She Thought Writing a Book Would Make Her Money, Instead She Built a Six-Figure Business Around Goats

Deborah Niemann's debut book sold out its first print run of 5,000 copies within nine months. When she worked out how many hours the writing had taken, she calculated what those hours had actually earned her. 'I could have made more money if I was working at a fast food restaurant,' she said.

Niemann, a homesteader and author from Cornell, Illinois, has since built a six-figure media business focused entirely on goats. Speaking on Nick Loper's podcast, The Side Hustle Show, she described how she moved from book royalties to the online courses, paid members' club, YouTube channel, and podcast that keep the operation running today.

That first book began with a speaking engagement. A publisher approached her after watching her speak at a Mother Earth News Fair in 2010, having found her homesteading blog linked on the event's website. They asked whether she could deliver an 80,000-word manuscript in three months. She said yes.

She wrote seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, to hit the deadline. When the homesteading guide came out in 2011, it carried a $20 (£15) cover price and paid her a royalty of about $1 (74p) per copy. Her advance was $3,000 (£2,215).

'This is nowhere close to minimum wage,' she recalled thinking after the book sold out.

Two more books followed within three years, along with speaking invitations that took her from Washington State to Virginia and into Canada. Together, her titles, among them Homegrown and Handmade and Raising Goats Naturally, have sold roughly 25,000 copies. The books brought speaking work but modest income.

How a $1 Royalty Pushed Her Towards Online Courses

By 2013, Niemann was teaching sustainable agriculture online for the University of Massachusetts, which paid more than the books, though not by much. A single course cost students $1,500 (£1,110). Around 2015, she saw other creators building their own courses and decided her goat expertise could fill one.

She credits the email list she built to sell that first course, rather than the course itself, as the turning point. She started the list in 2016 after reading the entrepreneur Nathan Barry and hearing marketing author Michael Hyatt speak. By early 2017, her first course, Goats 101, went live to about 2,000 subscribers, and roughly one in 10 bought it on release.

Goats gradually became her main subject. After she published a goat-specific title in 2013, the audience following her for that one animal kept growing while her general homesteading readership shrank. She renamed both her YouTube channel and her podcast For the Love of Goats to match.

Why the Goat Members' Club Now Pays the Bills

Before moving to the country, Niemann had worked as a lactation consultant, a childbirth educator, and a newspaper reporter. She relocated to rural Illinois in 2002 to grow her own food, and two goats soon became 20.

Courses and the membership she launched in 2019, Goats 365, now bring in about 70% of her income, she said, with display advertising across her 700-plus articles adding another 25%. The club, priced between $19 and $29 (£14 and £21) a month, started with 20 members. It now holds around 150.

The shift to recurring revenue coincided with a fall in her search traffic. Niemann said her website once drew about 110,000 visits a month before Google began placing AI-generated summaries above its search results, cutting the figure to around 40,000 almost overnight. It has since recovered to about 60,000.

Her latest venture is offline. This October she is leading her first overseas goat tour, taking paying followers, most of them members, to farms and dairies in Portugal, with a second trip booked for April.

Asked for her biggest business regret, she named one decision. 'My biggest regret in my business is that I did not start my email list earlier,' she said, describing the list as the one asset no platform or algorithm can take away.