The Side Hustle Show

Latest Episodes:

270: How to Systemize Your Business with Marketing Automation Feb 15, 2018

Show notes

How would you like to add thousands of dollars a month to your bottom line, on autopilot?

Sounds pretty good, right?

Greg Hickman of System.ly has achieved this for his own 6-figure a month business and does the same for his clients using marketing automation and effective sales funnels.

If you're wondering what marketing automation is, in Greg’s own words it's, “How to use technology to enable your sales and marketing and fulfillment strategy.”

Greg is a master in the art of offering compelling lead magnets to attract potential customers, setting up onboarding sequences and follow-up emails to keep them interested, and converting them into paying customers.

The best part is that it doesn’t need to be complicated as his own simple 4-step formula from Facebook ad to paying customer proves. Plus, when your marketing automation sequence is set up it runs itself bringing in new clients all year round.

Tune in to hear the types of lead magnets and sales strategies Greg sees working today, the questions you have to ask yourself before writing any email sequence, and how he communicates with prospects on an ongoing basis.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Systemize Your Business with Marketing Automation

269: How to Set Up and Sell a Paid Mastermind Group Feb 08, 2018

Show notes

Women pay up to $2000 a month to hang out with Natalie Eckdahl for a few hours.

The mother of 3 has turned her BizChix podcast (which started as a side hustle) into a thriving business based largely on paid mastermind groups. She curates groups of high-performing female entrepreneurs – and gets paid handsomely to do it.

Is this a revenue stream you could add to your business?

If you’re in a consulting, freelancing, or coaching role and trying to figure out what the next step is to scale up your business, a group mastermind program could be the answer.

In fact, a paid mastermind was the first thing I sold on Side Hustle Nation, but I put the program on hold after our son was born. All of a sudden that extra hour or two in the evening became a lot harder to part with!

I wanted to pick her brain on how she set everything up and sold it to her audience.

“What I’m trying to create is an amazing brainstorming opportunity for the women that join the group,” Natalie said.

Today she’s running five separate premium-priced masterminds for 5- and 6-figure entrepreneurs, with prices ranging from $600 to $2000 a month.

But it almost didn’t happen. She was a few weeks away from putting BizChix on pause, when a fateful few customers sparked a major turning point.

Tune in to hear how Natalie sets up her groups for success, structures the meetings, and 20x’d her rates in 3 years.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Set Up and Sell a Paid Mastermind Group

268: Blogging ROI: From $18 to $100k a Month in 2.5 Years Feb 01, 2018

Show notes

Could a part-time blog really bring in that kind of cash? Rosemarie swears she only works 20 hours a week!

Yes, The Busy Budgeter is back for her 3rd round on The Side Hustle Show, and it's a good one.

If you missed the first two:

In episode 142, Rosemarie Groner's blog was about a year old and earning $5k a month. She shared a step-by-step system for generating massive traffic from Pinterest, which I immediately implemented myself.
A year later, in episode 199, she was earning $20-25k a month, and shared her "date your list" and "core affiliate strategy."

A few months after that recording, she started posting consistent $100k months from her blog, so of course I had to invite her back to hear what changed.

If you guessed creating her own products and driving paid traffic, you'd be the big winner.

“I eliminated anything that wasn’t important for my growth,” Rosemarie said.

Tune in to hear how Rosemarie started selling her own products, the sales funnels tactics and tools she uses to turn subscribers into customers, and her tips to keep improving your ROI so you spend less time working while increasing your revenue.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Blogging ROI: From $18 to $100k a Month in 2.5 Years

267: The Hustler’s Mindset: The 10 Traits of Successful Side Hustle Entrepreneurs Jan 25, 2018

Show notes

This should probably be episode 1, not 267, but if I'm being totally honest, I probably wasn't in a place personally or professionally to record it as episode 1.

I’ve avoided doing a “mindset” episode for almost 5 because I didn’t think it was necessary. I thought if people are seeking out business information, entrepreneurship information, they’ve already got the right mindset.

They know what’s up.

They get it.

But older and (hopefully) wiser, I’ve come to see the mindset conversation as an important one, and one I’ve been overlooking for a long time.

This is foundational stuff, and before you dismiss this as way to fluffy for a Side Hustle Show episode, let me give you a couple points to consider on the mindset front.

