Podcast 27: How to Grow a Moustache.com with Douglas Smythe

Today is an exciting day.  I'm sharing a new podcast episode without even recording a single word on my own!

What?!?

Yep, this guy named Perrin sends me an email the other day and says, “Hey, I just recorded a podcast for you!”  Weird. 🙂

Without any instruction from me, Perrin goes out and finds a guy that knows how to grow a moustache really well and interviews him.  At first, I was thinking I would have to tell Perrin that NichePursuits.com isn't really all about growing facial hair (hairpursuits.com might be available?).

Luckily, Douglas Smythe (the guy that knows about moustaches) actually knows all about building a successful website as well.  Phew!  Something my audience is interested in!  (Although growing facial hair is pretty cool too).

Okay, okay…let me be real for a second here.

I'm absolutely THRILLED that Perrin has found a fantastic podcast guest and conducted an interview.  Douglas Smythe has grown his site about moustaches to over 100k visitors per month in less than a year!

You can check out his site at HowToGrowaMoustache.com.  He also has a podcast on iTunes called the Moustache and Blade Podcast.

I may not be on this podcast, but the advice shared is very actionable and the success story is inspiring!  And it was super easy for me to get this podcast…I could get used to this :).

From here, I'm going to turn it over to Perrin…

Podcast Overview

Hey guys! It’s Perrin. As most of you now know, I work here now. And one of the biggest perks by far is occasionally getting to contribute to the ol’ Niche Pursuits blog when the opportunity arises. Another perk is meeting tons of cool people. Some of those people are readers here. Some of them are fellow site builders. And some I’ve met through my very own site, aPennyShaved.

One of the things I did to grow aPennyShaved was to reach out to a bunch of other bloggers in the shaving community, a process I outlined in one of my previous posts. It was a super fun process, the response was spectacular, and I ended up making a bunch of cool friends.

One of those friends was Douglas Smythe, who founded Howtogrowamoustache.com. We exchanged emails about shaving, discussed blogging strategies and ended up collaborating on a guest post, which was a ton of fun.

The more Douglas and I chatted, the more I became absolutely fascinated and blown away by his success in the very same community I was working to succeed in, especially because his site wasn’t just a simple ad-supported site. Douglas was leveraging his traffic to expand his shaving site into a larger, product-driven business. How cool is that?!

I’ve probably asked Douglas about a million questions by now, so I figured we might as well record them so you all can learn, too. Here are just a few of the things we cover:

• How his site grew from 200 visitors per month to over 100,000 visitors per month in just one year
• How he started selling his own artisan product (that he makes by hand himself… what a boss)
• How to leverage traffic from tons of difference sources, including Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook
• Trying, failing and succeeding with different monetization methods
• The importance of being in a part of your niche’s community
• How caring about your subject matter can help your project blow up
• How to find your audience and put your brand in front of their eyeballs
• + Tons of other little tips

I love getting to talk to other people about blogging and SEO, so it was a total treat for me to chat with Douglas for an hour. I learned a ton, and I think there’s a lot of good lessons for all of us in here, especially for folks like me, who are still relatively new to this whole business.

Here’s what I think is the most important lesson I learned: don’t just build sites to make money. Build them out of passion and enjoyment. The money is nice, of course, but the real fulfillment comes from digging into a subject, community and process you love.

If you do that, people will like you, you can distribute your brand much more widely, and you’ll have a lot of fun doing it! So, really, I guess for it boils down to three main lessons: (1) be passionate, (2) be everywhere, and (3) don’t be afraid to turn your simple site into something much bigger.

Hope you guys enjoy this one! Thanks again, Douglas!