Here are 10 side hustle trends for 2025. What's up? What's up? Nick Oloper here. Welcome to the side hustle show because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. Today, we're tackling some side hustle trends that you should be aware of because they might impact what business you start and how you think about scaling it.
And to help me out with these is a longtime friend and friend of the show. He's been covering online side hustles even longer than I have from nichepursuits.com. Spencer Hans, welcome back to the Side Hustle Show. Nick, it's great to be here. Longtime listener, follower of the show. And of course, we've connected a couple of times in person. It's always fun to talk about side hustles.
niche projects, if you will. So yeah, really excited to jump in. Yes, a couple old timers here. We'll go for it. So almost all of our content starts from the question, how do I make extra money? And to answer that, I think it's important to know. where the market's been, where it is today, and maybe where you see it potentially going. So that's our goal for today, 10 or maybe more. We'll see what happens as we get going. 10 observations from a couple, like we said, a couple of old guys.
that you can use hopefully to make some more money this year. And trend number one that I want to bring up is for the last year and a half or so ever since this helpful content update is what I'm going to call the shrinking SEO landscape. Rand Fishkin has called it zero-click publishing, but just in the search results.
You see more AI answers, AI snippets. You see more Reddit. You see more user-generated content. You see these huge image... card blocks like side hustle nation used to rank for a lot of like listicle type of content but now like this huge chunk of the page is getting like well we'll just parse out all the items on your list and put a little image by it like well
It pushes everything else lower down on the page. What are you seeing with niche pursuits? What are you seeing with publishers trying to combat? piece of the pie plus user behavior changing like i know from my own personal experience like i find myself using chat gpt as a search engine or as an answer engine rather yeah more often than google these days
Yeah, quickly changing landscape. A lot is going on in the SEO world. I think you hit on that sort of the zero click landscape that we're entering in. I've seen a lot of publishers. that, yeah, their answers are being taken by those AI overviews that Google is putting out. Not only has there been a lot of
updates, right? You mentioned the helpful content update, but a lot of Google core updates that feel like a lot of small publishers have been impacted heavily with, right? But even some large publishers I've talked with. privately with that their rankings in Google haven't changed. Like they still rank number one for the term or number two for the term, right? That they originally ranked for. But because there's now this AI overview.
they don't get as many clicks, right? So the rankings technically haven't changed. They still are the number one organic result for whatever, but they're getting less clicks because people now just read that. AI overview, right? And so there's that, that Google has changed. And then the other thing, I'm in the same boat with you, and I think a lot of people are.
Like I am starting to use chat GPT a lot more, right? Because it remembers what I searched previously. Like I'll say, hey, I'm starting a little side hustle on this. And then I might ask it a series of questions like, what do I need to get started? And then I might ask later. What products should I buy to help me with that, right? And it's just like this ongoing thing that you don't really do on Google very well. You'd have to type out like two paragraphs.
to do it, ChatGPT just remembers your... Yeah, you can provide it a lot more context, a lot more detail. We're like, hey, we're visiting Japan with two boys. They're seven and nine. What do you recommend for this two-week itinerary? And it spits out this detailed day-by-day thing.
where it's like ah you know but it's it's frustrating from the content creator perspective because somebody had to create that for it to crawl and it's like well where are they if they're business model was monetizing with ad revenue or affiliate clicks like where are they left and what's the incentive to keep creating this content for the ai to chew on like where does it yeah where does it go like
For a time, and I'm still a little bit torn, like there's still got to be some value in being a primary source, like scooping a story, you know, providing... firsthand experience and review content, but if it ends up just getting aggregated and scraped and re-summarized, it's like, well, I don't know. Why are we doing this? It's extremely frustrating, right, to the content creator because you're exactly right. Somebody had to create all those different itineraries to Japan, right?
ChatGPT had to learn on, right? So we as publishers over the last, you know, however long you've been publishing, have been creating and researching. And a lot of people have been traveling to these locations and taking pictures. And, you know, travel bloggers in particular have been hit really hard. Food bloggers in particular have been hit really hard, right, where AI can now just spit out the recipe for you. That's that sort of thing. And so where does that leave?
