MBA 056: A Hobby Turned Full Time Income with JIM HARMER

Elevator Pitch: Who is Jim Harmer?
Jim prefers to introduce himself as a blogger instead of a photographer. He finds that people don’t tend to see blogging as a serious profession. It baffles them that you can earn an income from your blog and being a YouTube personality.

Starting Out
Upon finishing his Bachelors degree, Jim made the decision to study law. In the interim he worked at the Dollar Store in the evenings and listened to podcasts to fight his boredom with his job. These podcasts were mainly about online businesses. Simultaneously he started to learn about photography and enjoyed it greatly. When his classes at law school started, he decided to teach evening photography classes at the local high school. For this he created a blog to communicate with his students. To his surprise the traffic to those blog posts grew to hundreds of thousands and eventually it’s in the millions today.

Jim did finish his law degree, but was never a practising attorney. In his final year at Law school, Jim realised that he would earn much more from his online business than he could ever earn as an attorney.

A Day in the Life of an Online Entrepreneur
Jim doesn’t follow a set regime and he tends to work in sprints, as he calls it. He found that he doesn’t like working set hours. When he feels like working, he puts all his effort into it, but when he takes a break, he focuses all his attention on his family. Jim is able to work so hard in business because he loves what he does. If there’s a specific part of his job that is not particularly enjoyable to him, he will outsource the task. Jim feels his efforts are best utilised in content creation.

Outsourcing
The very first thing that Jim outsourced was the finances for the business, a task his wife took off his hands. It’s the type of thing you can’t entrust just anybody with, so he was glad she offered. Shortly after he outsourced their customer support as he feels that this is not one of his strengths. He handed this task over to a virtual assistant (VA). The independent contractors he uses are based all over the globe, most have another day job and he only employs them for one small task. Jim finds it to be much more cost-effective. When a position needs filling, he has in the past made use of platforms such as Fiver and the like. These days he turns to his existing audience, with great results.

Social Media in 2017
Jim started his business 8 years ago, a time to which he refers as the heyday of social media. He had a greater reach when he posted on his social media page. Social media has undergone many changes since then. It is just much more difficult to get your message noticed in the noise that is Facebook these days. Contrary to popular belief, Jim will spend as little time as possible using social media as a marketing platform. He recommends only focusing on those channels you can control. In his case this is his podcast, his blog and his email list. With any new websites he starts he doesn’t even bother building a social media following for them. Jim’s advice is to build a stellar blog right from the beginning.

How to Build a Tribe
If not with social media, then how? Jim identified a niche and created a website with a blog to answer questions. He suggests you write long, decent articles on the topic. For a specific blog on boating he wrote 33 long articles on the subject. Jim published the articles on his blog and left them there for Google to rank. It can take up to 12 months for you to see any real increase in the traffic to your posts. He doesn’t attribute the traffic to SEO or link-building or social media.

Monetising your Blog or Website
The income from Jim’s blog was 100% from Amazon affiliates. Once you reach around 80 000 views per month the revenue from advertisement space also...