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How This 38-Year-Old Made $100k Profit in 2022 From Her Travel Blogs & Facebook Groups

Published

1 year ago

April 12, 2023

How This 38-Year-Old Made $100k Profit in 2022 From Her Travel Blogs & Facebook Groups

Sarah Chant worked as a teacher for over a decade while she poured her heart and soul into various side hustles. The bad news is that, for several years, none of them worked out. The good news is that, during that period, Sarah learned the skills she needed to finally find success.

Today she runs her main travel website, New Zealand Travel Tips, and its accompanying Facebook group, as well as other smaller travel blogs and groups. Ultimately, she’s been able to create a community-minded business that provides her with financial freedom. Between her sites, ebook sales, and itinerary support for travelers, she made $100k in profit last year. And now, with Covid restrictions behind her, the sky’s the limit!

Keep reading to find out:

Which side hustle laid the foundation for her future success
Why she created New Zealand Travel Tips
How she kept busy during Covid
How long it took her to get into Mediavine
Where her income comes from
How much time she spends on her business
Her main marketing strategy
Her approach to keyword research
How she creates content
Her favorite resources and tools
Her biggest challenge
Her greatest accomplishment
Her main mistake
The advice she would offer other entrepreneurs

Meet Sarah Chant

Kia ora, I’m Sarah, founder of New Zealand Travel Tips. I’m 38 years old and live in Auckland (the largest city in Aotearoa, New Zealand) with my husband and our two much-loved cats.

I’m a total adrenaline junkie, as I’ve done 7 skydives and15 bungee jumps. I’ve also traveled to 75 countries.

1681267228 326 How This 38 Year Old Made 100k Profit in 2022 From Her

I’ve blogged and worked as a content creator for the past 10 years, but always alongside a full-time job. I spent 14 years teaching full-time and have worked for the last year as a digital content specialist.

In the last year or so, though, I’ve seen the light at the end of the side hustle tunnel!

Why She Created New Zealand Travel Tips

Before starting New Zealand Travel Tips (NZTT), I had a few other side hustles.

Initially, I taught myself to face paint, and in doing so, I created a small face-painting business. I built myself a basic website and started learning about SEO, social media marketing, and the benefits of blogging.

From there, I helped a few friends build their own websites and went on to create my first travel blog, Exploring Kiwis. These were the days when Instagram growth came easy, and global travel blogs were all the rage; the idea of niching down simply wasn’t on my radar.

Through Exploring Kiwis, I really focused on SEO (but with a general blog, struggled to make as much progress as I would have liked) and connected with other travel bloggers.

Though we enjoyed countless hosted stays and experiences and learned a lot, we barely made a cent. The learning, however, was immense, and though I didn’t know it at the time, I was laying the groundwork for future success.

Though I wasn’t ready to create a new niche site, I decided the time might be right to create a region-specific Facebook group.

At the time, the only substantial New Zealand Facebook groups out there were run by overseas admins (some, I’m sure hadn’t ever been to NZ!) and I thought there was a gap in the market and decided to go for it!

I got to work creating the New Zealand Travel Tips Facebook group and another group, Exploring Auckland.

Along Came Covid

Then Covid hit and New Zealand shut down. I’d heard about the benefits of niche sites and decided it was the perfect time to give one a go. I put Exploring Kiwis into hibernation and set about creating a new website for Exploring Auckland.

Within four months, I got the Exploring Auckland website onto Mediavine—something I never achieved with my original travel blog, even after years of hard work. I did this by leveraging “newsworthy articles” and sharing them with local Facebook groups. My city-specific blog allowed me to write about things that would have felt out-of-place on a travel blog (like this article about a plant giveaway), and growth came much easier.

Not long after, I took a leap of faith and committed to bringing a New Zealand Travel Tips blog to life, and it paid off—we got it on Mediavine within three months. This site is now just over a year old and we’re really happy with its traffic.