The first comes from one of my favorite podcasts, Tropical MBA. Their theory is for entrepreneurs making:

$0-100k - the barrier is mindset
$100k - $1M - the barrier is marketing
$1M + - the barrier is your team

I’m sure there are counterpoints but I think there’s a lot of truth in that breakdown.

The second point to consider comes from Dane Maxwell, who was a special guest on episode 119 of The Side Hustle Show, during my public coaching experiment. Dane created several software businesses before founding The Foundation to teach others what he’d learned.

He said the easiest way to test if your mindset is in the right place is to ask if you have or are you getting the results you want?

If not, something must be missing, right?

There’s some brutal honesty in that question, and it took me a minute to wrap my head around it, but the gist of it is this: if you’re not where you want to be, there’s room for some mindset growth or changes.

In this episode I’ll share 10 traits of the hustler’s mindset and do my best to illustrate those with examples from either my own businesses or those of my guests.

Full Show Notes: The Hustler’s Mindset: The 10 Traits of Successful Side Hustle Entrepreneurs

266: The Simplest Side Hustle Ever? How to Earn $30-50 an Hour Picking up Trash Jan 18, 2018

Show notes

Brian Winch calls it “America’s Simplest Business.”

What started as a side hustle way back in 1981 has now grown into a $650k a year operation.

So what does Brian do?

His company picks up litter from parking lots. Sadly, it's still an essential service (boo litterbugs!), but has very low startup costs and Brian says you can earn $30-$50 an hour doing this on the side.

What prompted Brian to pick up the phone and ask property management companies if he could handle their litter picking contracts?

“I decided I liked my job but I couldn’t see myself doing this for the rest of my life and I wanted more,” Brian said. In just a few months he was earning more part-time in this side hustle than he was at his full-time job.

It's freelancing -- brick-and-mortar style.

Tune in to hear how Brian landed his first clients, how he priced his service, and how he scaled the business to remove himself from the day-to-day trash pickup.

With the decent pay, hours that fit around most day jobs, minimal start-up costs, and no prior experience necessary, it’s a side hustle success story that's worth checking out.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Simplest Side Hustle Ever? How to Earn $30-50 an Hour Picking up Trash

264: Challenge Marketing – How to Explode Your List and Revenue with Free Challenges Jan 04, 2018

Show notes

"I teach women how to get dressed in the morning."

That's how Kelly Snyder from AdoreYourWardrobe.com introduced herself to me at FinCon.

(The more "official" tagline is that Adore Your Wardrobe teaches women how to confidently dress their unique bodies through the principles found in math and science.)

There's a niche for everything, right!

It’s a really cool business idea that sits firmly outside of the usual internet marketing space and has helped thousands of women be less frustrated and a lot happier with their wardrobe.

Kelly has used an interesting strategy of challenge marketing to grow her business to multiple 6-figures in under two years.

But the 14 Day from Frustration to Functional Closet Challenge is just one piece of the puzzle, or one piece of the "customer success path," as she put it.

As the challenge wraps up, she invites participants to join her flagship course, and she's added a couple more upsells beyond that as well in response to customer feedback.

So how about results? Each time she runs a challenge she adds another $100k in revenue to her business!

There are some interesting and unusual techniques to her challenge marketing strategies, and definitely some scope to apply these techniques to your own business if you sell courses or any other service.

Tune in to hear how Kelly structures her challenges, how she gets people in the door, and how she converts free participants into paying customers.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Challenge Marketing – How to Explode Your List and Revenue with Free Challenges

263: The Top 3 Amazon FBA Private Label Product Research Strategies for 2018 and Beyond Dec 28, 2017

Show notes

It's no secret that Amazon FBA is one of the hottest side hustles going right now, and it shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

FBA is Fulfillment by Amazon, the program that allows you to list your own products for sale on Amazon, tap into their giant audience of customers, and have them handle all the shipping when orders come in.

The trick is figuring out which which products to sell, and that's where Greg Mercer comes in.

Greg has launched over 100 successful products on Amazon, including a few public examples like bamboo marshmallow sticks and hooded baby towels he shared on the JungleScout.com blog.

Just those two products alone are earning $12k a month in profit, and he’s formed some cool partnerships with Doctors without Borders and Pencils of Promise to put the proceeds to good use.

Now, you might remember Greg from an episode we did a couple years ago, How to Find Your First Amazon FBA Private Label Product.

