Many people talk about having a niche in whatever we do. Websites, podcast, etc. Well, Cassidy Tuttle with Succulents and Sunshine has done that and is successfully unemployed as she shows others how to grow succulents. Learn how to create your own niche site just like Cassidy did.
How Cassidy Started Succulents and Sunshine as a Business to Make Money
Cassidy’s has a BFA in photography. She was working as a freelance photographer and there were aspects she liked about it and aspects she didn’t.
When she found out she could make money online, she started diving into that. She has always been very business minded.
She initially went to school for business, and then she realized that she didn’t want to take business classes, she just wanted to learn about photography.
Cassidy had posted a few articles on her photography blog about succulents and realized all of the traffic to her website was coming from those articles.
She happened to be ranking in Google search, and when she realized the traction, she switched it over to a different website and intentionally turned it into its own business.
Cassidy remembers having a conversation with her husband where she said if she could make $5,000 a month from succulents, it would be mind blowing.
Now, they make a lot more than $5,000 a month. She knew there was potential there, but she didn’t realize how much. It became a really big trend, and she got in at the right time.
Listen to the Podcast
How long have you had the Succulents and Sunshine website?
Cassidy and her husband purchased the domain in 2013. She had a few succulent articles before then, but in 2013, it became a business.
The articles had been up for about six months or a year on the photography blog, before they moved them to the new site.
They redirected traffic to the new site and then started adding more content.
How long was it until you started making a little bit of money?
They bought the domain on Valentine’s Day in 2013, and Cassidy made her first $100 in May 2013.
The money was all through Google AdSense. Initially they made all of the money this way.
Watch the entire episode here:
Tell us about the progress from finding out you wanted to do something with succulents, to building the site, to writing the book, and then on.
Cassidy saw succulents in magazines and popping up in different places in 2012.
Her cousin had some in her wedding bouquet and Cassidy thought they were really cool and they photographed well.
Cassidy did food and product photography, and succulents are really in line with this because they sit still and you don’t need to tell them what to do.
She bought her first three succulents in the winter and she was trying to figure out how to grow them indoors. All of the information out there was basically about growing them in Southern California, where the outdoor climate is perfect for succulents.
She couldn’t find much information about growing them on a windowsill in the middle of winter in Utah, which is where she lived at the time.
Cassidy started reading a lot of books, experimenting, and figuring out what worked, and that is what she was writing about on the blog. She documented her experience and it filled the gap of her needing information.
Ultimately, that is what the website has been from then on. She has learned more about succulents since then and she has been able to connect with other people who are considered to be experts in the field.
There is one guy Cassidy met early on who has been growing succulents since he was 12, and he is probably over 60 now. It has been great to find people like that, learn from them, and then turn around and use the information herself and teach it to other people.
From the business perspective, she realized she was getting search traffic from how to propagate succulents – growing from a leaf or a cutting. This is where she first started getting traffic, because she was trying to do this, posting photos, and documenting her experience, and she started showing up on the first page of Google under “propagating succulents”.
This is when Cassidy started diving into it and thinking about what she could do to increase the traffic.
There wasn’t enough information for her to get what she was looking for online, so she created what she needed by finding people locally, reading books, experimenting, and then sharing that with other people.
You wrote a book. There was something special about writing that book, wasn’t there?
The book came about a year and a half after Cassidy had switched over to Succulents and Sunshine.
She bought the domain in 2013 and it was in May 2013 she quit doing freelance photography. The first $100 she earned was surprisingly enabling.
About a year and a half later, they got to a point where the blog income wasn’t growing and she started thinking about going back to freelance photography to earn more income. That is when she received the offer from Idiot’s Guide to write a book for them.
Cassidy had about three other publishers contact her before then, but those offers didn’t work out, because they didn’t make sense for her business.
She told her husband if she could make a certain amount of money to write a book, with no strings attached, she would do it in a heartbeat. Idiot’s Guide came to her with that exact number.
This was right at the time when she was talking about putting together portfolios and contacting clientele. The offer was enough financially to get them through the winter, which is their slow season.
