757: She Built a 6-Figure Business Talking About Goats

26:47Well, when I first launched it in 2019, we had 20 people join. And actually, it's kind of funny because my mentor at the time said, how many people do you think you could handle? And I was like, 20. And that was exactly the number that joined. I was just terrified that I was going to be overwhelmed because I thought like, oh my gosh, if 20 people join, they're all going to have so many questions and I'm going to be so busy. And they didn't, you know, I mean, in those early days, we would usually have two or three people in our Zoom meetings and we only had two meetings a month and they would only last about an hour.

27:25And then every year we're up to 150 members now. So we've, the membership number has never gone down every year. it grows. And some of the, you know, of course, some people do quit. But we still have some people who joined that very first year who are still members. Yeah. And now we've moved to a couple years ago, we moved to a new platform that has a fabulous community aspect to it. And that really helped the membership because it is structured similar to a Facebook group, but it is 100 % private. So everybody on there is a paid member. They all love their goats. Nobody is giving bogus information.

28:05And it's the courses are right there as a part of it. So if somebody has a question, we answer their question because it is unique to them. But then we also give them the link to anything relevant in the courses. Like you can get more of an understanding by watching this video in the goat nutrition course or in the parasite course. Was there any hesitation to say, well, I'm selling the courses for$97 or even at a 20 % discount, still quite a bit more than the monthly membership here. Was there a worry? I'm going to cannibalize my course business by offering this lower priced membership. No, because I have been every January, I have been sending an email to my list and I ask them lots of questions in the beginning.

28:53It's because I wanted new ideas for blog posts or videos or whatever. And one of the questions that I started asking people was, do you prefer online courses with a one-time purchase price or a monthly membership, or I'm not interested in courses. And interestingly enough, it was split evenly one third, one third, one third. Oh, okay. Even though I'm nowhere close to two-thirds of people do either one. But it was basically split 50-50 between the membership and the course people. Some people just wanted to buy lifetime access to a course. And the answer to that question remained the same, always 50-50, until a couple years ago.

29:41And then the number of people... And that was when the course sales started falling. so people just are not as interested in purchasing lifetime access to a course anymore and and the membership just seems to serve them better it is interesting we've become so accustomed to paying everything on a on a monthly subscription that it's like well yeah why wouldn't i pay for my goat education and support on a monthly subscription too yeah and i don't even offer like I don't even do those monthly promotions anymore for the courses because the number of sales just fell so low. It wasn't worth it. I'm like, I am not going to bug everybody with emails for a week just so that 10 people can buy this at a 20 % discount.

30:29Like it's on the website. You can, you can go buy it anytime if you want to, but we do promote the membership now. Okay. Do you find traditional thinking behind a membership would be that I'm going to come for the content and stay for the community. Now you've got some community elements built in. You mentioned kind of the member to member forum and you've got these monthly Q and A calls that are kind of sold as part of this package. What you get is like, we're going to make sure to answer your, your questions and have a higher level of one-on-one or touch level of support than you would otherwise get.

31:03What's your take on that? We are now up to three calls a month and it is not And they typically last an hour and a half to two hours because I will stay on the call until everybody's questions are answered. I am not one of those people who's like, oh, the hour's up. Bye, y 'all. You know, because we are dealing with live animals and you can't tell the goats, hey, could you just hold off on dying, you know, from that worm load for another week? Like if somebody comes on a call, they usually they really usually need an answer today. OK. But interestingly enough, so two-thirds of people do join at the premium level because they want the Zoom calls.

31:38And now we've also added in-person events for people at the premium level. We just had our first in-person event on my farm in Illinois. And out of 150 members, 12 people signed up. They came from as far away as Virginia, Texas, California, and then all over the Midwest. and the person who came from Texas said, hey, if you ever wanna do this in Texas, I'll do it for you. You can have it at my farm. And I'm like, cool, how's the end of September? Wow, okay. And so we're gonna be doing our next member event in September. The woman who attended from Virginia said, hey, we need to do this in Virginia.

32:16So we're gonna do it in Virginia. I've got two people in California saying, can we do this in California? So that's the next level. And you included that at the$287 a year or they paid like extra to come to the farm? We're including it. Wow. I mean, they paid their own travel and all that. But yeah. Yeah. You are a giver. I am. I'm like, I'm not the best business person. But I also can't overlook all of those people who came to the farm in Illinois. It just deepened our relationship so much that, I mean, they're all like, hey, I want to let people come to my farm and do this on my farm. Oh, okay.

32:53So I think they see the value in it and they want to pay it forward. And help people in their area who couldn't come all the way to Illinois. And so we're definitely doing more in-person events. I think that is definitely one of the other trends, right? We're shifting away from online courses. We're seeing a rise in memberships and even like cohort-based stuff. We're all going to go through this together at the same time. And we're seeing a shift towards in-person. Like, look, I know it's not AI because I can see your face. You know, I can see it in person. And so that's something. Before I forget, I did want to ask, you mentioned the membership platform or the forum platform.

