This is the piggyback principle by it's easier to fill demand than to create it from scratch. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show. We're part of the entrepreneur podcast network because you're already an entrepreneur even if right now your day job just happens to be willing to come. We've got an awesome case study for you today, one that combines a couple common strategies on the show to build a really strong business.
Business, those strategies are number one, what we call SWAS. Software, we serve this. This is offering help or consulting or guidance or templates that support a popular software product. It's a lot of examples of that over the years and number two is what we call the piggyback principle. My kids will tell you it's a lot easier to get a piggyback ride if you do all for walking yourself.
The same is true, the business and the strategy allows you to draft on the popularity of that software product to catch that rising tide, to get better faster results with plus effort and in this episode we're going to be acting out to do that in your niche.
To help illustrate this, each Christy is seen from www.thesilvalife.com. The Silver Life helps small businesses set up and integrate two popular software tools, honeybook and click up into their workflow and operations, earning thousands of dollars per project along the way. Christy, welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Thank you, Stunt for having me, Nick, and super excited to be here.
To me as well, stick around, we'll learn how Christy and I are so customers from never having heard of her all the way down to paying customers and what that journey looks like. But this business has started in a unique way, so it's 2020. Christy is a nanny and personal assistant in New York City. And as you know, all of a sudden, all that in-person work suddenly gets grind into a halt. And she's saying, well, I've got to make some changes here. Take me back to that time period.
My husband and I were both living and working in New York City in a teeny tiny apartment. So he was working from home remote. And I, my job was kind of on pause because it was in person. I was just keeping myself busy and my sister-in-law introduced me to a program called the virtual savvy.
And I know Abby Ashley has been on this show before. Thank you, Abby, for all your ex-wirties. I would not be here without you today. So basically my sister-in-law, Tase, was friends, personal friends with Abby. And she told me she's like, listen, I don't even know what Abby totally does. But it's something with virtual assisting. And I know you're a personal assistant.
So I bet there's some correlation there. You should check it out. And what really got me was the testimonials for the virtual savvy. I was like, if all these people can do it and they can replace their 9-5, they can work from home. I could do this too. Why can't I do it? So it was a huge leap of faith. I will say it was the biggest investment I had ever made on myself kind of feeling like it was a gamble.
Whenever you're investing, especially in the beginning of your business, you're like, totally is this thing going to work. And so I ended up diving in headfirst and like, you know what? No better time than the present. I'm literally not working. I can dedicate all my time to doing this course, giving it a shot.
I totally felt nervous and embarrassed to tell people like, hey, I'm trying out this thing. And I have no idea if it's going to work, but I'm going to go for it. Then the first 90 days I ended up replacing my New York City salary with virtual assisting work.
Well, that's a really funny connection that I didn't know existed because we met through the 2x coaching program. And I didn't know that it went back to Abby. She's been doing the virtual savvy for years and years ago. We can link up her previous episodes on the show. I think that's really exciting.
So now starting out, are you you know, niche down to these project management tools early on? You're like, or your early on, I'll just take whatever clients I can get. I could help you with virtual admin type of task.
Yeah, so I started in June of 2020 and I started everyone like as you get into the online business world, as you guys know, there are like so many voices and opinions out there of like, you need to do this. And you shouldn't do this. And so as I started like diving deeper, everyone was saying like, niche down, niche down, niche down. And I was like, but I don't even know what I like to do yet. So I took some time and I did a little bit of everything.
So I was just a virtual assistant. I did like admin content creation systems, all the things. And after about six months, I would say before the end of the year was over, I decided, you know what, I don't want to do everything for everyone. And that's when I decided to invest in my first business coach, where our first session together, basically she had me just like word vomit, all the things that I loved about my job and did not love about my job.
And we very quickly realized at the end of that session that what I was really passionate about was getting people organized and the pathway to do that was through systems. So at this point for my clients, I had already set up my two favorite tools, click up and honey book.
I've also set up different CRM's and project management tools for people, but I felt very strongly that these were the tools that I wanted to master. And at the time, I'll be honest with you Nick, I actually didn't see many people in the online space, like just niching down into specific tools and being like pros.
They had, click up consulting at the time was a very small group of people, honey book pros wasn't even a thing. I was one of the first like 12 honey book pros. And so it felt like again, this like leap of faith, like starting is leap of faith continuing. You're constantly having to believe in yourself, but then niching and taking such a drastic turn was definitely like a mindset thing of like, I feel like this is the right thing, but I hope that it pays off.
And it feels risky because you're like, well, am I going to cut off all this other business that I'm, you know, perfectly qualified to do. I know I can get it done. I can deliver good results for clients.
But I think there's a greater pastors over here. It is challenging. And I like a couple things that you almost have to go broad in a service like this early on to identify what really lights you up or where do you kind of have your special secret sauce that you can apply and then follow that path or keep pursuing that.
And then the other thing is being on the earlier side, you don't need to be bleeding edge, but if you can be one of the first 12 people to offer this obviously these are up and come tools now, but you know, maybe this was earlier days. And we saw on some example of Paul miners doing this with a sauna and pipe drive, you know, eight in the world of software, a generation ago, you know, different iterations of these types of tools.