Publishers, I don't know the right answer going forward other than we're in this really big shift, this big transition phase of, boy, you either need to provide really unique content. or like you said, maybe scooping truly groundbreaking stories, or your writing is just so fascinating that you can build an audience, you have an email list.
People truly following you for your personality or for your writing abilities or for whatever it is that makes you unique. So building an audience is just becoming. right? Because if you're just there for that transactional query, and you were making money with ads in the past, that may be not a very strong business going forward. Yeah, it's a challenging, a changing landscape. And maybe that brings us... to trend number two in light of the SEO challenges or the search traffic challenges.
Like I'm still, you know, maybe this is old school, but like, I still think you ought to have a website as your home base, something you truly do own and control. But we've seen the shift towards what we might call social first audience building or social first publishing where I'm going to go out.
instagram tiktok youtube linkedin twitter and like try and bring people back into my world or try and go where you know go where my audience already is and try and create content build up reputation authority on whatever topic it is on these other platforms
you know question mark question question mark step three monetize a profit right it's like it's not it's not as simple as it was you know just pasting in uh an adsense or a media vine script and saying well now i get page views so i got i got revenue right Yeah, exactly right. For a long time in particular, as you know, we talk about bloggers and blogging a lot, right? The model was like, okay, get this organic traffic from Google. And now that pie is shrinking, I think.
A lot of content creators are trying to get that organic traffic, right? To avoid having to do paid media, but they're doing it, like you said, Instagram, TikTok. Twitter, LinkedIn, pick your platform. YouTube is a big one. And then what are they doing with that audience? It all just depends.
one arrow in your quiver of like, okay, what's the organic reach that I can get? Where am I publishing my content? Pick a platform, whatever it is, Instagram, YouTube. Yeah, and I would probably say pick one to start with. Study it, learn it, own it, and go deep. Simplify first, diversify second. But then do lead them to a website or to an email list or some central hub where you interact with your audience.
on a more intimate level. A lot of businesses do that well and It's just, I used to say, hey, go to Google and get that organic reach, but maybe, yeah, it is more a social. I think that I'm seeing that a lot. Yeah, I think it's going to lead to more thoughtful or more creative monetization strategies. where it's like if the game plan was to just... you know, blanket the web, like trying to target.
you know long tail search queries you're gonna have to have a more in-depth knowledge base around that topic to be able to monetize with a coaching or consulting program, like somebody's specific, probably going to have to go up market in a way if the bottom end of that information-based search traffic is just going to get eaten by AI. And, you know, one other thing for people to consider that I'm seeing is video first content.
is a bigger moat, right? It's gaining in a lot of popularity. The platforms TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, right, are probably... If you're willing and able to get in front of the camera, create great videos, whether it's shorts or long form videos. that is going to have a little bit bigger moat than if you're just to do written content because AI...
can spit out written content all day long, but it hasn't quite gotten to the place where it can replicate you and I quite as well. There's still a moat there. If you can do video first content, I think you can build an audience fast. Okay, that makes sense. You played around with any AI-assisted video? Like, are you doing any Hey Jen, Spencer, where it's like your little avatar talking on the screen?
I haven't gone as far as, you know, my avatar so much. AI B-roll, you know, elements that I can add to my videos, done some things like that. Or other sort of silly B-roll. I had some B-roll on a YouTube video recently where I was talking to an artificial intelligence. you know, person, it was quite obvious that they were not real. It was sort of like an inside B roll joke or whatever, but.
So played around, but not like made it a main portion of my videos at this point. Yeah, video first, social first. create that bigger moat where if you have that firsthand experience like and it's you on camera you're building that relationship and trust that is a much deeper relationship and same thing with podcasting like hard to build an audience but once you have people paying attention like really really valuable audience especially if they're gonna spend
45 minutes a week with you in their earbuds, right? You build that relationship much more powerfully than somebody You know, Googling something and like skimming a blog post for, you know, 90 seconds and then they're on to the next thing. Yep, exactly. The next one on my list, it kind of relates to this.
