Teaching & Earning: Eamonn’s Journey to Turning Google Sheets Tutorials into Income

Hi I’m Eamonn, a happy husband of one, grateful father of four, middle of the pack ultra runner. I've worked in the specialty coffee industry for 21 years and currently oversee operations for a locally owned coffee roastery and cafes based in central Mississippi. Over the past 7 years, I've moved my family to Tennessee, started working remotely and automated a lot of the cumbersome parts of the business and finance operations. 

During COVID I doubled down on learning to code, automating more things and investing time and energy into content creation.

I now operate a main YouTube channel, two online newsletters (Got Sheet & Progress and Perfection) and contribute articles to freeCodeCamp. I've made some digital products, done freelance and a bit of consulting, affiliate programs and all the usual creator stuff. I just completed my first email course and will be using it as a lead magnet soon.

My main inspiration has been to create content and learning resources that would have been helpful to myself a while back. I really enjoy teaching and creating content. I'd love for this to be a full time income one day too, but I enjoy it regardless.

Success is measured by two things: the help I'm providing and the sales generated. I get messages on my videos and emails from subscribers every week thanking me for what I'm putting into the world. This is the most important part. But, actual success needs to have a financial component. I monetised my YouTube channel after about 9 months of weekly videos last year. And I've combined the ad revenue there with affiliate links to products and services that I enjoy using and promoting. Digital products and courses are next.

I'd give more attention to audience sizes for the topics I was considering. For the longest time I've targeted Google Sheets specifically. But this has significantly lower search volume than Excel. I was playing to my strengths, but if I did it over, I'd combine my strengths with more popular search-based topics. This is something that I'm currently pivoting into. In terms of financial success, I'd probably go harder into affiliate deals from the beginning too. My YouTube growth was quite slow and without much chance of revenue until I hit the YouTube Partner Program requirements. In fact, I am experimenting with another new channel right now that is solely focused on affiliate ranked videos.

You've heard it before...start now. Not tomorrow. It'll be ugly and messy. Don't sweat it. Some of my best performing videos are ones that I grimace when watching today. But, hey, people got something out of them. I learned from them. They were stepping stones. I got some great advice from a mentor last year too which I'm grateful for. He told me to start a newsletter before I thought I was ready for it. So I did. It was janky. But I put in the work and got it out there. It grew MUCH slower than the YouTube channel. But then, I turned around and realised that I had made a ton of videos that could act as lead magnets for the newsletter. I turned the top 10 videos into lead magnets and have been growing the subs on that by 15 or so a day for the past two months.

- YouTube 

- X

- LinkedIn

- Got Sheet (spreadsheets and coding)

- Progress and Perfection (addiction and recovery)