And you can be on the earlier side of that start to create content around it. You can really carve out an interesting space for yourself. Before we do that, though, I think people will be curious because we can't gloss. Hey, I replaced my income in 90 days. I would be remiss if I didn't ask, how did you get those first customers? There were two main ways that I got my first customers. The first, which feels even more intimidating and scary is reaching out to your personal connections.
And what also feels scary about this is because there are so many like MLMs and pyramids, evens out there that you're like, okay, are people going to think I'm a scam. But number one, if you're not a scammy person and you have, I'm reaching out to people that I actually have legitimate connections with. And so just reaching out to them being like, hey, I'm starting this new thing. It's basically just like a personal assistant, but I'm virtual.
If you're interested or you know anyone else that is, feel free to reach out. And so I actually my first client ever was a personal connection that had a garage door business. And he was my first client. Then a lot of the majority of my other clients getting started came from Facebook groups, which is really ironic because I'm now going back to that strategy for top of funnel, like starting to engage more in Facebook groups.
In terms of like answering questions. So I would go into Facebook groups. Abby has one that's the virtual savvy. So it's a free public Facebook group where like people are literally like I'm searching for a virtual assistant. So yes, that's awesome because people are literally searching for it. But then you also have to figure out how to make yourself stand out.
So there's a lot of competition in there. And then the third way is really just starting having a marketing a solid marketing strategy and plan from the beginning. And so I would say those were the three main ways. Obviously the marketing strategy because I was brand new. I'll never forget the day. I started to sell the life my Instagram with zero followers. And you know, it was just something that I had to flex that muscle and practice.
And eventually I started, you know, becoming a name in the industry in virtual system. And then eventually in systems and honeybuck and click up. Okay. Yeah, trying to put yourself out there. And it's kind of intimidating because at that stage, I feel like I personally committed to doing this thing.
But it's still intimidating to start to spread the word tell other people about it. And even if it's not a direct connection, you're trying to plant the seed in in your networks mind that this is what you do now. Like your previous identity about what I did for work just at that side. It's a well, now I need if I need virtual assistant support, you know, Christie is my person. And it may be I don't need it. But maybe my networks network needs it like somebody else I'm talking to.
Oh, I know somebody I had a connect you with Christie. There's a we've seen that play out where it's a you know, because it's kind of like to your MLM point like yeah, kind of feels a little skeezy trying to sell directly to your immediate network. But it's more just occupying a little bit of mind share and say like, oh, if I need somebody for web design or if I need somebody to, you know, watch windows like, well, who do you know, right?
It's kind of like this. How do the word of mouth can start to spread now when it's in down. We're doing the software with the service. Hey, we're going to be your click up specialist. We're going to be your honey book specialist. What happens there? Like how do you make that transition or start to get customers in that space? Because the other benefit to this too is, well, now instead of just being general admin.
I don't know, maybe you're at 25 30 bucks an hour. All of a sudden by being really specialized, you can command a lot better rates to. Yeah, 100% and I won't sugar code it Nick that transition, although I knew it was the right one. It felt like so difficult in the time because like you mentioned before, like I had really good relationships with my current clients.
So it honestly felt like it was a breakup when I was telling them that I was moving in a different direction now every single client because they're amazing people were so supportive of me and have sent so much business my way as well since that, you know, transition.
But there definitely was a dip in income as I was making that transition. Obviously I look back now and the ROI is so much greater and you're right, you can really expand your services and your offerings and I know we'll get into that in a little bit about like where we are now and our different income streams.
But aside from it being a mindset block of like, you know, are people going to resonate with me now because they loved following my VA journey, but also then having that a lot of people don't talk about the internal battle of when you transition and people still know you as an awesome VA and they're in your DMs being like, hey, I know you used to do this.
I have a client who really needs it will you still do it and when you're in that moment of being like, I don't want to say no, but also I'm trying to go in this new direction like it's hard as a people please are especially it's really hard and so I had to stand my ground and be like, no, this is the direction I'm going in and so basically how I started was really just becoming a pro at these tools.
And I started my rates a lot lower than other people may have been charging because I'm like, I'm not like a top tier expert yet, but I know that I know a lot more about these products than the people that I'm serving and these software is the people that I'm serving and so I was still able to charge more technically hourly except a lot of our stuff is flat right now.
For example, yeah, I'm making about 30 to 40 bucks an hour as a VA where now I charge $300 an hour for a strategy session like so crazy that jump but now being an expert in this for four years it's really cool to see where we've been able to go. That's worth pausing on like that's the power of niching down and becoming an expert on the thing more with Christie in just a moment including the free marketing channel the drive the majority of quality leads today right after this.
You know the side hustle show is here to help you make more money and one of the fastest ways to improve your bottom line is to play the substitution game. The way it works is you find lower cost alternatives to what you're already spending money on and if you can do it for a recurring expense you just scored yourself some reverse passive income that's the cash you're no longer spending every month.