video first and maybe we could call it you know short form video is eating everything like the tick tock vacation of of the planet but the one that comes to mind is the It's kind of like the fall of the follower and the rise of the algorithm where it... no longer matter like i'll give you the example of like if i log into facebook or instagram or any of these platforms like half of the stuff in my feed is from accounts that i don't follow have never followed have no relationship with
but it's stuff that the algorithm thinks I will like and it does a pretty good job of that because like it's for me it's like a lot of data visualization and maps.
or baseball statistics because it knows it knows i'm gonna stop and like try and figure this out like what is this thing trying to show me or on instagram it's like a lot of like ski videos like oh watch this guy go over some crazy jump like you have to watch the landing to see if he makes it yeah and they know it's going to stop the scroll even though i like i don't follow any of these accounts it's like it's just a weird thing so
The good news is, if you're a new creator, if you create something that's compelling, you have the chance to punch above your weight class and get seen by more than your three followers. The drawback is if you have a bit of a following, you still have to play the algorithm's game. And, you know, unless...
It's really compelling. Even the people who do follow you probably not going to see your stuff. Yeah, exactly. You know, on YouTube, we've always accepted this. When you go to your YouTube homepage, you expect to get recommended videos, right? most of the videos you're seeing in your recommendations are not channels that you've subscribed to, right? From day one, we've always just sort of accepted this. on YouTube, but you're exactly right. It's creeped into Facebook, Instagram, other platforms.
Where you go through, you're not seeing your friend's posts anymore. You're seeing, you know, whatever. sort of interest the algorithm has assigned to you. And so, you know, hey, good for their business, I guess. It's maybe increasing engagement. But you're exactly right that I have seen like some really small Facebook pages, for example. that they can have something go absolutely viral. They only have 10,000 followers, but one of their posts gets like 10 million views.
Right. Just because for whatever reason, it's triggered this algorithm and it can get in front of a really, really large audience. So there's a lot of opportunity there. If you can kind of figure out what types of content. work really well. And you can kind of game the algorithms a little bit on these platforms. But as a user, we may or may not love this situation, right? People call it brain rot. We've got a lot of brain rot in our feeds.
uh that we gotta we gotta get past so you know it's uh which one wins out there i don't know but then it's like what's the benefit to the creator like okay i got a lot of views but Is, I mean, is Facebook paying these creators like based on...
The views that you played around with their, what do they call it, like their partner program or publishing program or something? Yeah, their performance bonus program is exactly right. And I could talk about this a lot. I don't know if this is like another side hustle, you know, whatever number we're on here. Go for it. Facebook performance bonus program is a really...
interesting program. So think of it, I mean, think of it like the YouTube partner program, right? You know, we all see Mr. Beast videos. He has ads in his videos. The YouTube pays him, you know, ads. revenue, ad revenue. That's exactly what Facebook is doing, that if you get accepted to this performance bonus program and not everyone gets accepted, but I do happen to have a Facebook page that is accepted so I can talk.
intelligently about this program, that once you're accepted, you get paid based on essentially views and interaction. of your posts, right? So if you do have something that goes viral, gets a million views, gets a ton of comments, gets a bunch of thumbs up, you will make more money. And so I have a particular page that my best month ever was just over $5,000, and that was about two months ago. On average now, it's doing $3,500 to $4,000 a month. And it's just a very obscure, random...
topic that isn't popular. It's not like mainstream news or anything. It's more like nostalgic type stuff. Like, hey, remember the 80s when this happened? That's not really what my page is, but... Kind of in that vein, right? Nostalgic stuff. Okay. So I get some of that stuff too. Like here's, you know, here was the Billboard, you know, top 12 modern rock chart from 1994. And you're like...
I remember those songs. Exactly. Stuff kind of like that. Remember this, you know? Okay, okay. And it might be an image of something that was, you know, from 20 years ago or 30 years ago or whatever. Yeah, I remember like blowing into the Nintendo cartridge. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Is this something that someone on your team is sourcing this type of material, like coming up with this on a consistent basis? Yes. it is. I've, you know, I managed it from the beginning, but...
