The DIY Golfer

Just did my 3rd launch of the "Break 90 in 90 Days" training course and reached $10k in total sales.

This is a bittersweet milestone.

On one hand, I'm thrilled to have created something that people want to purchase.

On the other hand, I am not actively growing this site any longer.

Growing the site would require me to continue making golf-related content, networking with those in the golf industry, and spending time around golf courses. At this point in my career, I'm not interested in doing any of these things.

Some might suggest selling the site and moving on, but I also don't see this as an option. This site has a personal touch to it and when I first created it, I promised myself that I would never sell it.

While I don't have time to grow it now, I do enjoy the passive income it provides (now about ~$1k / m). In addition, the organic traffic continues to grow, my course testimonials keep coming in, and I could see myself working on this down the road when I have some more free time.

I'm certainly celebrating this success, but have decided to put this on the backburner for a while to free up time for other projects.

During late 2019 and the first half of 2020, I developed a golf application that allows users to take online golf video courses and track their golf statistics.

https://training.thediygolfer.com/

With minimal experience developing software and deploying a production-ready app, I successfully brought this thing to market and had a fairly successful launch.

The MVP for this app did two things–allow users on my site to take my online golf training course, and track their golf statistics.

Since I had collected about 2,000 emails through my site that launched in 2015 (tracked separately as a product on IH), I had an audience to market the launch of the training app to. When I launched it, I sold 30 training programs totally about $3,000.

Since the launch, I resumed creating content for both my golf website and my software YouTube channel (which was at about 1500 subs at this time) in order to start building some more passive income and traffic for future sales.

Because I am still working a full-time corporate job along with creating content (for marketing purposes), I have gone in maintenance mode for this app. There are tons of features I plan on adding in the future but need some financial independence to free up my time first.

I probably went through 6 different WordPress themes and designs before this point, and I was not pleased with any of them.

This remodel was a milestone because, for the first time, I was actually happy with the result, and it remains the current theme today.

Alongside this remodel, I did a lot of SEO optimization of post titles and descriptions, updated the pictures on the site, and organized the site into more logical categories.

Trailing Month Stats as of this date:

Website sessions - 10,000
YouTube Subscribers - ~1,000
Total Revenue - ~$300

I built my first paid product, "Break 90 in 90 Days", which is a 20+ hour video course for golfers who want to break 90 and learn the game of golf.

Sold the beta launch for $99/course, and got 6 purchases off of an email list of about 1,500 (that I had not emailed in over a year at this point).

This was a huge milestone because it was the first paid instructional product that I had ever sold.

https://www.thediygolfer.com/introduction-to-instructional-content-terminology/

While this appears as a series of posts, this content was meant to be read like a book and marked the first substantial amount of content completed for the site. Currently, this content is driving at least a quarter of the site traffic.

While I was playing college golf, I started my main website, www.thediygolfer.com to help myself become a better golfer and share golf instruction with whoever wanted to read it.

While working on my Corporate Finance degree and playing college golf, I learned the basics of WordPress and put together a golf site. The original versions of this site were so ugly I must have deleted all the history because I can't find screenshots today. Most of my initial work here was writing posts to populate the site with content.