One of those areas is your wireless provider and that's why I'm excited to partner with mint mobile for this episode. I made the switch to mint mobile back in 2019 and haven't looked back. The mobile offers premium wireless for $15 a month when you purchase a three month plan all plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network.
You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your current phone number and all your existing contacts to get this new customer offer in your new three month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month go to mint mobile.com slash side hustle. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mint mobile.com slash side hustle $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 per month.
New customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan additional taxes fees and restrictions apply see mint mobile for details. When you're hiring it feels amazing to finally close out a job search and hit the ground running with your new hire but what if you could get rid of the search part and just get matched with qualified candidates.
Well now you can with our sponsor indeed it's simple if you need to hire you need indeed the matching and hiring platform is trusted by over three and a half million businesses worldwide to connect with great talent faster and 93% of employers agree that indeed delivers the highest quality matches compared to other jobs.
For my next tire I'm using indeed to tap into a talent pool of 350 million unique monthly visitors and what else is cool is indeed matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences so the more you use it the better it gets and how about this side hustle show listeners get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash side hustle show.
Just go to indeed.com slash side hustle show right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com slash side hustle show terms and conditions apply need to hire you need indeed.
So yeah so I basically just started you know with the power of social media it's really cool how I also my background is in math and I was going to be a math teacher and so I love educating very passionate about education so basically on my marketing channels I just started educating about these tools.
I didn't have to go on and be like by my consulting services let me do a click up built for you all I had to do was start proving that I knew a lot about these softwares and then people would trust me and be like okay I just learned five things for me by scrolling on your Instagram now can you just do this thing for me and so I started out with a lot of like solo
preneurs and smaller businesses setting up their click ups getting a lot of experience and then eventually it just started getting to bigger and bigger and bigger agencies and companies. There's almost a built in demand is you open up notion you open up a son are you open up click up and it's like I know this is going to be super powerful but it's kind of like blank and I know to do with this.
And so then you naturally go to YouTube or like how to set this up for a content business how to set this up for an agency business and you might find educational content like Christie's so it sounds like that was the initial play there where we just kind of do tutorial demo type of content.
Do you have an example of something that hit early on yeah so actually we decided to launch a YouTube channel that was a huge turning point for DL because YouTube is obviously long form video content and people are extremely problem aware. Like they're like how do I do this with click up how do I do this with honey buck and so our first YouTube video that ever took off it's still one of our highest ranking is five click up dashboards that will change your business.
It was cool to see like as the first few videos were like here's how we can help you what's the difference between a CRM and a project management tool. You know beginners guide to honey buck and click up which those do still do well as well. But then the more specific we started to get with it like OK these five click up dashboards that will change your business even ones like specific click up automations or how to create a content calendar and click up or things like that.
How to run your agency and honey book those are things that perform really well because people are searching for that exact thing. Yeah and once they find you this person is you know the answer to my exact search query they're the answer to my prayers and so they watch the thing you build trust and eventually they come and hire you say well you're kind of give it them the do it yourself version.
But then maybe it's still complicated enough where maybe it's worthwhile to just hire a Christian or team yeah 100% and it's so funny. We get the majority of our leads from YouTube and I will say like probably 80% of the time people come on they're like oh my gosh it's so nice to meet you I've been subscribed to your channels for like two or three years and they feel like they already know me even though I have no idea who they are yet.
I it's funny because it's a huge thing in sales is that like no like and trust factor and we're in soft that piece before we even ever get on a sales call. Yeah so you know you're showing your face your voice it yeah you build a lot of trust that way. I'm deciding what type of content to make any sort of like keyword research tools or search volume that goes into it I'm just looking at like broad Google searches you 400,000 monthly searches for click up and then 60,000 for honey book.
And so there's some decent like top level search volume but then I imagine it kind of. Goes into that long tail for like how to run your agency in honey book like more specific type of searches we actually really love that I can. We were using to buddy for a while and then we started getting into that I can they have some really cool things with like AI and their platform is a bit more robust I feel.
And so we look at our channel and we do quarterly content planning we do yearly at a high level and then we do quarterly and we try to do like themed content like themed months and now we're starting to get into like different series. And we'll look at what performed best on our channels are like what's ranking highest like for example.
Or click up dashboards video was ranking highest for like a long time are how to use honey book and click up like yearly videos like in 2024 those always do really well as well so we're like okay we'll always do those in the beginning of the year. But we'll look back at our previous content what's highly ranking knowing people want more of that and then we'll really just start doing long tail keyword research in vid iq you know kind of going down a rabbit hole of like okay.
How are these ranking in terms of search volume and things like that is there a minimum search volume that is interesting to you or worthwhile to make the video about. It's more like how it scores and vid iq I think we're looking over like a 60 or 70 ranking. Which is a combination of volume and competitiveness yeah.
Yeah exactly and so we also speaking of competitiveness will definitely do competitor research as well because we have like a few competitors we're very niche but we absolutely have competitors and so we'll look at their channels what's ranking high on their channels and by no means do we ever just copy their video but will be like okay cool they did something on this specific topic. How can we do something similar but have our own spin and so we'll do that research as well.