Like you, I've got a lot of other things going on. So I found somebody that they run it. They manage the entire process. They source the content, you know, write up the descriptions and interact with the Facebook page. where they are essentially doing everything at this point. I'm just, you know, kind of managing and making sure everything's working well. So it's hardly any of my own time. So I, you know, pay this particular person, you know, VA to run it and manage it.
take whatever profits I get. Yeah. Is it mostly image content, video, like what's working well? Yeah. It's pretty much image content. Yeah. Where we might ask a question about, you know, do you remember this or. you know, did you ever experience this or whatever it is, you know, we'll write something on it. We might put a caption on the image, you know, but yeah, it's, it's image content. We don't do any video content at this point. So.
Okay. That's an interesting one. Yeah. How many views it took to make that $5,000 plus the ramp up period to get there and more side hustle trends with Spencer coming up right after this. Lots of scrappy side hustlers start their business with just their personal phone number. I've been there. I remember checking customer voicemails between classes in college.
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something like that. And I don't remember the first one or two months, but it was under $1,000. But quickly after that, since late last year, call it October, November, it's been making a couple thousand dollars a month. So only two or three months of getting accepted. Now, the page was...
about a year old before that. Okay. Was it one that you started or did you buy it like for the existing base? I had started. I had started this particular page from scratch. Okay. And I was trying to send traffic to my website. you know, to make things go viral, send them to the website, make money from the ads on my website.
It was like maybe making a couple hundred dollars a month. But once I got accepted the performance bonus program, I went all in on, I'm just keeping everybody on Facebook. I'm like. Hardly send them to my website. at all because I'm making a lot more. And so to answer another, I think you asked like, how many views does it take? So my highest viewed month where I made about just over $5,000.
there was 30 million like views or impressions. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Like essentially 30 million people scrolled past our content. Wow. Yeah. You know, at some point. So it's a lot. I mean, things can absolutely blow up. It can add up. Okay. And the page has about 100,000 followers, just so people are aware.
Okay. So yeah, so it's true. All those views have translated into some people clicking and saying, okay, we'll follow you now. Exactly. Okay. Do you have a sense of how often your VA is posting new stuff? We post like 10 to 15 times every day. So it's a lot.
So it's, you know, it's a serious thing. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's two, three hours a day. She's in there, you know, posting images and interacting. All right. Yeah. It's a legit thing until, you know, Facebook ends their performance bonus program and it's all crushed, but. For now, we're putting a lot of effort into it and it's working. Until, yeah, until the rug gets pulled out.
The one that shows up a lot in my feed is Jeff Rose, like good financial sense, like his stuff shows up a lot. Oh, yeah. And he's like trying to trigger people politically. A lot of these, like he just grabs like screenshots of somebody, you know. play both sides like i get the sense it's like completely agnostic i don't really care it's like but i want to spark those engagements spark those reactions and try and get people to uh to click on this i bet i imagine
He's doing pretty well with his bonus program as well. Yep. Yep. No. And that's, that's smart. We do similar things. So go into like your. Nintendo example, right? We might post an image of like nine games and say, pick your favorite if you were stuck inside all day or something, right?
And everybody's like, oh, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, you know, that's the one I want to do. Or, you know, it's stuff kind of like that. So it's fun stuff. Yeah, it's like engagement bait in a way. Engagement bait sometimes. Totally. Oh, this is great. I get people debating. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Okay. I haven't applied to do this. I need to find a VA like yours to come up with this type of content, even if it's side hustle related. That could be an interesting way to grow the page and another.
revenue stream if the page views are going down on the main site. Yeah, absolutely. There's potential there. All right. What's next on the list for you? Let's see. We kind of talked about artificial intelligence kind of showing up everywhere, but there's people that are truly starting like artificial intelligence businesses, right? So call it vibe coding, right? We now have people using these tools. that they're not coders, that they're building software products.