33:27that you were using? Oh yeah. So that is Mighty Networks and we moved there so that we could have the courses and the membership in one place. Okay. Because it gets confusing. We used to, we actually had the community and Mighty Networks from the beginning, but people never went there because the courses weren't there. And so we moved the courses there two years ago and that made all the difference. Once the courses were there, then people are in that community discussion all the time. And so even if somebody joins at the basic level, they have access to that online community discussion too. They just don't have access to the in-person, you know, to the Zoom calls and the in-person activities.

34:12Yeah. Which is great to get members talking to other members and hopefully in some cases saves you from having to answer every single question. If somebody else also knows the answer, they can chime in. Yeah. And a lot of our members have been around long enough that they do know the answers and then they also have great experiences to share. Okay. So Mighty Networks for the community and the course hosting kit for the email list. Anything else on the tools and tech side while we're here? Those are the two big ones. Like I couldn't really run the business without those two things. More with Debra in just a moment, including the full breakdown of her revenue stack and the surprising switch that took her from barely a dollar a month on video to over a hundred dollars in the very first month.

34:55All that and more coming up right after this. It took Bryn and I a few years to fully appreciate that as a couple, as a family, our finances really are a team sport. And for a long time, we'd have these every so often money check-ins where I would dutifully log into what felt like a dozen different accounts and update my overly complex spreadsheet to get a look at our financial picture. Today, all that lives inside Monarch, and it's given us a clear one-stop visual dashboard for our net worth, for our investment performance, our account balances, and it's just made those money conversations so much easier.

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36:10hear that that's the sound of your marketing working and as an entrepreneur you know that every call is an opportunity but if you miss it potential customers don't wait they'll just call the next business on their list that's why today's episode is brought to you by quo spelled q u o it's the business phone system built so you never miss a call you can set it up in minutes on any device, you can keep your existing phone number, and you can add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. Once you do, all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place, so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast.

36:48Plus, Quo integrates with the tools you're already using. HubSpot, Zapier, Cloud, and tons more, so you can save time and stay organized. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash hustle. That's quo, Q-U-O dot com slash hustle. Let's kind of go through this revenue stack because there's a lot of moving pieces starting with the books, even though, okay, it's a low royalty percentage, but it's not nothing. We've got the membership, 150 members coming in that grows every year. We still have some course sales for the 50 % of the audience that prefers or the diminishing 50 % that prefers the one-off lifetime access for the courses.

37:36We've got the podcast for the love of goats. Are you taking sponsorships on air? I do, but there are not very many businesses that would be appropriate. It's not a big source of income. It's not even 1 % of the income. 70 % of the income is from the courses in membership. 25 % of the income is from ads on my website. So for all those people who just want free information, if you are reading articles on my website, we are making a few pennies off of you reading that because you're going to see ads. Is that Mediavine? It used to be. I just changed to Raptive. So actually, that's a new one. Actually, I should add that.

38:20Yeah. I was with Mediavine since 2019 and that was about 25 % of my income. And luckily when our traffic fell two years ago, somehow the RPM stayed high enough that we did not see that big of a drop in income. We had been all the way up to$3 ,000 a month on income with the ads and it got all the way down to like a thousand something. Okay. But it was a very gradual decline. And now we're back up to a couple thousand dollars a month. And we just switched to Raptive because it looks like we're going to be able to make more money from them. One of the things I'm excited about with them is the fact that we can put our own videos on there and we get paid for people watching our videos on the website.

39:15We get paid a lot more for people watching our videos on our website than when we were just embedding YouTube videos, which is pennies, less than pennies per view. That's weird, but okay, I'll take it. So like your YouTube video would be the embedded ad, like it would look like the commercial or look like the ad on the page. Yeah. Well, it's in between, in between paragraphs or at the end of the article, we would have a YouTube video and we are now, so we just switched to Raptive on the 6th of July. And so we are now in the process of removing all those YouTube videos and putting our videos, uploading our videos directly to Raptive so that we get paid for people to watch those.

39:56That's super interesting. I did not know that was a thing, although they have been courting me in my inbox as well. So maybe I'll have to poke a little bit more and find out about that. That's what happened to me. I kept getting emails from them saying, why don't you come over to Raptive? Yeah, send us your analytics and we'll give you your free RPM guarantee or something. Yeah, so I did it. And the biggest thing that I see, you know, within this first month is that we had uploaded maybe 20 videos on Mediavine and we quit because we were not even making a dollar a month on those videos. I mean, it was laughable, you know, I'm like, okay, this is a waste of time.