No that makes sense yeah and this is you know I probably have talked about this before but I would come up with this content idea and it would be something super broad like you know ways to make money on the internet or something and then of course Google that and well shoot there's already a dozen people have already written this article.
I guess I better go back to the drawing board and come up with another topic no no no that's still viable you can still get traffic and eyeballs and visitors and customers from this you just have to put your own unique spin on you got to make something that's different and better than what's already out there.
And that was a little bit of a shift here and it sounds like the same thing okay we can look at the competitor channels we can see what's working for them and say okay and just trying to reverse engineer that and you know followed.
Yeah the same people doing like a software review or your tutorial type of videos like for fill in the blanks like well I don't use that tool so I can't make that one but I could do the same thing for this app or this software it's like here's a template that clearly worked and kind of fill in the blanks. Exactly we also will absolutely use AI so like chat GPT when we're contemplating will be like we're working on a series for click up for agents is help us grab some like highly.
S.O. ranking topics for these videos and then it'll spit out a bunch of things then we know our ideal client more than anyone so we can guide it in the right direction but we'll also just like use it to ideate and get inspiration from as well is super helpful.
Do you feel the need to publish consistently or is like look we got this stuff out there it's evergreen we got a consistent lead flow or you have to keep kind of feeding the machine right now we feel like it's pertinent to keep feeding the machine. Just so we're like constantly ranking I mean we have some videos that are like upwards of like 40 50 thousand views so those are still bringing up in us like warm leads and like hot traffic.
Yeah but what we're seeing now is that we niched into systems and honey book and click up but we're actually niching a little bit further in the recent months into seven to eight figure agencies.
So we have a lot of really good content out there that serving the broad audience of people looking for click up and honey book how to get started things like that but now we really want to start focusing our content on seven to eight figure agencies and where they're having their specific troubles and hurdles in their business.
Yeah and then relating it to okay you're having this issue then how do we solve that with honey book with click up and so I think that's where we could still be getting leads from YouTube even if we stopped our content right now our content machine but I think we want to start tailoring it more to the ideal client that we want to bring in and so we want to start feeding that machine.
Yeah it would be a different the existing content was to get your business but it's not necessarily the client base or the target customer that you want to be going after going forward from here and that right.
Exactly and that's something we've even been working with our marketing agency that we've been partnered with for like over three years is she's like okay now that we're serving this new market and this new ideal client we have to go deeper like we have a lot of really good like broad topics on our YouTube but now it's time to like.
Dive deeper into it start using more strategies and more verbiage that those agencies will know exactly and what they want like even in terms of marketing instead of being like you know elevate your client experience with honey book it'll be like increase your sales conversion from 30 to 55% by optimizing your client flow and honey book a lot more specific which I feel like agencies will relate to that content more.
Yeah well I know you've got the case studies in testimonials to prove it to exactly but here's here's what we're able to do a couple things that I wanted to highlight there.
Hey you know the best performing videos 40 to 50,000 views we did an episode on like YouTube automation and AI is like you really had to hit the viral lottery where like hundreds of thousands or millions of views to make this pay for itself and the whole model was like you know I recognize that a lot of these aren't going to hit but the one or two that does it's going to
pay for all the production costs on everything else and it's still going to turn a profit you don't need to go viral in this case because the traffic is so well qualified nobody's going to watch how to run your agency and honey book if they're not try to figure out how to run their agency and honey book is like it's like it's a completely different YouTube ballgame where you know very very well qualified viewership the second thing that that stood out was OK we're now we want to reach down to these seven eight figure agencies obviously they're bringing in tons of revenue.
So they have more hopefully disposable income to spend on a service like to sell the life and also as you get better at serving those like the same issues and problems probably crop up over and over again so it almost I imagine it becomes faster to deliver the service then it would if you're serving you know every type of different business customer or small business solo per newer type of person so it's like not only command better rates but you can deliver it faster so the margins improve.
But I want to talk about this is transition or any specific scripting or language that you found effective to transition from viewer to customer like hey we just help you learn how to do this if you want to set up a free consulting call like what's the what's the progression from you know a viewer to lead to a prospect to a customer.
We have a lot of different offers in our offer suite. We have our you know one-on-one consulting services which is obviously like the highest top tier all the way down to you know courses then we have products and templates and then we have like freebies on demand webinars things like that so what we have been doing in the past and I'll be honest about what we're kind of testing and trialing now is we were told that we should always have like kind of this.