They're building little tools that people are paying for or using, right? And so if you have followed Peter Levels on Twitter, for example, he's built a game using artificial intelligence. It's like a... airline simulator it's a okay like a airplane simulator uh type game that thousands of people can play at the same time so everybody's like doing flight simulators together so you gotta i don't know i haven't played it but you're dodging other planes and
It's just absolutely, you know, blown up. But he built it all with artificial intelligence. He has a large following, so he has been able to get a lot of users very quickly. That's a big part of it is having that built-in audience. And now he has sponsors in the game. that are paying like, hey, we'll sponsor the cloud or we'll sponsor the building, right? And so he posted, but it's, I mean, it's insane numbers. Like it's over $50,000 he's made in this.
it's like less than a month old, right? Wow. And so, but there's lots of other examples now of people that are building tools. and apps and actually selling them or, you know. allowing people to use them all using, you know, cursor.ai as a tool. There's lovable AI. There's all these tools you can use where you basically chat, you know, you chat with the AI.
And it builds the app for you. Yeah. Isn't that nuts? Just like natural language. This is what I want to build. It's crazy. Yeah. We did a whole episode about this with Pete McPherson from Do You Even Blog. He's built out. a handful of these different tools his latest one is like a
you know, an email list gadget, list gadget, I think it's called, but he's got several of these, exited at least one of them. And it was really interesting how he recommended, okay, I want to start off by asking chat GPT, like, hey, I want to build. this big picture, what do I need? And it'll list out like, here's what you need to do. It's like step two, go to cursor, natural language. Here's what I want to build. These are the features of functionality that I want to have.
uh this is what i'm thinking it's like boom boom boom you know it's like now you have a semi-working version and then you ask you know if you ask it to troubleshoot itself and do the qa testing yeah and you know now you got to go figure out The marketing and sales piece is always the challenge of that. And his recommendation was to like...
you know, start with your own pains and problems, scratch your own itch. And like, we call the kind of unbundling of different tools where I may not need the whole feature set of an Ahrefs, for example, but like... If I could do this one little piece of it, okay, maybe that's something that people would be worth paying nine bucks a month for, 19 bucks a month for. Yeah.
Now, it's super fascinating. And I've seen several examples, kind of like you mentioned, of people that are building tools. Maybe they're not even selling them, but they're building tools for their own business. to just make their life a little bit more efficient, like building their own essentially WordPress plugin. Like I want, you know, something to do this on my website or.
fix you know a thousand images you know and i i don't know how to do that i'm not a programmer but i'm smart enough to ask an ai tool how to do that and it spits out code for me right to improve my own business yeah the one that i got all excited about the other night was maybe this could just be like a custom gpt tool is like so ever after every
episode hit stop recording my next step is to look at the transcript and kind of mark up for the editor you know the the questions that didn't really land or where the conversation went off the rails right just to tighten that up a little bit and provide a better listening experience my thought is to build that custom gpt like feed in a bunch of before and afters like here was the original recording here's what made the final cut learn from this maybe upload 10 or 15 of those
And then like, here's the next raw transcription. Like, could you provide some suggestions on what to trim from this episode to tighten it up a little bit and just to see what kind of results? Maybe that would speed up my review process a little bit. Yeah. Now, there's like so many applications of different things that you can do across your entire business.
It's an exciting time, right? But things are changing so fast. But the good news is that like such a small percentage of people out there, even though... Everybody listening may have heard that, hey, I can actually get AI to do some coding for me. Very, very few people. actually take that step to actually build something still. So the opportunity is there. You just still need to be willing to jump in, take a risk, you know, build out your idea and do it.
potentially becoming cheaper to build a software business. And there's still opportunity there, I do think, for the next few years. There's still only going to be a tiny sliver of people that actually take that step and do this. Yeah, this is an interesting one from a software entrepreneur like yourself. Like, oh, if we go back 15 years ago, you know, this long tail pro just take a...
fraction of the development time and effort and cost to to build something uh today probably so yeah yeah exactly if i were to start from scratch you know i'd probably still have to work with a developer but I bet I could get it 50% of the way there.
You know what I mean? Yeah. It would definitely be way cheaper to build something now. I like this idea of building something for your own use and then... maybe with a few tweaks it's almost like white labeling to a different audience like if somebody else of another podcaster wanted to utilize the same you know editing assistant you know maybe they could do that and then
Maybe someday Descript wants to buy that from me and I get a nice little chunk of change for my exit. Yeah, exactly. And so here's another side hustle trend that I'm seeing that's very related, right? So I think we piggyback on this. is creating free tools or free websites that perhaps are generated with AI. or not, right? Either way, but I've been covering on my YouTube channel, I cover a lot of free games or free tools, you know, free calculators.