40:40And on Mediavine, we were limited to a really short video. And so we were having to create videos just for the website. And so we were like, okay, this isn't worth it. So we didn't even do that anymore. Just with the videos that got moved over to Raptive, we had made like over$100 in the first month. And I mean, I saw like what, like when I saw how much we're making videos, I immediately contacted my VA and I'm like, okay, priority right now. We got to start uploading our own videos to Raptive because we make so much more money on them than what we were doing with Mediavine and the YouTube embeds.

41:25And the downside is it just wouldn't trigger a YouTube view. So So it's not like helping you in the YouTube algorithm at all. Yeah, but I don't get that many YouTube views. But the channel did get monetized. So that's another income stream over there for the YouTube direct views. Yeah, the channel did monetize. Yeah, I mean, I make like a whopping$100 a month on YouTube. All right. Well, I don't know about you. It feels like free money. Never mind all the time it took to create the video. But every time I get that deposit from YouTube, it's like, all right, this is great. What's a day in the life of running this thing now 10, 15 years into it, engaging with members, creating more content?

42:06Where does your time go? It has changed a lot. Right now, it usually means me at my desk for about 40 to 50 hours a week. And I have, oh, this is, you know what, this is another great tool if people don't have it is rescue time. Probably six or seven years ago, it was around 2019, was when I put rescue time on my computer. And I discovered I was spending 15 hours a week on Facebook. and that was when I realized, oh my gosh, I need to hire somebody to do Facebook for me because it has always been really important to me that if somebody asks a question that we answer it. And I was spending a ridiculous amount of time constantly checking, oh, are there more questions I need to answer?

42:50And then answering them. Is that inside a group of yours? No. Well, it was on our pages because we had multiple pages and groups. Plus I was making the content. I was on Canva all the time creating the content. And so when I saw that, I realized I needed to hire somebody. So in 2019, I hired a VA, Amy, who is still with me today and is amazing and probably knows my content better than I do now. And Amy started by doing Facebook. She started creating all my Facebook posts and checking Facebook about three times a day and then answering what she could because at that point, I had several hundred articles already.

43:29Now we have over 700 articles. We have over 800 YouTube videos. We've got probably 180 podcast episodes. So there's massive quantities of free information that we have for people. Right. Odds are the answer is out there somewhere. Exactly. And Amy or Abby, we've since hired Abby. And whichever one of them checks it, many of those questions can be answered by simply giving someone a link to an article. And they can get a much more thorough response that way too than if I just typed out a two or three sentence answer. And if something is complex and needs a human, then I can answer it. Or I have another team member who can also answer it, who raises goats.

44:12And she was one of my first Goats 365 members in 2019. So she knows the information as well as I do. And so she can also help troubleshoot something that's a little more complex. So my GOATS 365 members are my number one priority. And so first thing in the morning, I check my GOATS 365 Mighty Network group for the private messages and also the group to see if people have any questions there that I need to answer. And then sometimes I do consults because people can do a consult with me if they don't want to join the membership. They're like, I got this problem. I just need to talk to you. so I can do consults.

44:50I do podcast interviews. I create content. So the majority of my time now is spent either creating content or helping people by answering questions. And it sounds like by design, that's where you like to play. You said earlier, I like to help people. I like to create content. So it sounds like you're operating in your zone of genius. Yeah, basically. Any big surprises in running this business? I imagine there's some different things that come up. Each level of your business, it's a different surprise. It all started with a huge surprise. I mean, I started a blog in 2006 thinking, oh, you blog and then you get discovered by a publisher and then you write books and you get rich.

45:32It worked that way right up until that last sentence, you know, which when I got that first royalty statement, I was like, oh, dear. You don't get rich writing books unless you're J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or somebody like that. So then I had to find new ways to monetize. Actually, my latest surprise is just suddenly realizing that I had quit creating written content. Since my last book was published in 2020, I really haven't created any written content for the world. And so I just recently realized that and that's why I said, you know what, I'm just going to go back to the daily blogging idea because I love that.

46:15I was so happy doing that. And I'm going to do that first thing in the morning now when I get up. That's so funny that you say that. I kind of miss that era of the internet as well where that's how I got my start. probably 2009 was a, I don't know if I did daily, but you know, a relatively frequently updated personal blog. And that slowly morphed into a side hustle nation and really kind of was the, the start of everything that I've been working on since. So very cool. What's next for you? What's got you excited these days? Well, we are taking our first group to Portugal in October. And I am so excited about that because I have been wanting to lead a goat tour to another country for years.

46:59I've probably been thinking about this for at least 10 years, but it seemed really daunting because that's huge. That just felt like jumping over the Grand Canyon. It's so much more than just planning a trip for yourself, right? Yeah. Tell me you charged for this. Tell me this isn't just another free perk of the membership. Yes, we are charging for this. And interestingly enough, almost every single person who signed up is a GOAT365 member. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I'm not surprised. Yeah. That last person is just another person on my email list, but everybody else is a GOAT365 member with a loved one or two or three coming with them.