How This 38 Year Old Made 100k Profit in 2022 From Her

1681267228 629 How This 38 Year Old Made 100k Profit in 2022 From Her

After the success of NZTT, we also created an Australia Travel Tips and South Pacific Travel Tips group to support our members traveling outside of NZ.

Niching down with NZTT was the best blogging decision I’ve ever made. I am so passionate about helping others make the most of their time in Aotearoa, and our website and Facebook group work together to do exactly that!

Between our site and Facebook group, we work hard to bring our readers and members the most reliable, tried-and-tested information, to provide local knowledge, a friendly community, and discounts to make their travels more affordable.

How Much Money Sarah’s Making

We have worked hard to diversify our income streams.

We earn income through display ads (via Mediavine) and affiliates (though OTAs and by working directly with local operators). We also offer one-on-one travel consultations over Zoom (where we help our members with itinerary planning) and recently published a series of ebooks.

1681267228 397 How This 38 Year Old Made 100k Profit in 2022 From Her

It’s hard to say with certainty what our financial future will look like, as borders to New Zealand reopened less than a year ago so, though our business is 3.5 years in, in a lot of ways we’re still finding our feet.

However, we’re excited to say that in the last financial year, we made over $100,000 in profit doing what we love!

We’re always looking for new ways to serve our community while also bringing in an income. This year, for example, we made $6,000 selling our ebooks in the first four months of 2023. This was an income source that we didn’t have last year, and we know they genuinely solve a pain point for people planning travels in New Zealand.

That’s a win-win.

I spend approximately 40 hours a week working on NZTT, but could easily wind this back if required.

Right now, I’m committed to our growth and like to be hands-on in our Facebook community, so I choose to put in fairly big hours on top of my day job.

We are frequently told that our engagement and support as admins is one of the things that sets our group apart, so we’re keen to continue with this as a priority.

Her Marketing Strategies

I think Facebook groups are a massively under-utilized resource!

Our Facebook group has 50,000 members, all of whom are genuinely interested in the content of our website and our products

We’re able to survey our members to find out what their content needs are, keep an eye out for frequently asked questions, crowdsource information, quotes, and images, and can share our content back to them.

We also build brand awareness through our group and establish ourselves as experts in our field.

Plus, when someone comes through the website as a reader, we invite them to join our group to get more personalized information and to have their questions answered.

Sarah’s Thoughts on SEO

SEO is a key part of our business. Before we write anything, we’ll jump into KeySearch to research keywords and consider our priorities.

With that said, however, we still write articles that have very little search traffic. We know these articles help our Facebook community/readers and they help ensure our website is seen as a one-stop-shop.

Keyword Research

I keep a Google Sheet that outlines a range of keyword-researched topics (taken from Keysearch). We record the search volume and difficulty and look at the balance of those, along with the interest/knowledge of each writer before deciding what posts to write.

We’re also mindful of time-bound content and try to publish these seasonal articles at the most appropriate time.

Link Building

Link building is an important part of our strategy, though we don’t spend the time on it we should.

We contribute to collaborative posts, occasionally write guest posts, and make the most of opportunities like this. We’ll also happily link to our blogging buddies when there’s an organic opportunity and appreciate that many others do the same for us

Sarah’s Content Creation Process

We have a small team of writers that contribute posts and a wonderful VA that helps behind the scenes. They all play a massive role in freeing me up to edit and publish articles. We found our writers through blogging groups on Facebook.

Initially, we were focused on creating a “things to do” guide for each of the main towns and cities in New Zealand. Now, we’re working our way through smaller towns in New Zealand and creating road trip itineraries, etc.

1681267228 622 How This 38 Year Old Made 100k Profit in 2022 From Her — Checking out Wingspan, our National Bird of Prey Centre, in Rotorua. We’ve been lucky to attend a number of famils in New Zealand to help us understand a range of local tourism products.

As a relatively new site, our focus is on ensuring we have good coverage for our readers, so they can feel confident that by coming to us, they’ll be able to find the information they need, even on more obscure topics.

Of course, we then spend time building our internal links between these posts and pages.

