#182: Alex Nerney on Launching a Money-Making Blog as a Side Hustle

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. Just a quick reminder that you can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 182 and those notes include a summary of our discussion as well as links to resources we mentioned during the episode. Now, freelancing does not automatically give you freedom. I think that's a common misconception, right? This idea that freelancing equals freedom. And freedom is not the default state of freelancing. Not at all. In fact, I often say that the natural state of freelancing, if you do nothing, if you just kind of sit there and let things happen, is really bondage. It's not freedom. You have to work to create freedom in your business. You can set your own schedule, you can have more time flexibility, but you also give up the regular steady paycheck that you may have had as an employee. Of course, it doesn't mean that being an employee means security. That's the other thing, right? But you do lose that predictability. And this income variability that comes with freelancing often drives writers nuts. Now, there are many ways to deal with this income variability. This is a big, big topic and a very important one. Today we're going to talk about one of them, which is launching a money making blog as a side hustle to your freelance business. My guest is Alex Nurney. He's the co founder of Avocado, a popular and profitable health and wellness blog, as well as Create and Go, which is a website dedicated to teaching people how to build a profitable blogging business. In this candid, no nonsense interview, Alex explains why adding a blog to your freelance writing business is a great way to supplement your writing income and add more predictability to your business while also enabling you to make better client and project decisions. I think you're really going to appreciate Alex's realistic overview of what it takes to do this successfully. You're not going to find hype, you're not going to find get rich quick stuff here. It's just really a straightforward, honest conversation about the ins and outs of making this happen for yourself. I hope you enjoy it. Alex, great to have you on the show, man.

Dude, thank you for having me. This is going to Be fun. Yeah, yeah.

This is a great, great topic. We're going to dive in. I know we're going to explore several really cool, interesting areas about this. We're going to unpack it a bit for the audience. But before we get there, why don't you give us a 30,000 foot overview of your business. What do you guys do, what does it entail? And then we can kind of get a little bit more after that into how you got into this.

Yeah, for sure. So our business, essentially we run a few different blogs, a few different websites. The main two though are a website called avocado.com and a website called createandgo.com. and what we do is we. One of those websites is actually a weight loss or healthy living blog for women. And the other blog is. Actually teaches people how to start that. So essentially what happened? Well, not to get into the history just yet, we blog essentially, we teach people how to. We also run a successful blog ourselves. Writing the content, managing the content, similar to a lot of the people reading this, we write.

That's very cool. I know we'll dive a little bit more into this, but the business model with the blog for advice, what, how do you get paid? How do you monetize the content?

So we have a variety of ways that it happens. The main one is that we sell our own courses and we create our own digital products and things that teach people certain lessons. So one of our blogs, so Avocado, for instance, got really popular in the yoga category. So we taught people, wrote some ebooks on yoga and started teaching about yoga. That's the main, like the high level way that we make money. And that's actually the direction that I try to skew people towards along their journey with their writing and with becoming a blogger. Because it's the way that you control the margins and you control the sales pages. I know the copywriters in here understand the importance of that. But the other ways that we make money, affiliate marketing as well, make a good chunk from affiliate marketing, probably like 20%, something like that. The courses are like 70% and then everything else is just sort of like a trick in. So it's like you have some ads here and there. That's actually the main other way is some ads and some lighter affiliate marketing. Some occasional Amazon associates links here and there. But that's the general high level. It's probably 70% courses, 20% affiliate marketing, 10%, all the others.

Interesting. Okay. And of course then the draw is that the blog is the free advice. So you Provide good information, actionable information that this particular audience or audiences want. And then the courses, as an example is where you go deeper. So maybe you provide the what and the why, and most of the how would be kind of behind a paywall type of situation.

Exactly, exactly. That's funny, man. That was an old Ben Settle lesson, copywriting back in the day, where you teach them the what, not the how, I believe is how he put it. Yeah, yeah. And that was. That's kind of an integral part of it. You're teaching pretty high level stuff. And then the courses really go through. Like, here is exactly what to do. Here is the step by step how it should look. Here's the templates, those types of things.