YouTube like North star of a call to action like every video you're sending them towards a specific call to action so for a while we were always just promoting our on demand webinar because then through that you know the evergreen funnel then we could be funneling them down to our courses but now with this new ITA we're really just focusing more on that call to action being like OK
so I hope that video is helpful and you learned a little bit about how to manage your important employees and freelancers and click up we've helped hundreds of agencies do this and optimize their agency operations so if you're ready to do that let's grab a call and talk about how we can help you and so it's more
so like opening the door and then in our description we have like contact us here to work one on one and then we also have like free resources and things to get them on our email list as well so we're pointing them to the description so that if they're ready to like book a call with us they can but we definitely want to get them opted into our free resources as well to get them on our list and continue to nurture them OK so one quick definition ITA is ideal target audience OK
OK initially it was like hey let's go go check out this evergreen webinar and follow whatever you know choose your own webinar structure that leads to clients and sales but now there's a shift to you know maybe maybe our ideal target audience don't want to watch an hour long webinar they just want to get get cut to the chase like can you help me or not and so now you can book a call directly or you can you download the lead magnet opt in what
are the effective the magnets for you today we're going through currently like a revamp of our website and everything like that and so we'll probably be shifting those down a little bit but we have our free webinars both for click up and honey book and then we have a serum toolkit for honey book and then we have the click up 101 guide and our symbol click up system which is a free click up template
over time since we've had these rubies out for a while I think our click up 101 guide is still the highest ranking but our simple click up system because it's a free template is definitely probably getting the most traction on a monthly basis OK and it sounds like you know if they're you know a million or $10 million agency the simple system may not be applicable it may
be a hundred percent yeah so that's where this new niche and you know target audience we're going towards we really have to evaluate everything and be like OK maybe they don't need that maybe they need like a team handbook or something different that's like pointing them in the direction of click up and the whole thing is with this it gets very strategic because we don't want to overwhelm them but their systems what we figured is simple systems are great for smaller businesses solar
preneurs etc but agencies these like seven to eight figure agencies they need something that's robust but easy to use and so that's a very fine line that we're walking of like how do we not overwhelm them with you could do this and you can do this and you can do this and be like but we'll guide you in the direction it shouldn't feel hard it should be too adopt do you find that customers are coming in with a project management system or a CRM like already in place like are they
are they using these tools and they're like I there's got to be a better way or they like help us help us get organized you know the business is growing so fast we got to figure out a better systemized way to manage everything I would say about seventy five percent of our clients are already on the system so they're on honey buck on click up they come to us and they say my systems are now the bottleneck I know that I want to grow in scale as company but the
systems are going to break a lot of people to are like they haven't broken yet but they're going to soon as we continue to expand so can you help us make them scalable and then about twenty five percent of people come in and they say you know we're doing everything on Google sheets or email or
slack or whatever it is and we're ready to commit to click up our honey buck and we want to pro to help us set it up in the right ways we're not going to go right through it got it in the case of the lead magnet freebies to click up one on one guy the simple templates what is the email
sequence look like after somebody opposite for that yeah so then we'll put them through our welcome email sequence which basically introduces them to our offers and our stock of services so I think it's about six or seven emails it goes through you know who
is it going to be a live then it goes through you know if you're interested in click up here resources if you're interested in honey buck here resources and then at the very end it goes through okay how does it look like for us to support you is it through our free
content and subscribing to our YouTube channel is it through joining our system school and going through the DIY course or are you going to do everything for you and so that's kind of a journey that they go through now I think in the future as we're kind of fine tuning all of these freebies and sales funnels will probably have certain freebies go towards like promoting the course and templates and certain freebies potentially then promoting like let's get on a sales call type of thing
and you ever lose sleep over what happens when click up goes away and you built this whole reputation and this content library around this and then whatever reason the company gets bought the tool gets shut down I don't know I can see that being the counterpoint to be like well I don't want to marry myself to this one tool because what happens if it doesn't exist anymore actually love this question Nick because we get it all the time and even my husband has asked me
this question in the past like are we making the right decision by just like niching into one specific thing and it's actually not about the tool itself and the software it's about the system and the framework that we've created to set up the workflows in this specific tool so we actually have a framework that we've developed over the last four years that if click up shut down today we could take all of that and implement a brand new tool
now what to take a lot of time to energy and probably tears yes but my job wouldn't be obsolete like I have all of that information that we can just easily implement in a new tool. Okay that makes sense well I guess the solution is the same but the tool that you use to implement it may be different and you can apply the same workflows to something else. Yes a painful transition period but it doesn't have to be like well I guess I guess that's it it's game over.
Exactly. Anything else on the YouTube front here from driving traffic and views to generating leads and customers anything else that we missed? Something that is super important about these is you want to know where you're leading these people and you want to have that idea of where they're going and how to capture them.
So this is where systems come into play of having yourself organized in the back end because if you start taking off on YouTube even if you have like a small following which we still have I think only about like 6000 subscribers but it's a very strong community of people that are very interested in just what we have. You want to make sure that you have a place to capture those leads and nurture them and direct them in a specific direction.
So I would say just making sure like for example we use active campaign to store all of our leads in terms of like freebies and welcome email sequence and nurturing and then we use honey book as our CRM for people that are like I'm ready to hop on a sales call with you. I know that you're the person that can help me implement this tool and so then we have a place for them to go book a call submit their information.
So I think that's a huge key piece is like a lot of people when you're just getting started with a new marketing marketing channel you're so focused on what is that process look like and how am I going to make that content go viral into all these things. But you want to make sure that your back end is actually set up to gather those contacts nurture them and then handle that growth when it comes.