Her Email List

For a long time, I collected emails from new members joining our Facebook group, but I didn’t have time to do anything with them.

I recently set up an onboarding series, so I send out 5 emails in quick succession, designed to introduce new members to our key offers. They then get a weekly newsletter that refers back to information found on our site.

We give new members the option to sign up for these emails when they join our Facebook groups and also collect emails through our website using a pop-up and spotlight box, both through Mediavine.

Her Favorite Resources

As a big fan of Facebook groups, it probably isn’t surprising to learn that we get a lot of our information through Facebook!

I love Digital Nomad Wannabe and Facebook Group Admins: Growth, Engagement, and Monetization.

More and more, I find myself listening to blogging podcasts too.

Her Top Tools

My go-to tools are as follows:

GroupLeads: When we first started our Facebook groups, we used to manually copy/paste email signups but GroupLeads automates that for us. We signed up for a lifetime license and love it!

Keysearch: When I first started blogging, I wrote about what interested me and what I thought others might like to read, but I was just guessing. Keysearch allows me to make informed decisions about our content, and it’s surprisingly affordable.

ThriveCart: We added ThriveCart to our toolkit when we decided to sell ebooks. The lifetime deal is a reasonable investment but we’ve already made our money back (in four months) thanks to the bump offers it lets us run.

1681267228 411 How This 38 Year Old Made 100k Profit in 2022 From Her

ThirstyAffiliates: We use the free version of this tool and wouldn’t be without it now. If a product is no longer available through one OTA, we can switch out the link (from Klook to GetYourGuide, for example) and ThirstyAffiliates will push that change out right across our site. It’s a big time-saver.

Sarah’s Biggest Challenge

Finding what worked well for us was definitely the biggest challenge. I spent years blogging, never seeing a return that reflected what I was putting into my business.

When I found my secret sauce though, that all changed.

Her Most Important Accomplishment

Leading such an authentic, compassionate, genuinely helpful Facebook group is undoubtedly my most important accomplishment.

Many of our members even choose to stay in the group after they’ve finished their travels, paying it forward to new visitors.

I also love that I get to be involved in helping people plan bucket list adventures in Aotearoa New Zealand and that I’ve gotten to know so many amazing tourism operators across the country.

What She Wishes She Knew When She Started

You can’t be an expert in everything, nor do you have to do everything, and that’s totally fine.

I haven’t explored web stories, haven’t used Pinterest in years, and barely touch Instagram.

Instead, I focus on my Facebook group and website (particularly SEO) and do what I can with ebooks and email marketing.

Sarah’s Main Mistake

I’ve done things in the past that I wouldn’t encourage others to do and that I wouldn’t do again, but I’m not sure I’d call them mistakes as it took finding out what didn’t work for me to figure out what did.

In the early days, I spent far too much time growing my Instagram account. Though I had 50,000 followers, they were from all around the world, so the chances of them being interested in the particular place we were traveling to was slim. Our account was not effectively monetized and drove no traffic to our blog. And the time spent on our Facebook page really wasn’t much better.

Also, if I had my time again, I would have niched down far sooner as it was when we did that that we started to find success.

Her Advice for Other Entrepreneurs

Work hard to build a brand and community built on trust and empathy, that reflects your values.

We’re very fortunate to have a group of dedicated members that are our biggest cheerleaders. They support us and actively contribute, helping to reinforce the tone that our group is so well-known for.

It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers, but ultimately if you have a community that is highly regarded, opportunities will flow.

And if you’re currently working on something that just isn’t growing as it should (like my original travel blog), don’t be afraid to pivot to something new or leave an old business behind.

It took me going from a website about face painting to two different travel websites before I eventually made it to NZTT, and if I’d gotten stuck on any one of them, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Related Topics:100K 38YearOld blogs Facebook Groups Profit seo Travel

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Samsung: 6-Day Workweek For Execs, Company in Emergency Mode

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19 hours ago

April 19, 2024

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Samsung: 6-Day Workweek For Execs, Company in Emergency Mode

Four-day workweeks might have all the buzz, but one major tech company is going in the opposite direction.

