Flashback to 2015. I had just turned 25 and spent the week in Ecuador soaking up knowledge from Financial Independence experts. I was riding high on all the things I wanted to start doing and implementing. I wrote a post about my experience and published it to my tiny little blog.
A few months later, my email started blowing up with notifications someone was commenting on my blog. That someone turned into one of my closest friends in the Financial Independence community — Julie of Millennial Boss. We have done a lot together over the years — attended multiple FinCons as roommates, co-hosted an amazing podcast and changed people’s lives.
Most of my success in the blogging sphere can be directly attributed to her. The one post on my site that’s optimized for SEO is because of her and it’s my most successful post by far. She tried to explain the intricacies of Pinterest to me in an effort to help me boost my traffic. The pin she made me? Briefly trended on Pinterest and helped me set a record amount of views for that month. Any amount of success we had on the podcast was directly attributable to her.
I was incredibly lucky to get all that knowledge personalized to me straight from the source. She doesn’t have time to give personalized advice like that to everyone, so she teamed up with my other friend Cody from FlytoFi to create a course to teach you everything she taught me.
That course is open now!
Gold City Ventures is comprised of three separate sections. If you have any interest in blogging for profit, creating an Etsy digital download shop or crushing the freelancing game, you need to buy their course.
Gold City Ventures: Blogging for Profit
The first part of the course you can get is how to start Blogging for Profit. If you have a blog you want to monetize or have been thinking about starting a blog as a side hustle, this section will cover everything you need and more.
How to set up your blog? Check.
Plugins? Check.
SEO? Check.
Pinterest? Check.
Facebook ads? Check.
If you follow their recommendations, I can almost guarantee you’ll make the cost of the course back within the first 6 months. The only reason I haven’t been made tons of money from this blog is because I don’t care to optimize my blog in that way. If I followed their advice, I could make tons of dineros. In fact, each one of these courses is coming with an affiliate link so they can track who sends people their way. I might make a little bit of money off this post, which I feel great about as I strongly believe in not only my friends but the product they created.
If the thought of blogging for profit is overwhelming to you, (and let’s be honest, there is a lot you can choose to learn and implement), this course will cut through all the crap and tell you exactly what you need to do.
Gold City Ventures: Etsy Digital Downloads
Last summer, Julie and I ran a few Masterminds on creating an Etsy Digital Download shop. It was so cool to see people soak up the knowledge and put their individual spin on our information.
Y’all, we literally changed the course of people’s lives. One of our participants created a product that earned over $500.… a MONTH. Can you imagine what you would do with an extra $500 a month in passive income? The impact that would have on your FIRE number would be HUGE! Another participant earned over $300 a month. Not bad for a product that requires little time to manage (as opposed to a physical product that requires shipping. Aint no one got time for that!!)
I think the go at your own pace course will be much better than the 6 week format we had for the Mastermind. Life happens and it was incredibly difficult for some to carve out time to work on their shops. I know the timing of the meetings (night in the US) was a problem for some not in the US, so this is a good opportunity to get more knowledge on your own time!
My own Etsy shop has slowly started to produce some money for me. I think I’ve earned $50 so far from selling my stained glass patterns. If I had chosen a better niche, that number would be 100x. This course will teach you everything you need to know about creating an Etsy digital download shop and gettin’ dat money!
Gold City Ventures: Freelance Toolkit
Cody has spent nearly a year as a freelancer. I was one of those people encouraging him not to quit his high paid day job, but in hindsight, I’m glad he did! He is crushing it out there on his own. The third offering from Cody and Julie is their Freelance Toolkit in which they tell you all their secrets on how to be a successful freelancer.
As an added bonus, they’re not the only instructors in the course. They got some other megasuccessful freelancers like Paula Pant, Vincent Pugliese, and Steve Stewart to offer lessons. That’s HUGE! Many of the guest instructors were my inspiration for going at it on my own.
My Thoughts
“Uh, Gwen.… hasn’t this whole post so far been your thoughts?”
My answer to you is.…. SHHH!! Get out of here with your logic!
On a serious level, I believe this is the definitive guide to making money online. If you’re at all interested in blogging for profit, creating a passive Etsy digital downloads shop or going at it on your own to freelance, this is the product for you.
Now, these side hustles don’t interest me. It’s not where my talents lie but the great thing about humanity is that we’re all different people with different skills and interests. It’s honestly impressive I failed at freelancing when I know so many successful freelancers but when you’re not cut out for something, it’s not meant to be.
I’ve been working on a mission to “know thyself” over the last year or so and can definitely say this kind of hustle isn’t for me, given who I am as a person and my stage in life.
HOWEVER.
If you’re a new mom to be like Julie who’s facing a maternity leave and subsequent loss of income, this might be a good alternative for you. If you’re looking for a way to pad your income to bolster less than amazing pay at your day job, you should get one of the courses outlined above. If you have crushing amounts of student loans that will take decades to pay off, hustle some time off that timeline by buying one of the courses!
The Details
It’s $197 to buy one of the courses. You can ONLY get in on this today through Sunday. They’ll open the course again next year, but it will be more expensive so if you think you might want to do this, I strongly encourage you to jump on it quick! In addition to the course material, you’ll be added to their VIP Facebook group so you can interact with them easier. They’ll be holding once weekly Facebook lives to be available to answer any questions that pop up too. An incredible deal, if you ask me (as someone who did something similar once and knows how much value this provides to the course takers — you’re getting a steal of a deal).
Here are the links again just in case you don’t want to have to scroll all the way back up to the relevant sections:
Blogging For Profit
Etsy Digital Downloads
Freelance Toolkit
I wish everyone involved the best of luck! Have fun out there getting your hustle on!
I love that you wrote about this — but I ALSO love that you know yourself well enough to know that the online hustling isn’t for you. There’s nothing wrong with liking the day job option.
That said, the course is awesome and totally worth it 🙂
Angela @ Tread Lightly Retire Early recently posted…Women’s Personal Finance Wednesdays: Week 40 Roundup
We have been blogging on our site just to have friends and family travel the world with us and to help others do the same for 500 days. When we first started we would have to put virtually the entire URL into a search engine to get it to come up in results. Now it will usually come up on the first page of a Google search with our names, i.e. “Mike and Jan,” or a few of the tags we have put in. We make no money on it so we haven’t done any SEO or promotion at all. Just a little time online and blogging once or twice/week is enough to get a bit of a presence on search engines. Very little work at all.