Gotcha. So let's talk a little bit about the, you know, kind of the origin story here. I got a great story with a lot of twists and turns that I know is posted on your site. But can you give us an overview of how did you arrive here?

Yeah, for sure, man. It's been, it's been wild. It wasn't. Wasn't planned out like this, but some of the best things just kind of happened. So originally, where I was in life before this was I was a personal trainer. I was trading my hours for dollars and spent a lot of time doing that. I had always had an interest in online business. It was always something kind of in the back of my brain. I mean, the first time I read the four hour workweek was back in 2010 when I was college. And I was so inspired by it. So what I did is I tried working for Corporate America and I bombed twice at that. I absolutely hated it. I remember one day in particular, almost like wanting to get in a physical altercation with my boss and just realizing, like, maybe this isn't for me.

Yeah, that's probably a good sign when.

You'Re thinking those thoughts, maybe you should do something else. So I did personal training and what I liked about it was I was controlling my own schedule and controlling. Dictating a lot more of what I was doing. The problem was, is I was working incredibly hard, you know, waking up really early, working with clients who, you know, the funny thing about being a personal trainer is, like, you like working out, but that doesn't mean your clients actually like working out. So trading hours for dollars, working with people who didn't really have the same passion for fitness that I did. And so because of that, I was like, I gotta do something else. Went to a forum meetup for a group called the Millionaire Fast Lane and just was surrounded by these awesome entrepreneurs. Actually, the funny thing, I had a client who invited me to it, and then he bailed out at the last second. And so I was just there. I didn't know anybody. I was the very odd. The black sheep of the group. And I was like, who's this guy? But I just saw these awesome entrepreneurs all making successful businesses, all kind of in the online arena, and it really inspired me. So got back to Dallas, So this is 2015. Started working on a website and I didn't know much more about it than I'm just going to create a website and create content and see if I can get people to visit. And at the time, Lauren, my co founder, saw me working on it as well. And essentially what happened was I was working on some of the graphic design elements of the website and she saw how. How horrendous they were and just essentially kind of moved me over from the chair, was like, let me help you with this. And so just started building these businesses. And I didn't realize, like, we were building a blog at the time, but it just kind of happened naturally. So we were building it and started to get some traffic way back in 2015 from Pinterest, of all places.

Wow. What was the topic of that first blog? Would ended up being a blog.

Yeah. So actually the very first one was called Health and Happy Hour. And the idea was. Yeah, yeah, I'm just.

My mind is racing there.

Yeah. And that one didn't work. I love the title. I know everybody loves the title, but it just didn't work. Another great lesson in blogging. The titles really don't determine your success. But that one failed. And then we started another one called Avocado. And the whole idea, the whole central purpose was like this healthy living blog for women. And started to write about that again. Lauren was a vegan, I was a personal trainer. Just seemed fitting to write about a health topic. We did Avocado, and this blog started gaining some real traction. And by real traction, I just mean visitors. We weren't making any money, so we were making no money at the time except for with our, you know, she was a cpa, I was a personal trainer. And so we just. One day we were on a hike in Seattle and it was just this gorgeous hike. And we're like, what if we just quit? You know, what if we just went all in with this thing and like, really dedicated all of our time to it. And so we committed to a year. We said, all right, we're going to sell all of our Things. We're living in uptown Dallas in this expensive apartment. Like we're going to sell all of our things, we're going to move into my dad's house in Seattle and we're going to work 247 on this blog and just see what happens. At the time, we were already sacrificing a lot of our weekends, a lot of time with friends and hard things to sacrifice. And we were sick of feeling like we weren't getting ahead. We felt like we were always just spinning our wheels and that there was always more month than money, despite making a good amount of money. And so what we did is we just quit and we went all in, like sold all. I mean, I still have the photo of the five bags that we took to Seattle where all of our possessions fit in. And we just, we went all in and at the time had that blog, had traffic and then just started step by step trying to monetize and we got burned by so many products. At the time, you know, we were trying. Our willingness to try everything was really a big key to our success. But we had bought a ton of courses, a ton of products, a ton of things, and 99% of them didn't help. And it was very frustrating and really hard. But because we were all in, things just started to work and started to bounce our way. We started double our income every month. The first month was like 50 bucks, 100 bucks, but the next month was 200 and there was 400. And then it was more and more and more and we eventually kept scaling up and it kind of got crazy. We doubled our income until this one month where we made 40 grand in a single month. And that was like the most life changing, altering, mind bending thing. And we were just so. It was just, it was just amazing. And from then, so what we did is we, you know, Avocado is doing so well and this is Avocado Health blog. And what we saw was like the most people teaching this information on like how to make money blogging and how to really monetize something were full of crud. They didn't really know. They were just kind of talking out their tails, if you will.