Samsung is implementing a six-day workweek for all executives after some of the firm’s core businesses delivered lower-than-expected financial results last year.

A Samsung Group executive told a Korean news outlet that “considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome this crisis.”

Lower performance combined with other economic uncertainties like high borrowing costs have pushed the South Korean company to enter “emergency mode,” per The Korea Economic Daily.

Executives at all Samsung Group divisions will be affected, including those in sales and manufacturing, according to the report.

Samsung had its worst financial year in over a decade in 2023, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that net profit fell 73% in Q4. It also lost its top spot on the global smartphone market to Apple in the same quarter, though it reclaimed it this year.

Though employees below the executive level aren’t yet mandated to clock in on weekends, some might follow the unwritten example of their bosses. After all, The Korea Economic Daily reports that executives across some Samsung divisions have been voluntarily working six days a week since January, before the company decided to implement the six-day workweek policy.

Entrepreneur has reached out to Samsung’s U.S. newsroom to ask if this news includes executives situated globally, including in the U.S., or if it only affects employees in Korea. Samsung did not immediately respond.

Research on the relationship between hours worked and output shows that working more does not necessarily increase productivity.

A Stanford project, for example, found that overwork leads to decreased total output. Average productivity decreases due to stress, sleep deprivation, and other factors “to the extent that the additional hours [worked] provide no benefit (and, in fact, are detrimental),” the study said.

Longer hours can also mean long-term health effects. The World Health Organization found that working more than 55 hours a week decreases life expectancy and increases the risk of stroke by 35%.

The same 55-hour workweek leads to a 17% higher risk of heart disease, per the same study.

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John Deere Hiring CTO ‘Chief Tractor Officer,’ TikTok Creator

Published

2 days ago

April 18, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

John Deere Hiring CTO 'Chief Tractor Officer,' TikTok Creator

^{This article originally appeared on Business Insider.}

Agriculture equipment company John Deere is on the hunt for a different kind of CTO.

The brand on Tuesday announced a two-week search to find a “Chief Tractor Officer” who would create social media content to reach younger consumers.

One winning applicant will receive up to $192,300 to traverse the country over the next several months showcasing the way John Deere products are used by workers, from Yellowstone National Park to Chicago’s Wrigley Field and beyond.

“No matter what you do — whether it’s your coffee, getting dressed in the morning, driving to work, the building you go into — it’s all been touched by a construction worker, a farmer, or a lawn care maintenance group,” Jen Hartmann, John Deere’s global director of strategic public relations, told AdAge.

To kick off the search, John Deere tapped NFL quarterback Brock Purdy (who will presumably be a bit busy this Fall to take the job himself) to star in a clip in which he attempts to set out on a road trip in an industrial tractor.

Suited up in the obligatory vest, work boots, and John Deere hat, Purdy’s progress is interrupted by teammate Colton McKivitz hopping into the cab while a string of messages floods in from other athletes and influencers expressing interest in the job.

The clip also represents the first time that the 187-year-old company has used celebrities to promote itself, Hartmann told AdAge.

According to the contest rules, entrants have until April 29 at midnight to submit a single 60-second video making their pitch for why they should be the face and voice of the company.

In addition, entrants must live in the 48 contiguous states or DC — sorry Hawaii and Alaska residents. Interestingly, any AI-generated submissions are prohibited, too.

Videos will be judged against four categories — originally, creativity, quality, and brand knowledge — after which five finalists will be chosen and notified after May 17.

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How to Capitalize On This Thriving Talent Pool to Drive Your Company’s Growth

Published

3 days ago

April 17, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

How to Capitalize On This Thriving Talent Pool to Drive Your Company's Growth

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

As business operations shift, executives and entrepreneurs are increasingly turning to an on-demand workforce that is simultaneously empowered by technology and drawn to purpose-driven projects.

