families better capture those classic, picture-perfect family moments.
What she discovered was “a pretty big gap in the whole video creation side of things for people who are creating videos for fun,” Meredith said.
She started creating a video series on how to use a GoPro and some of the software - and things quickly snowballed.
Note: Click here to download Meredith’s top tips for growing a YouTube channel from this episode.
Her YouTube channel was getting more subscribers than all her other social media metrics and blog visitors added together – so it was obvious that YouTube was the ideal platform for her content.
A year after starting her channel Meredith left her day job, and her blog/YouTube channel that started as a side hustle is now her full-time job.
Tune in to hear how to set up your YouTube channel for success, how to master the YouTube algorithm to reach more people, and how to make money from your new video content.

Jodi Carlson has been running her blog LeaderConnectingLeaders.com part-time since 2014 and has slowly built it up to $5-6k a month in revenue.
The earnings come from a combination of mostly digital product sales, as well as advertising, and affiliate relationships.
Click here to download Jodi’s top tips for growing a blog and creating digital products from this episode.
The surprising thing – to me at least – is that she’s done this in a niche that theoretically doesn’t have any money.
Her readers and customers are almost all volunteers and they’re donating their time to local non-profit groups – in this case, Girl Scout groups.
On the surface that makes it seem like it’s as tough a niche as any to tackle, which makes Jodi’s results even more impressive.
She brings more than two decades of experience in Girl Scouts to the table, as a scout, then as a troop leader, and even though the blog didn’t start out with dollar signs in mind she’s turned it into a substantial income stream.
“I actually started it to help myself, and to then help troop leaders in my community,” Jodi said.
Jodi started documenting the activities she was doing with her Scout Troops in her blog and making PDF books so she could refer to them again in the future, and shared her articles with a small circle of other leaders in her community.
It wasn’t long before Troop leaders further afield started asking for her activity books. This sparked the idea to start selling her books and growing her blog.
Tune in to hear how Jodi comes up with product ideas and prices those, how she made her first sales, how she’s grown her traffic to more than 100k pageviews a month, and income to $5k + a month – all while working full-time and raising a family.
Related: Check out my free video series on how to start a blog.

“I feel like this is the most important project I’ve ever worked on,” Mike said about his blog YoungArchitect.com.
Mike Riscica runs a blog, podcast, and has built a thriving community for young professionals in the architecture field.
The idea for the blog came from a pain point in Mike’s life, and for many others – passing the Architect Registration Examination (ARE).
After failing to pass the exam 4 times (before passing) and seeing his peers struggling, Mike started blogging about his challenges.
“[My story] resonated with people in a pretty serious way,” he said, and he started seeing traction within the community.
He started monetizing his blog from day one with affiliate products and continued to add more revenue streams to scale up his business with courses, speaking gigs, books, videos, and more as his traffic grew.
Today his blog in a full-time business. He's had the opportunity to travel the country with his dog doing speaking gigs, has helped hundreds of students pass their ARE, and has some interesting plans for the future.
Tune in to hear how Mike grew his blog, how it rings the cash register in at least half a dozen different ways, and the strategies you may be able to lift for your own project.

FoodTruckEmpire.com generates $60k a year on the side from Brett Lindenberg's marketing consulting job.
Why'd he start a blog about the food truck industry?
“I started the blog at a time in my life when I was looking at just a whole bunch of different business ideas,” Brett said.
Originally, Brett wanted to start his own food truck. While researching how to start a food truck business he discovered there wasn’t enough quality information online.
So, he did what all good entrepreneurs do – capitalized on this gap in the market and started his own blog.
Note: Click here to download Brett’s top tips for starting and monetizing a part-time blog from this episode.
Brett creates the bulk of his content interviewing food truck owners and influencers in the industry.
He’s grown his blog to $60k a year in just 4 years through building an academy course, securing paid advertising, running AdSense, and selling ebooks.
And spoiler alert: he never ended up starting that food truck!
Tune in to hear Brett's content strategy, the different ways he monetizes his business, and how you can apply these methods to your own blog.