Right, if you don't need to go viral, you get 100 well qualified people watching this thing certain percentage of people going to reach out by having that consistent called action and having something in place to guide those prospects into being customers is got to be thought through like from this is a week point.
I like making YouTube videos I like making that content but at the end of the video is like subscribe for more money making ideas like there's not like there's not a you know really concerted effort like go check out the evergreen webinar on how to you know 10x your side hustle or something.
But being upfront and introducing yourself hey we are consultant specialists on this topic and today we're going to cover you know xyz and then at the end you can also say hey you want to learn more go download the template you want to learn more hey let's book a call. Just being consistent with whatever the status if you need to be hit in the head with the same message five six seven times before they're like I should really take up on that and you know go what step deeper.
You always want to have a call to action on top of being like like and subscribe put on your alerts like 100% we say that like 2 to 3 times a video but on top of that at the very end it's like what are their next steps people need to be guided in the right direction. And so even if that is a you know if you want help in blending this in a custom way and you're ready to xyz the like to book a call of us is in the description.
Gotcha and that goes through honey book to schedule that stuff yeah more with Christie in just a moment including the other marketing channels that are driving sales and the different pieces of the disilva life revenue pie right after this. You mentioned going back to the Facebook well for potential clients this is like groups of business owners this is groups specific to the software tools what's going on there.
Yeah so right now it's specific to the software tools so what we just started implementing again is going back into the click uppers Facebook group and going and just answering people's questions no call to action like hey book a call with me it's literally just me going in there I'm looking at their question I'm creating a 60 second
Lume video that solves their problem and they're getting to know me as that person solving their problem and so you know we literally just started this last week again and we've already had two people reach out and be like hey can I grab a one-on-one call if you do you do this like in a custom way. Yeah it's crazy to see how it works where if you go in with the mindset of like I'm just going to go help people and build that connection with them you see that returned right away.
And it's interesting because it's like yes I'm answering is one person's question and it feels like it's really worthwhile to take the time to do that but everybody else at the group has the same access the ability to see that answer and it's like it seems like it's one-to-one but it's really one to many and even if it's not the original poster that as a reaching out it's like I saw your answer you know so I think that one potentially more scalable than it initially seems.
And that is actually what happened with one of the two people that reached out someone messaged me I had a message request and they were like hey I saw your Lume video in the ClickUpers group. Do you do this in a custom way we're looking for someone to optimize our ClickUp? This person was not the person that asked that question and they just watched my Lume video and the thing is too is what I found in the ClickUpers group giving away my little secret here.
So I went in there and realized that everyone you can absolutely see people promoting their services which people should be. But in the responses to someone's question everyone is giving written or screenshot feedback and like how can I be different and go the extra mile I'm going to record a 60 second Lume video. And I've already seen that pay off because I'm a visual learner especially with things like software is like I need to see someone do it.
Yeah. For some reason like the text like doesn't translate to my brain as quickly and so I'm like let's see if this works and so far it's been working. So far so good. We've got YouTube, we've got the Facebook and then you mentioned Instagram as well. It looks like we're a little over 5,000 followers on Instagram. So this is interesting where I think of Instagram as like pretty pictures or kind of like a day in the life type of stuff.
But it's like similar educational content over here. What's going what's working over there? We have been doing Instagram since day one all the way back from the VA days and it still really works for us.
So Instagram I feel like is one of the tools that to be honest is the hardest to scale because I feel like they're always changing the algorithm and like oh you need to post reels then everyone starts posting reels and they're like actually we're doing carousels again like post carousels and so you have to kind of be in with the trends. But also at the same time like if you do something that you're known for you can keep doing that and just like it's going to work.
And so with Instagram what I've been doing is just obviously educating and doing reels and carousels on different features of click up and honey book and as I mentioned going more into the agency route as well. But then we also have you know fun things that that shows my personality or teams personality and goes through our personal journey of scaling our agency as well.
So I think that will also really resonate with our ideal client of like we've been able to scale our agency and here's how we run our agency with these systems and here's how you can do it to.
Okay got it we got an example is like four things to automate and click up is the is the carousel post and there's no call to action in the graphics themselves call to action is in the caption is in the description drop a comment below or shoot me at DM if you're ready to take your efficiency to the next level let's chat about how we can make click up or harder for you.
And so for anybody who comments is there like a manual outreach somebody on your team is trying to engage with these people what does that look like. Yeah so most of our call to actions for Instagram are using many chat which is like amazing I love this tool where you can comment a keyword and then you can it can reply back so that definitely boost the engagement on our Instagram.
So at least once a week will have the carousel or caption or whatever say you know comment teamwork and we'll send you this week's YouTube video so then many chat will go ahead and be like thanks for commenting teamwork. If you want to dive deeper into this topic here's this week's YouTube video and it'll send them to them via DM got it so that's your many chat but definitely when there are ones that are like if you're ready to take it to the next level.
Those will then they'll comment and then I'll reach out and then be like hey what are you struggling with let's chat about it how can we help you tell me a little bit more about your company so I would say probably 90% of the call to actions are responded through many chat automatically and then after that the other 10% would be me manually and then another thing I'm considering with many chat to is having kind of like a follow up sequence.