A lot of these things, like for example, a couple of them are really simple tools like a YouTube thumbnail downloader. All you do is you pop in the YouTube URL and it pulls the thumbnail for you, right? Another tool I covered is you upload an image of yourself. and AI detects the shape of your face. Do you have a round face or an oblong face or an olive face? I didn't even know this thing existed, right? But for example, the face shape.
It's called, oh, what's the website? Anyways, I can't remember the exact website that it's called, but it gets something like two and a half million visitors every month. Wow. That are common. People just, they want to know the shape of their face. This little like face shape quiz thing? Yeah, it's like face shape. AI, you upload an image of yourself and says, oh, you've got an oblong face, congrats. They're just monetized with ads, right? But there's lots of calculators.
Like there's a sleep calculator. A fun one is snowdaycalculator.com. You put in your zip code and it predicts if you're going to have a snow day tomorrow. Like, what are the odds this school is going to be canceled tomorrow, right? Okay. And that gets like 3 million visitors a month during the winter months.
Right. Wow. So there's a lot of these little either free tools or there's lots of games. There's tons of examples of games out there. You could just think of some, you know, silly word game or shape game or. Whatever it is, you make it free, monetize with ads. The thing can be built with AI or simple coding. right? So a lot of these free websites, free tools, a lot of these things I'm still seeing do really, really well.
Do you know the secrets behind what's driving the traffic for the face shape predictor or the snow day predictor or anything like that? Well, like the face shape one does really well in Google. It is getting a lot of organic traffic. And this is something people are searching for? Like here, if I search, what's the shape of my face? I want to get the... Oh, detectfaceshape.com. is the website, right?
Yes, people are searching for this. I was blown away, the keywords. It's hundreds of thousands of searches every month for a bunch of these. So that is a Google Play. The Snow Day Calculator one gets a lot of repeat visitors. Once people... find it they just know hey this is got it i don't know why so many people look at this but
People that want to get out of school, they're, hey. 100% sounds like something my kids would check every morning. Exactly. There's clouds today. Maybe I can get out of school tomorrow. Exactly what they're doing. Yeah, you're like, well, it's 54 degrees, so don't get your hopes up. That's right. It's fun stuff. No, this is cool. This has always kind of been on the back burner. You know, what is kind of the niche? tool or a little calculator.
And maybe with the help of AI, maybe it's a little simple game, one that we talked about after. a recent trip we went to hawaii with the family and we're snorkeling along and You know, my six year old will tell you the story of like, you know, the giant turtle attack is like, of course, the turtle is paying him no mind at all. But like the water was kind of cloudy and it shows up like two feet in front of our face. Oh, yeah. Scary. So he's like.
dude did you see a shark or something you know it's a maybe we can make um like a crossy road style game but it's like turtles and sharks and jellyfish like something where you have to like go across the ocean this way. I like it. You know, maybe there's something, a little browser-based game that you could do based on that. And who knows, maybe people find it. Yeah, absolutely. I honestly think there are thousands of ideas that...
Sometimes the sillier, the better, right? Because they might have chance to go viral. Either create a really great game, right? Or if it's something silly that's fun that people might talk about, you know, it's got the opportunity to be shared a lot and can do well. So lots of opportunity there. Yeah. I saw a Twitter post about this, and I'll see if I can dig it up for the show notes, but it was a bunch of software or little tool ideas.
And it was, you know, sometimes it's something simple, like how to improve images in Word or like, you know, maybe you can kind of piggyback a question based query with. Maybe there's some layer on that you could add to that for a workplace. Maybe if people are swiping the company credit card, they think less about it than pulling out their own money. Maybe there's something there.
