PPP068: Financial Freedom through Writing with Dave Chesson

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Dave Chesson started his side hustle while in the military, and grew his online empire from the first dollar to a full-time income. He now supports his family through a combination of niche websites, Kindle books, and his new venture, The Kindleprenuer. Learn how you can make a killing with the Kindle in this week’s episode.

What We’re Chatting About This Week

This week we follow Dave Chesson’s story and journey to becoming the Kindleprenuer.

We start out by learning about Dave’s time in the military, and his desire to leave the military career path to enjoy more time with his family. What is the definition of success in his life? Is it to stay in the military? Get a 9-5 job? Neither looked great, and that’s when Dave first found the world of online income.

It sounded like a TV infomercial at first, but after finding a free book online by Jeff Usner, he followed through on building his first niche website. After months of work, he only made $1, but that first dollar opened his eyes to the potential of online income. As I always say, it all starts with the first dollar!

Now that he knew it was possible, he worked to improve his skills and efficiency so he could earn enough online to leave the military.

This story made me think of a concept from, The Art of Non-Comformity, where author Chris Guillebeau shares that in order to make a major life change, the current situation must be horrible or the opportunity great. For Dave, it was somewhere in the middle. And he defined his new success, which made the transition from a stable paycheck to an entrepreneur’s income more palatable.

Next, Dave learned about search engine optimization, or SEO, and worked hard and practiced by building more and more niche websites. His income grew, but it wasn’t scaling the way he wanted. He set a goal of $10,000 per month to support his family at the lifestyle they wanted.

He took the content from the sites he built and turned them into books, and things started falling into place. He built niche books for each of those niche websites and the income started coming in. Then he learned how to apply his SEO knowledge to Amazon and the Kindleprenuer was born.

His expertise helped him build his first authority site, a change in direction from the many niche sites he built before. But as an expert in the field, the new direction fell into place.

Dave learned a lot of technical and practical tips for building Kindle books, and he uses his sites to send visitors to Amazon, where he gets both an affiliate commision and revenue from selling the digital products. He earns even more because he gets commission on other products those buyers get while at Amazon. And this system scales.

What’s next for Dave? Science fiction. This is a new experiment is going to be an attempt to sell sci-fi books based on their relation to other popular books. This new niche website has some fun potential. We’ll see what happens!

This Week’s Sponsor

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This Week’s Guest

Dave Chesson is 34 years old and an 11 year veteran of the US Navy. He was also a military kid and so have lived in all corners of the globe. But that’s not what defines him. After his family, his real passion is books, but more specifically the new world of Kindle e-books. He’s made a pretty decent side income out of them.