Maybe like a couple days later like hey did you check out the resource do you have any questions and then kind of opening up that conversation again. Yeah that's a cool way to do it without without having to go in and reply to everybody manually. One thing that I think is interesting about Instagram today is you and it could be good or bad depending on your perspective but they seem to if your target audience is people who are going to do it.
And then the next is people who are interested in productivity and systems they don't need to be following you to get served up your content anymore if it is been proven to be engaging to you maybe a small subset of your followers.
Instagram can push it out into the feed of other people it thinks are going to engage with it and I think that's interesting for a small account to be able to grow your reach in that way and it's in half probably two thirds of my feed is like stuff that people I don't follow but it's like. Well, I think I'll be paying this is interesting yeah stop stop stop get out of here.
I did not subscribe to this right right I guess it gives hope to people with small followings in that yeah you don't necessarily need that early on if you can create engaging content on a specific topic people you know the algorithm will tend to push that.
And even like talk about small following like that is all vanity metrics you could have a hundred thousand dollars and be making like no money per month if it's all just vanity metrics and you're not pointing people in the right direction like you want to know how your content is converting where these people are coming from.
And like where it's worth your time and effort even in my case my money because we're actually paying people to keep these systems in these marketing channels running don't get caught up in the small following thing because you could consider me having a small falling of 5,000 on Instagram about like 6000 subscribers on YouTube do I wish I had a hundred thousand yeah totally but if I was still making the same amount of money and I'm not nurturing them it doesn't matter at the end of the day.
On the revenue side obviously got the done for you consulting the high ticket you know it just hand over the keys will build it's all for you and the prices are public on the silver life dot com I think is interesting just because you know always there's a comment to be like we'll book a book a consultation and you know I was like well shoot if I have to ask I probably can't afford it so I like that it's up front and just going to pre-qualifies people in a way where it's like I'm not even going to get on the call if I like if I can't afford that.
But if you look at that and say yeah that's worth it to not have to do it myself sure I think that's interesting you've got some like digital product template stuff that's for sale and then there's like an online course and you me a sense of the revenue pie like the breakdown between these different different offerings it gets a little like crazy because we have different services and offers and then we have two totally separate
software's and so we have our click up services and we have our honeywax services then it breaks down for each of these we have consulting one on one services which are the highest ticket then we have our courses and our templates.
So our click up consulting is about I would say like 30% our honey book consulting revenue like one on one is about 30% our courses and templates are about 30% and then that other 10% is things like affiliate revenue guest speaking's partnerships things like that so it's a pretty even split between honey book and click up consulting that's being the biggest driver and revenue generation then our courses and templates and then we have those kind of like other categories.
Okay, I think you're able to get reseller rights for affiliate partnerships with the software themselves or there's other tools that you're recommending to customers.
Yeah, so we have our highest affiliate driver right now is honey book they have an amazing referral program we can get up to like a $300 payout for different people that sign up and then we have a affiliate partnership with click up as well and then other tools we recommend to but that's like a much lower revenue generator obviously because a lot of our affiliate revenue also comes from YouTube which is completely passive which is awesome.
Yeah, and I guess that you know if the majority of your clients are already using these tools this is a little bit higher in the funnel so to speak where you know maybe it's broad level honey book tutorial it's honey book versus competitor a honey book versus competitor be like people
who are trying to figure out is this even right for me and if it is a sign up through our referral link exactly what's a day in the life like you know sounds like a lot of one-on-one consulting a lot of client relationships mention having a team like how much is it you doing this stuff. I'm obviously a very organized person I'm an avid time blocker so every day kind of has a life of its own but my week is themed into time blocks.
So Tuesday Thursday are primarily call days like client call days and so on those client call days I could have upwards of like seven eight calls in one day just like the whole day stacked and those could be a mix of sales calls you know kick off calls training calls checking calls one-on-one consultations and strategy sessions.
So those are about the mix and it could be for click up or honey book I don't really theme those days in terms of like okay Tuesdays is just click up calls just honey book but I do section chunks of like okay from 10 to 12 will be just sales calls and then from one to five will be just client calls whether it's a check in or a kick off or something like that.
Okay other days like Wednesdays are my days where I do like deep work for clients and then Monday Fridays are really dedicated to team so we have team calls we're working on team initiatives are quarterly initiatives for marketing and building our business launching a new product things like that so does that answer your question.
That's helpful to hear that some of it is passive you know client flow is relatively automated relatively hands off but yeah there's a lot of hours to go into making this machine run yeah 100% especially right now and so we are an agency but I'm still heavily involved in certain aspects of certain projects like some services are really agency
and I need to spend maybe like one or two hours total and then other ones I'm still more directly involved as we continue to grow those offerings and get me out of the driver's seat. Do you find the expert trap where customers see your face on the YouTube videos they see you on Instagram they expect it to be you and you say well I'm the CEO here I'm the boss I got I got I trained my people to do that.
