How Harvest Eating Makes Money

I first heard about these guys when listening to a Pat Flynn Smart Passive Income Podcast.  I loved that Pat was finally getting to share a few success stories of making money online that weren’t to do with teaching people how to make money online! As someone who created a careers advice membership site myself, this was verrrrry refreshing.  So here’s the story behind Harvest Eating.

This chef, Keith Snow, decided to create a site showcasing awesome recipes for fresh local style eating.  He put a ton of content up and then added a You Tube channel too – ie he was no longer just writing about his recipes, but also cooking them like a mini Jamie Oliver.

He rolled the site he had into a membership site, where people paid to access all the content.  Membership fees were either monthly, yearly or lifetime.  He’s got over 1000 people paid up, many of whom would be monthly members at $4.99 a month.  Now I don’t need to do the math on this one, you can clearly see this is generating $20,000+ a month for him (assuming half of people take up the discounted options of yearly or lifetime membership).

He’s also making money through all the You Tube videos he’s done, and since he’s in the millions of views, you would think this amount would not be negligible.  You can see that any niche can produce a 1000-strong tribe for it’s content creators, so whether you’re a downhill mountain biking nutjob or an ultra-marathon runner, realize it’s possible to make money from a small interest group.

Two other sources of income for this e-celebrity chef are direct private advertising on his site (ie not google adsense, but rather deals negotiated with companies one on one who saw his high net worth audience was huge) and through a little ecommerce too (he sells specialty food products directly to his audience too).

I did also see he made an app, but I think at a measly $1.99 it’s not going to bring in much more than say $1000 a year, so I’m looking at this as more of a distribution device for the money-making content.

PS I remember Pat saying on the podcast, something like, what information can you turn into a membership site with monthly recurring fees?  I think pretty much anything can fit, but one big point you’re not going to like – as a passive income junkie that is – is that in order to keep people paying recurring fees every month, you’re going to have to continuously offer something new, whether it’s new content or interactions with members, it certainly ain’t passive.  You can of course get around this by just charging a one-off entry fee for your members-only website, which is the exact route I took with our recruiting information site.

Visit Harvest Eating or check out Smart Passive Income where case study originally spotted