Consider Upwork, whose 2020 Future of Workforce Pulse Report revealed that nearly 80% of hiring managers engaging freelancers feel confident about doing so. These hires provide coveted expertise — on a project-to-project basis — that entrepreneurs need to scale their operations without incurring long-term overhead costs.

This new market paradigm also promotes dynamism, with 79% of businesses agreeing that freelance talent enables greater innovativeness. Perhaps most telling, 84% of hiring managers utilizing it feel more assured about adapting to future disruption, compared to just 69% of those relying solely on full-time staff.

By capitalizing on freelance marketplaces, entrepreneurs can amplify employer branding, augment capabilities and future-proof organizations, even amid turbulence. As nearly 60% of hiring managers plan to increase engagement with freelancers over the next two years, the time is now for executives to realize their inherent potential.

The job market continues to shift

After a season of massive hiring, we’re back to seeing layoffs and downsizing. Companies are feeling the bloat—from unused office spaces with rising rent to oversized employee structures — and are shifting focus to hiring only the most essential positions. This leaves a critical talent gap needed for complex projects and specialized tasks. Highly skilled and specialized independents can fill this void.

A few key benefits to engaging them:

• Access to niche experts: Platforms like Toptal and Guru provide access to elite professionals from leading Fortune 500 companies and innovative startups. Whether the need is for a machine learning specialist, growth strategist or financial modeler, entrepreneurs can now curate on-demand teams that boast specialized skillsets, enabling them to focus investment on projects with the highest strategic value.

• Enhanced agility: Leading corporations increasingly “rent” skills by tapping freelance experts for initiatives involving new technologies or while entering unfamiliar markets. With niche contributors available to plug knowledge gaps, owners can explore ideas that once seemed unrealistic due to internal constraints—unlocking inventiveness and first-mover advantage.

• Stronger employment brand: Blending full-time employees with project-based freelancers signals a commitment to modernization and work-life balance. Offering both engaging work and flexibility will help draw exceptional candidates and help you compete with corporate giants for top-tier talent.

Tips for capitalizing on gig talent

Having explored the forces reshaping work, executives may wonder how to effectively leverage freelance platforms. After all, how can you know you’re getting your money’s worth if a hire isn’t physically present full-time?

• Define projects clearly: Contract hires thrive when expectations and deadlines are established upfront. So, clearly, detail needs around deliverables, success metrics, required skills and projected time investments. Staying ahead when it comes to communication and expectations will help avoid headaches, including delays.

• Build loyalty with talent: The best independent professionals have options regarding the projects they accept. Study their profiles to discern passions and incentives. Offer interesting work, flexibility and strong communication to motivate interest and improve results.

• Manage collaboration: Provide steady context, feedback and guidance at each project stage, but also foster autonomy, even while directing efforts toward strategic goals. A dynamic balance of these qualities drives optimal outcomes.

• Continue expanding your talent pool: Add proven freelancers to an internal database for repeat engagements, and notify talent about new initiatives for which their expertise would provide an edge. Uncovering additional ways, freelancers can enhance the business deepens the relationship.

Top platforms for connecting with talent

Now comes the hard part: finding contractors who bring fractional expertise sets. There are a growing number of platforms, of course, but I’ve found that the following stand out as leaders:

Fiverr: Ideal for execs seeking design, digital marketing, writing, video and admin support. Known for affordability and ease of posting jobs. It taps a global talent pool, too.

Upwork: A flexible platform that spans more than 150 skills. Used by everyone from small businesses to global enterprises. Strong at IT, development, design, finance and consulting.

Toptal: Focuses exclusively on the top 3% of talent. Best for expert software developers, designers, project managers and finance experts. All contributors are extensively vetted.

Contra: A growing independent platform that vets and connects both job candidates and hiring companies. Best of all, it doesn’t take a commission from projects.

The numbers speak for themselves: businesses engaging freelance professionals report greater confidence and competitiveness, as well as the ability to withstand turbulence, yet legacy beliefs can still cause hesitancy among those keen to hire. Supported by such specialized collaborators, companies can explore new horizons unencumbered by a one-time narrow view of staffing models.