I trained my people to take a list for you. Do you get any pushback on that all the time so not really from current clients because and now let me say this to for the honey book side it was really easy to agency and stream line that service because I'm not an expert copywriter I'm not an expert designer and those are two huge things that come into these honey book and client flow builds. So immediately when I brought in the team on that and we kind of made that agency stream line.
So I'm going to do the strategy and map out your client flow then we have an amazing team behind us that's going to do the rest and make it all come to life and they're like awesome cool. So I was immediately able to actually deliver a better product after making that service agency.
So I'm going to do the first step one is a little bit harder because it's so technical it's like my brainchild in a way but again that really comes down to our clients they think they want me but they want my brain they want my framework. And so that's what we translate to our clients and as long as you translate that from the beginning of like I'm still involved in this project right now anyway I'm still involved in this project and we're going to take care of you.
But here are the other two key players in this and then you start having them answering questions and serving the clients they all the sudden are like okay everyone can help me here doesn't matter who's helping me I know I'm going to get helped. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean from the business industry and point of course the big sense from the client perspective it's like well well well you know I thought I was working with Christie and so it's trying to make it.
Yeah, try and get yourself out of certain roles to create more content to think higher level strategy to do all this other stuff. We get asked that on sales calls all the time we're like okay so who am I going to be working with is it you and I'm like I will be leading the project but you'll also be working with our amazing team and I'll need them and talk about their roles.
So right now yes I'll give them that comfort of I'm still involved eventually I won't be but again it shouldn't be an issue because it's going to be like we've created this framework that works for hundreds of agencies now we're just giving you the key. And especially if you're serving agency clients they got to understand hey this isn't a solo operation either.
Yeah. Well it's to silver life dot com will link up the YouTube channel as well will link up Instagram as well what's next for you where do you want to take this thing next for us is I talked a lot about you know like our own agency is really day by day getting me more and more out of the driver's seat.
And we're really working on building our offer suite we have some solid offers now but we're actually launching a new offer that we're super excited about called the click up agency accelerator so that's going into beta in the next month or so. And the more we get our agency growing then I'm going to be able to have more time to dedicate to marketing and creating more educational content and stuff like that so I'm excited for that.
Alright building out the office we getting out of kind of the client fulfillment stuff to focus on a higher level stuff exactly. Yep that's the goal cool Christie there's been awesome I'm taking a ton of notes lots of resources mention that we can link up in the show notes as well let's wrap this thing up with you number one tip for side hustle nation.
I want to kind of share my mantra that I have a stuck with for these past four years it was in the beginning of taking that initial leap and then I carry this through with me on the hard days on the good days in these pivotal moments of feeling like oh my gosh how am I going to get through this exact barrier in front of me you always think like well what if it doesn't work well you know I got into this point but what if I can't go any farther but I've been able to reframe that.
And every time I think what if it doesn't work I then think but what if it does what is on the other side of that what is that dream life look like what is it look growing this business being able to serve more people and support these amazing team members and so if you're having one of those moments like we all do. Just think what if it does work and that's what really keeps me going.
The important addition to that because I love that we tend to focus a lot on the failure side well what if it doesn't work like I'm going to have to you know go sleep on a French couch and I'm going to have to go get another job what if it doesn't work like it's natural to focus on like the downside right if you minimize that downside risk you like OK worst case scenario is not going to be life threatening what if it does work and is that going to be a win like if I project out three five years down the road am I going to be materially better off am I going to be.
And a better place personally financially what if it does work I think it's really important to ask and we tend to focus on the other negative side a little too much so look at the upside as well I make sure that you're setting yourself up for those wins. We had no a Kagan on the show one of his criteria was like could this be a million dollar business if not why I'm even looking at it why am I why is it even on the on the option list here.
So that's the number one tip what if it does work take a ways from me obviously we're talking about following the demand lots of search volume around these particular software tools could you find something that your relative expert in could you become an expert in the thing and build that library of educational content help people out on that and have that consistent call to action doesn't take a huge following I think that's probably the inspirational party because anybody who's watching this is going to be pretty well qualified lead.
You knit yourself down and become that expert you take inspiration from what's working in terms of competitors content put your own unique spin on it lots of inspiring stuff if you're new to the show you're wondering what to listen to next I want to invite you to build a personalized playlist of the side hustle show episodes most relevant to you in your specific situation and goals all you got to do is go to hustle that show answer a few short multiple choice questions you do it on your phone.
The little quiz will spit back out the school curated playlist based on your answers that you can add to your device you learn what works go out and make some more money that's hustle that show we mentioned Abby Ashley on the podcast previously will link up her episodes and Paul miners another example doing this with a sauna and pipe drive very similar type of businesses hey I'm an a sauna consultant and today we're going to learn how to blah blah blah fantastic model feel free to blatantly rip this off and apply this to whatever tool right like it is the template is here.
You know it is for you to run with so big thanks to Christie for sharing her insight big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone you can get upside hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show that is it for me thank you so much for tuning in if you find in value in the show the greatest compliment is to share with a friend so fire off that text message hey you should totally do this for you know fill in the blank software tool.
Until next time let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on.