PPP076: Taking Your Side Hustle Full-Time with Chenell Tull

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There’s little I love more than a good “I quit my job” story, and today’s comes from my friend Chenell Tull. I met Chenell at FinCon a couple of years back, and excitedly watched from the sidelines as she turned her side hustle into a full-time income. Like me, it all started with a personal finance blog, but it wasn’t the blog that took her full-time. Learn how she did it in this week’s episode.

What We’re Chatting About This Week

Chenell did not have a long-time goal of leaving her day job, prior to that she was happy working for a big organization with a steady paycheck. In her job, she worked with the web, but it wasn’t until 2015 when she realized she may be able to quit her job and use her online marketing skills to build her own profitable business.

Her old day job lasted about seven years, and after discovering Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog in 2014, decided to use her skills in online marketing ads and campaigns with paying clients. She built her personal finance blog, Bright Cents, and built up her digital marketing skills. She started taking clients on the side, and eventually saw her side hustle income grow to a point she could make a living without her day job salary. She went full-time in June, 2017!

She didn’t start out online on a path to running her own online marketing company, she started with a personal finance blog aimed at helping people with the same financial struggles she faced on a daily basis. Getting out of debt and managing money were primary topics, and the blog kept her accountable along the way. She tried to make a few bucks with affiliate marketing, following Pat Flynn’s model, but digital marketing landed in her lap with a family client.

She took over the online marketing for her step-Dad’s business, and used the results as a portfolio to start charging outside clients. She worked for her family for free in the beginning, and still gives her step-Dad’s business a family discount, but building his online presence from scratch led to great results. With a portfolio of real-world experience, she started finding real, paid clients. Many of those clients came through her LinkedIn profile.

After updating her LinkedIn profile, members of the FinCon community suggested working with Chenell in the community’s Facebook group. That was the source of most of her early clients. Networking, improving her skills, and doing a great job for clients let her build her business.

Chenell charges clients a fixed monthly recurring rate to her clients rather than charging hourly. She focuses on the value she delivers to clients, not the number of hours she sits behind the keyboard on client projects. By showing clients the value she produces for them, it is easy to justify the costs of an online marketing pro.

This Week’s Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by GoDaddy. I bought my first domain at GoDaddy, and have the same account there more than ten years later. With competitive prices, industry leading options, and recently updated management consoles, GoDaddy is a great value. Buy yourname.com, yourbusiness.com, or any other domain at GoDaddy.

This Week’s Guest

Chenell Tull and recently quit her day job to try and make a living on my own. In the past, she’d written a lot about paying off student loans, but have since been saving money so she could quit her full-time job. She runs Conversion Owl Marketing.