47:36So a couple of months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was actually in that mastermind back in 2019, 2020. She moved to Portugal three years ago and we were talking and I said, do you have goats in Portugal? And she's like, of course we have goats. And I'm like, no, really like goat farms and dairies and stuff, you know, goat cheese. And she's like, yeah. And I said, do you think you could put together a goat tour of Portugal? And she said, yeah. And so I feel like, I don't know, my inner child like took the wheel or something and just said, we're doing this right now because entrepreneur Deborah would have said, you are crazy.

48:19You cannot sell a go tour to Portugal in July when for the end of October like you can't do that and we started to promote it and then it was like oh these hotels want deposits now in a wire not a credit card oh people got to give us money now and they did and so that was exciting because we're able to put down all those deposits on the hotel rooms. And it's great. So it was a massive learning curve. And I'm glad that I stepped out of my comfort zone to do it because she and I just had a meeting before this and we're doing a second one in April, probably going to do the first week in April because I had four people contacting me that said, I really want to do your Portugal trip, but I can't because the end of last week of October doesn't work for me.

49:18And I said, okay, well, we're already talking about doing a second one. So we're going to do a second one the first week of April. That's awesome. You've had so much demand. They're like, hey, just we'll add you to the waiting list for the next round. Very cool. I think, and that's another new income stream on top of the existing stack that we talked about. So these in-person events, do you get the sense that people want to come and like hang out with you? They've watched dozens of your videos. They feel like they know you. Or are they like friends with other people inside the membership? Like, oh, I can't wait to go to Portugal and hang out with so-and-so, even because we live, you know, four states away.

49:53I think most of the people who signed up, like I said, they're all Goats 365 members who are bringing friends and relatives. It's like an excuse to go to Portugal. Yeah. The feedback I have had from people is that it's really the goats that are selling it. One person said they've been to Portugal already. but it was just a tourist trip, you know? And so what we're doing, because Janelle lives there, one of the things we're doing is that we are going to have lunch on her friend's farm and her next door neighbor just has pet goats, you know? And we're going to go, we are going to farms where they do not have agritourism.

50:34When we approach them, like we approached this one farm, the first response was, we don't do agritourism. We have a dairy. Our day revolves around goats and caring for the goats. And we're like, oh, we totally understand. That's what we want. So people are going to see goats and some sheep too. And farms that they would not be able to see if they were just visiting Portugal on their own. That is super fun. ThriftyHomesteader.com is where you can find Debra for the love of goats on YouTube and your favorite podcast platform. If you are a goat or soon to be goat owner, definitely check her out over there.

51:13Debra, let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. My biggest regret in my business is that I did not start my email list earlier. I finally started it in 2016 after hearing Michael Hyatt talk about it and reading Nathan Barry's book that he had written back then. But before that, I thought I was just going to get rich by writing books. And boy, was that wrong. And then I started hearing people talk about the money is in your list. And it is like your email list is the one thing that cannot be taken away from you. You've got control of that list and you control the messaging and you can get kicked off of Facebook.

51:54Google can change their algorithm again and stop sending people to your website. But once somebody is on your list, then there's a lot you can do with that list. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's probably the most important foundation of my business and for many other online business owners. In fact, we've got a recent episode with Chanel Basilio from Growth in Reverse on a bunch of different ways that are working now to grow your email list. We'll link that up in the show notes. So I think it's 747. I don't know. In any case, we'll link that up for you. A very recent episode there. A couple takeaways from me before we wrap.

52:29Number one, I think, Debra, you're a perfect example of really owning your niche. she said at the top of the show, well, we're everywhere. We've got the blog articles, we've got the social media covered, we've got the podcast, we've got YouTube, right? And really what we're doing is using people's questions to fuel the content, which is perfect for any search intent type of discoverability, especially YouTube. I think that's really a great example and showing up consistently for over a decade now. So I think that's really cool. And then the other thing we covered in this episode was the diversity of income streams.

53:02Well, the books aren't going to be the main driver, but we can stack on a membership. We can stack on courses. We can stack on YouTube income. We can stack on display ads on the website. We can stack on in-person events and trips, like really kind of creative example of taking one niche and really, really running with it for a long period of time. So if you're wondering what to listen to next, that episode with Chanel is a great option. Otherwise you can take our little quiz at hustle.show and it'll build you a customized playlist of some of our greatest hits episodes based on your answers. Takes just a couple minutes.

53:36You can do it right on your phone and then you'll be all set with another eight to 10 side hustle show episodes to help you achieve your income goals this year. Again, that's at hustle.show. Big thanks to Debra for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. Sidehustlenation.com slash deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend.

54:07This is a perfect one. Fire off that text message. Did you know you can make money talking about goats on the internet? You got to check this out. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.