It made her never want to look at a succulent again and also made her really excited about them. It was good validation of what she was doing, because the publisher found her through Google or Pinterest and saw her as the authority on the subject.
She wrote the book in three months and it helped her to realize other things she could do on the blog. She took about a month off after she wrote the book and then dove in really hard. She started focusing on driving traffic, she launched another couple of ebooks, and she tried to monetize the traffic they had as well as increase the traffic at the same time.
What would you suggest for somebody who wants to start an online business and doesn’t already have a niche?
What would you suggest for them to get started? How would they figure out if the niche is worthwhile to get started and something that could make money?
There are a couple things Cassidy looks for:
- It is better if it is something you are actually interested in. Cassidy and her husband have several URLs they’ve purchased of niche sites they will eventually get to, when they decide they are ready to work on them. They wanted to do something they were interested in. For them it is a hobby they want to start learning more about. Cassidy is obsessed with pottery and would love to make money from that.
- It is better if there are products related to your topic that you could sell or be an affiliate for online. A lot of people will create products themselves and sell them. Cassidy is usually looking for something that is already on Amazon that she can be an affiliate, or Etsy also has an affiliate program. Look for something that there are products people use consistently, will purchase multiple times, and there is some consistency to it.
There are thousands of varieties of succulents, there is pottery, and a lot of things they can link to.
There needs to be some sort of problem you are solving. There is a Chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere, and for a low price, about a penny per search, they will show you how much search traffic a particular keyword is getting.
After Cassidy finds something she is interested in and finds there is money in that niche, that’s when she would validate it by seeing if there is traffic online. Personally, she wants to get traffic without having to work for it with ads. If she stopped doing any sort of promotion, she would continue getting traffic now, because she is ranking in Google search.
Tell us about that process and what was going through your mind as you realized you could make a go of the business.
Cassidy had one main client she was working for about 20 hours a week. They decided they wanted someone full time for the same price and Cassidy said no.
At that point, the blog was making about $100 a month. Her husband was in a PhD program and he had some funding for his research, so they had enough to pay the bills. To her, that was really important.
Blogging takes a long time to get traction and get going. Her husband thought it didn’t make sense for her to keep shooting for this company, so she decided to do the blog and pick up clients along the way if she found some new ones.
They were fine for the summer, so she decided to go all in on the business. Her husband has always been supportive of her.
In general, most of the people she is connected to are supportive, but they also had some reservations. When Cassidy made the switch, she went from making $2,500 a month to $100 a month.
Her in-laws thought it didn’t make any sense. They wanted to make sure Cassidy and her husband would be financially sound.
It was scary going into it, because nobody really understood what she was going to be doing, and she didn’t really know anybody who made money online other than the random people she found online or Pat Flynn, whose podcast motivated her.
It was challenging to not have a good support system of people she knew who were already blogging or making money through a blog. All of the bloggers she knew were in a lifestyle niche and appealed to a broad audience.
Cassidy had some doubts about whether it made sense to keep the subject so small on succulents. Now, six years later, she thinks they should have niched down even more to just talking about growing indoor succulents.
There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong. She also didn’t know a lot about the tech side of it. It was scary and she was bootstrapping it. There were a handful of things they would hire out for $50 at a time, but she didn’t have a lot of money to put into it.
Looking back, it was obviously the right move, but at the time, she was stressed out about it.
They had funding for her husband’s research through the end of the summer, so she knew they had bills covered through the end of August. If nothing happened with the website by then, she was planning to move on to something else.
In that timeframe, they went from making $100 to making $1,500 at the end of August. It wasn’t a full-time income, but being students, it was close enough to a full-time income that it was worth staying on.
What kept her going on is her husband’s encouragement and realizing that she was the one learning about online businesses, she knew the potential was there, and in her head it all made sense. To people who didn’t understand this non-traditional job, it just seemed crazy.
Tell us about the income streams. How and what ways are you making money through your website and your online business in general? Are there one or two different ways you make money through your site?
