$10k a Month Blogging: How to Grow from Here? [Side Hustle Coaching]

Side Hustle Show listener Raffaele Di Lallo has built a successful house plant website, earning $10k a month — on the side from his day job.

Still, he explained that 90% of that income was from advertising, and he wanted to diversify his revenue sources and earn more from affiliate marketing.

To help me talk through Raffaele's business is a long-time friend and online business mentor of mine, Matt Giovanisci.

Matt runs SwimUniversity.com, BrewCabin.com, and MoneyLab.co and the Money Lab Pro membership community.

I knew he'd have some suggestions to grow the income pie and “future proof” Raffaele's business.

Tune in to check out our full conversation.

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Current State of the Business

Here's how Raffaele described the current state of OhioTropics:

• Receiving 350,000 pageviews a month.
• Email list is 10,000-12,000 people.
• Generating about $9,000 a month with display advertising from Mediavine, which I plan on to continue growing.
• Making over $1,000 a month with Amazon affiliates
• I also bring in some income with a couple eBooks that I sell on Amazon and on the blog.
• I'm excited to also have a traditionally published book, with a major publisher, that will be coming out in early 2022.
• I used to do virtual houseplant care consultations but I stopped doing those because I can only do so much.

The Challenge

“My biggest challenge or opportunity is increasing my affiliate income,” Raffaele explained. “My goal this year is to focus on creating specific product review posts, but these types of posts are newer to me so I'm in the process of figuring things out.”

He described trying to balance the online business with his day job, and deciding where to focus his efforts.

Advice and Recommendations

Matt and I had several ideas for Raffaele:

• Use an in-content email capture form to collect more emails.
• Use that email list to turn one-time visitors into repeat visitors and buyers.
• Be nervous of Amazon, given their history of cutting commissions.
• Partner with smaller growers or brands, where you might have a bigger impact on their business.
• Consider building out your own digital product(s) to serve your audience.

Again, I think you'll enjoy this conversation on taking a side hustle that's already doing well and trying to step it up even more.

Links and Resources

• OhioTropics.com
• MoneyLab
• Swim University
• BrewCabin
• Mediavine
• Lasso
• PageSpeed Ninja
• Mailmunch
• ConvertKit
• ActiveCampaign | My full ActiveCampaign review and demo
• LeadPages

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