There is a lot of trash out there in this topic, isn't there?

It is. It is an enormous amount and we know that better than anybody because we had spent thousands of dollars, I mean, I'm sure I spent 15 grand, 10 grand just on buying products and trying them and realizing that these people don't know what they're talking about.

When you say products Meaning, like many of them, online courses on how to do that. Right. How to start a blog and monetize and make a living off of it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It was on those topics, it was on these people, these gurus and stuff like that. I realized I wanted to create something that actually made sense to people. Obviously, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. I was financially motivated to make, Create and Go. And so is Lauren. And that's why we started it. We knew what we could bring to it was something. There's something different. Was something that. No, this is. We know because we started this completely separate blog. We know the pain that you're going to go through and the struggles and the frustrations and the sacrifices you're going to have to make to make it successful. And that was why Create and Go got built. And today Create and Go helps an enormous amount of people. We've helped retire a bunch of people. People go full time. Our goal is to help people go full time blogging, but to do it in a way that creates like a massive amount of passive income where you are not so bound and chained to those hours, chained to those working for those clients that you don't like, and chained to these deadlines and due dates. You know, we wake up, we still work hard. I still love working. I love what we do. But, you know, Lauren is out in Bolivia right now, you know that. And that's the freedom. And she works when she wants. And I'm out here in Austin. I work when I want. And that's the freedom that our blogs and our businesses have bought us.

That's really cool. So it sounds like you built the health blog, Avocado. Right. To a point where it was really doing well financially and supporting you guys, but all with this idea that, you know, as we're doing this and trying a bunch of different things, we're documenting what works and doesn't work. And we eventually would like to teach others how to do this so they don't have to make the same mistakes we made. Was that, you know a lot. What was going on in your. In your mind for sure.

And obviously I don't want to, I don't want to sugarcoat it. Right. We were, we were money motivated to make, create and go.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. But it was, it was definitely something where we looked around it. We would just read articles from other bloggers, like teaching blogging about blogging, and just be like, that's so wrong. And it was hard for me not to make a comment on their post and Be like, no, this is not correct. But I held myself back and just decided we'd start our own blog and try to teach people. And again, the best part is we've had multiple people make six figures and way more than that from our advice and from our courses, and that's been a very fulfilling thing.

That's amazing. I'm curious, going back to those early days, it took a few months for you to even be able to live and pay bills off of this. How did you stay focused and motivated when you weren't getting those results? And it took so long.

It was hard. There's this certain amount of dumb optimism anybody who comes into this space needs to have. Because really, for a long time, I always. I always told Lauren it was like I would go to bed with anxiety because of how hard I was working and how little. How little it felt like it moved the needle. But then I'd wake up the next morning and I'd feel good about myself, and then I'd just drown myself in a ton of coffee and go at it again. I equated to a boxing match where you just get knocked down every day and your job is to slowly stand back up and do it again. It was hard. That's another big thing that we talk about on the block was like, we'd make tremendous amount of sacrifices. We stopped hanging out with friends really altogether. Like, most weekends, we would go and we would just be working on our blog the whole weekend. Yeah, there was a ton of sacrifices that needed to be made. We never sugarcoat that.