They have tried to diversify as much as possible, while still doing things that are mostly passive.
Cassidy has friends who do sponsored content. It is not something that has ever really aligned with her business.
- The three main ways they generate income are through:
- Ad revenue. They’ve moved from Google AdSense to AdThrive. If you come to the site, there are ads and they make a penny for every page view they get.
- They have several businesses that sell succulents, like Amazon and Etsy.
- Product sales. Within a year of launching the website, Cassidy wrote an ebook, so they were selling that. She has written a couple more ebooks since then and they have an online course. About two months ago, they introduced a membership, called the Succulent Lovers Club.
For the most part, the income has been fairly evenly spit between those three things. Now, with their focus on sales, their products are starting to take over at about 40 to 50 percent of the income.
Is your husband working or is he helping you with the business? What does it look like with your business and your family?
It looks like whatever they want it to. For the most part, her husband is hanging out with the kids or pursuing hobbies.
He is kind of tech support now, because he likes it. Even though she had it all figured out, she lets him take care of it. If there is anything they need to buy, he likes to do the research on it.
Cassidy has a full-time assistant and she is the one that keeps things moving along. Cassidy works about 20 hours a week, but it is usually less. They are able to volunteer at their church and do stuff with their kids and there are a lot of things they are pursuing. They are enjoying life, instead of being stressed out about making another $10,000.
They really like that they can do whatever they want and they can be flexible if something comes up.
They have a lot of ways they can put more time into the business both now and in the future.
The two biggest things are:
- Start an email list. She didn’t do that until quite a bit later.
- Start affiliate marketing. She didn’t do that until about two years in and that was huge. It was after she wrote the book that she started getting into affiliate marketing and it doubled her income. Don’t be afraid to sell from the beginning. There is no reason to wait until you have an audience. You can wait to develop your own product until you have an audience.
She would have been focused on alternate sources of income other than ads earlier on. Ads are nice, because they are consistent, and if you have the traffic, they are amazing. If you don’t have a lot of traffic, it doesn’t bring in that much income.
Tell us a little about how we can utilize analytics to make our businesses better.
A place where Cassidy see people going wrong is when they are doing ads and not having a clear purpose to the ads and not knowing the value they are getting out of it.
If you are trying to sell a course and you are running an ad straight to the course, hopefully you can track an organic sale versus through the ad itself.
Cassidy has been heavily focusing on revenue per user. Her traffic fluctuates throughout the year and her conversion rate fluctuates too. It can change whether you are selling a high price item or low price item.
She is looking at how much money they are making per person on the website. For her it comes down to having Google Analytics installed and also in their emails/promotions, Google has a system called UTM Parameters that can be added to the end of your link. If Cassidy is sharing a post on Facebook, it has UTM parameters that tell her the traffic is coming from Facebook and what specific link it is coming from.
On Pinterest, Cassidy knows that one of the pages that is doing the best is on why is my succulent stretched out. That drives the most sales and it is trackable for their own products. It is a little trickier to figure out for affiliates, but if a page is selling well for their products, it usually drives sales for affiliates as well.
She can also track which page is driving the most email opt ins.
What else should we know about starting an online business to be successfully unemployed?
Be willing to try something. There is a fine line between doing your research first and researching so much you don’t get anything done.
If you want to take the blogging or website approach, Cassidy recommends to start by writing 10 to 20 articles to see if you like it and if you want to keep going with it.
Get it done and get it out there, because the more you do, the more you learn.
The first articles Cassidy wrote, weren’t great or helpful and they’ve evolved and been updated through the years. Even the ebooks are that way. They have been updated.
Don’t be afraid to put something out there. She has had a lot of things not work out, but she has learned from every single one of them. That is where people become successful. They have the consistency of putting in the work, they aren’t overly stressed, but they are moving on one day at a time and finding what works.
How can listeners find you and learn more about your business?
- Go to SucculentsandSunshine.com
- Go to CassidyTuttle.com, where they are slowly adding content