At that time, we talked about private label research and strategies for starting an FBA business. Since the landscape has changed a bit since then, I invited Greg back on the show to dive into how he's picking products today.

The 3 strategies we cover are:

Big demand / bad reviews.
Big sales / poor marketing.
New markets / immature listings.

Greg also breaks down the criteria he likes to see in new private label products, how Amazon ranks products in their internal algorithm, and how he successfully launches his new products quickly.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Top 3 Amazon FBA Private Label Product Research Strategies for 2018 and Beyond

262: The Most Common Website Mistakes (and How to Fix Them) Dec 21, 2017

Show notes

Is your website guilty of these common sins? How secure is your site, really?

WordPress is like the new toy you unwrap on Christmas morning -- you know it's going to be awesome, but there's some assembly required.

To break down some of the most common website mistakes, I invited my friend Anthony Tran on the show.

Anthony runs MarketingAccessPass.com, a web design and development agency, as well as AccessWP.com, a WordPress support company offering unlimited support for a low monthly subscription.

(Get $20 off your first month of Access WP through my affiliate link)

With years of experience building websites for himself and for clients, he definitely knows his stuff.

In this episode, we walk through how you can tighten up the security of your site, speed up your load times, and some quick changes that’ll improve your SEO and user experience.

Whether you’re new to WordPress or have been blogging for years, I think you’ll take something away from this episode as Anthony shares his tips, tools, and best practices from years of working online for himself and for clients.

Note: If you don't have a website up and running yet, my free video series will show you how to get online quickly and affordably.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Most Common Website Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

261: Health and Fitness for Busy Entrepreneurs - The Most Overlooked Productivity Hack? Dec 14, 2017

Show notes

I felt gross. I was tired from chasing a toddler around, out of shape, and fighting a series of frustrating injuries.

And I realized it was hurting my output at work. Building a business takes real energy and real brainpower, and I wasn't performing optimally because my body wasn't performing optimally.

I knew I had to do something about it.

A friend introduced me to Rob Dionne, a certified personal trainer who works with clients online and in person. He also co-hosts the Open Sky Fitness podcast with his wife Devon and runs the really active Open Sky Fitness Facebook group.

Since we started working together, I've lost 5 pounds, gained strength, and generally feel more energized during the day. On the surface, investing 20 minutes in a workout seems like going backward; that's 20 minutes I should be working! But I've found it pays dividends in better energy the rest of the day and better sleep at night.

During our coaching calls, I'd often find myself saying, "This is really good stuff, we should be recording this."

And that's how this episode came to be.

Tune in to hear the most important health and fitness factors, how they can fit into any schedule, and Rob's analysis of one Side Hustle Show listener's daily routine.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Health and Fitness for Busy Entrepreneurs - The Most Overlooked Productivity Hack?

260: From Flipping Textbooks to $4 Million in Sales: How to Scale Your Amazon FBA Retail Arbitrage Business Dec 07, 2017

Show notes

A lot has changed in Ryan's "buy low, sell high" business built on Amazon's FBA program.

This week’s episode is a “where are they now?” show as I catch up with Ryan Grant from OnlineSellingExperiment.com.

Ryan first appeared on the show back in 2014 on episode 61. Back then he had just quit his $50k a year job to sell online full-time using retail arbitrage.

(He’d started out flipping textbooks in college and then got into Amazon FBA retail arbitrage; buying low from stores locally and re-selling on Amazon.)

Fast forward 3 years and Ryan’s business has grown at an incredible pace.

He’s had some pretty impressive media exposure off the back of a Reddit AMA and is on track to sell more than $4 million worth of stuff in 2017.

What were the driving forces behind this accelerated growth?

“I wanted to make it a true business,” Ryan said.

He now has a team of 11 people working for him, has put processes in place to find more items in retail stores, has started buying at wholesale, and can now use his own time more efficiently to work on growing his business and finding expansion opportunities.

Ryan’s success is proof that retail arbitrage is still a viable side hustle. In this episode he explains what he’s learned over the last 3 years, and how the retail arbitrage landscape has changed for new sellers.

Tune in to hear Ryan explain how he grew his business into a multi-million-dollar operation, how he grew his team and developed processes to scale up, and what he’s focusing on in 2018.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: From Flipping Textbooks to $4 Million in Sales: How to Scale Your Amazon FBA Retail Arbitrage Business

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