When I say working on the blog, I mean it was creating content. It was just setting up, maybe executing the strategy, looking for affiliate partners, creating these courses. There's a lot of work that goes in. A lot of people think that this stuff kind of creates itself.

Right. You know how we always say it is. Blogging is an A to Z thing. There's this cute, incorrect concept where people think that, oh, you know, there's this one thing, and when I start focusing on the one thing, all the dominoes fall. It's not true. So blogging is A to Z. So A could be your idea and your concept for your blog. And Z is the time when someone is so happy with your product or service that they are recommending it unsolicited to other people. And the B, you know, the B through. Why are all of the other steps we're talking about, the copywriting, the creating your own product, the ability to make a good headline, the how to engage with an audience, how to Build a community. These are all steps that you have to learn along the way. And they're all skills that one has to learn in order to have success.

That's a great point, Alex, because a lot of people think that it's, you know, they think content and they think promotion, traffic, you know, those basic things. And those are definitely some of those steps you mentioned. But there's so much in the middle.

Yeah.

So important. Yeah. So, you know, as you know, my audience is maybe a little bit different in that. So they're writers and copywriters and they're already on their own. Most of them are already on their own. Some of them are still doing this as a, as a side hustle while they keep their day job, but most of them are entirely on their own. I think one advantage that they have is that they already, many of them have the discipline and the understanding of what it takes to be self employed. But I'm curious, somebody in this situation, is this model a viable model for supplementing their income, considering the work that goes into this?

Yeah, absolutely. This is perfect for you because. Because you already have one of the hardest skills down. Knowing how to copyright is difficult and knowing how to just write good content that engages readers is a skill that you can actually get away with not having and starting a blog. But when you have takes everything to the next level. So I think you have almost the most difficult skills down. Right. The discipline of managing your own time, the ability to write, the talent to do so. Those, some of the hardest parts, the next steps really are having like a set plan for that A to Z part. Right. Because the thing about it is that when you don't have step D down, like you could have E through, you know, E through G down, but if you don't have the step before that, people don't get there. So I equate it to writers. You all understand the importance of a great headline. I could write the most amazing content about a particular topic. Something super engaging and super. Just an incredible piece of content. But if that headline is not good, nobody clicks. If nobody clicks, nobody goes and reads the article and that article will fall. So yeah. Does that make sense?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think. And you're right. So if you already have that, that's one of the things that keeps so many people from even starting a blog. Because I've talked to non writers who have tried to do this and that was the biggest stumbling block. One thing, and I'd love to hear your take on this, one thing that I tell writers and Copywriters who are looking to start a side hustle like this is, man, one thing you need to be ready for is this is like starting another full scale business. And by that I mean like you think you're book solid now with client work. Try starting exactly what you started a few years ago while you have this thing. So it's like doubling what you have now. And because I think a lot of them think, oh you know what, I'll just do it in my, in my spare time. And then they don't realize that right now the way they're running their business, there is no spare time. So for somebody with very. Because I know you run into the same thing even with people who are traditionally employed. You know, how do you wedge this in? You know, especially if you got other obligations, like, you know, family and kids and like all this other stuff and.

Life, just general life. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the big one. So here's how I'd relate it to. And here is my feelings on it. I was not a writer at the time, but I was a personal trainer. And so I was very aware of myself trading hours for dollars like many of the people listening to this. And there was this, the book that I read that really clarified a lot for this for me was the Millionaire Fast Lane still shout out to MJ DeMarco. Great dude, but he talks a lot about where your hours are being spent and the goal with said hours. Right. So you can, it didn't matter how many clients I really got, like there was just going to be a peak to what I could make as a personal trainer. Same goes with a freelancer, same goes with a copywriter. I know some amazing copywriters make a ton of money, but you are still bound to somebody else's schedule. And so because of that I had to escape that. And so what the book clarified was where my hours were being spent and what the end goal with those hours were. And so what happened was I would start to knock off to gain more time. Obviously you're going to have to throw the book at it, right? You're going to have to spend.