And to piggyback on that a little bit, we talked about, hey, Google is changing, organic traffic is searching for a lot of content creators. The one area that I am seeing organic traffic still do really, really well. these games, right? Because when somebody is searching for that particular problem, you know, what is the shape of my face or whatever the query is,
They actually do need to go to that tool or that website to get that information. So that is the one area that if you want to try and get that organic search, you need to be thinking more about tools. actual products or games, something people can go to and actually use and interact with on your website. Okay, very cool. The next one that I have on my list is what I'm calling the death of the online course and the rise of the...
higher touch, higher engagement offer. And I don't know if this is a factor of AI or a factor of just like online course fatigue, where it's like that lower ticket, maybe the hundred to $500 online course is make a really a really difficult place to play in right now, in my opinion. And what we're seeing is a shift towards the
you know, thousand, two thousand, maybe two to ten thousand dollars. Yeah. As much as thirty thousand dollars for like some really high touch. You have a dedicated coach who's going to hold your hand. Maybe there's some. you know, on-site local, you know, retreats or workshops that are included in this, but it's kind of a transition. away from a purely on-demand pre-recorded video-based course to a more
high engagement. Maybe there's a community element to this. Maybe there's live coaching elements. And so if you're thinking about structuring an offer, that's just something to keep in mind for going forward. Yeah. And I think part of that... is that there's so much information for free on YouTube through video content. I think that's part of it, right? Is that, hey, maybe I used to buy a video course for $200 or $500.
But now I can get 90% of the way there just with free content on YouTube. So people are like, eh, if it's just video. Maybe I'm not going to do it, but I do believe that you're exactly right. More and more people are craving in-person type meetups or community-based, you know, where you can interact. either in smaller groups, you know, maybe you have a mastermind that's part of this.
community that you can meet up with on a regular basis, or you get that more high touch, like you said, that that's what I'm seeing. And same with me, you know, I am I'm part of an online community that I paid for for a few years, but I don't pay for the education part of it. It's really just the community part of it. I'm there because I like the people that are in the community.
And, you know, when I have a problem, I have a group of people I know and I trust, I know they're experienced, I can bring up an issue.
And I know I'll get an answer. Yeah, it's community-based. We've seen people shifting from like a on-demand evergreen model to more of a cohort-based if you're going to do the course thing. That's right. It's like, we're all going to go through this together. It has a defined... start date and a defined end date and you know everybody there's no working ahead like we're going to do this uh together like that safety in numbers or strength in community.
I think can work really well. And it makes it probably easier to sell than just something. Well, it's always available. You can buy it tomorrow. You can buy it the next week. Doesn't really matter. It's like, you got to get in because we're starting on Tuesday. Yep, exactly right. Yeah. I think those types of models work well.
Seems to be the trend. That's what I'm seeing. More side hustle trends with Spencer in just a moment, including a seldom talked about publishing channel, Spencer's latest side hustle, and the businesses that AI isn't touching anytime soon. Right after this. Do you say data or data? I think I'm a data guy. And one thing I love about Mint Mobile is I can get all the data I need for one low monthly price.
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We do use Shopify now. A lot of the third-party platforms and stuff just integrate a lot better with Shopify. It has made a huge difference in our ability to be more flexible on our site. That was Randall Pulfer from episode 661, and he's just one of many side hustle show guests who rely on Shopify to power their online sales. One of the things I think is really cool about Shopify is ShopPay, which basically...
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Go to shopify.com slash side hustle to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash side hustle. One other trend that I found... interesting or maybe maybe this has been going on forever and i was just like playing in the organic sandbox too much but like you know more and more entrepreneurs incorporating paid media paid traffic paid acquisition strategies and really trying to break down
their value chain of well what is a customer ultimately worth at the end of the funnel or you know what is a visitor really worth to me what's an email subscriber worth to me how can i go out and profitably buy those customers like it was insane the amount of money flowing through meta from one mastermind group or coaching group i was a part of last year it's like everybody in the room
was spending thousands tens of thousands of dollars a month with mr zuckerberg and i was like what what an amazing business that they built yeah yep exactly right but I mean, that's sort of the golden opportunity that's always been there is that if you know that it costs you a dollar to acquire a customer.
and you can make $2 for every customer that you get in the door, you're going to just spend as much money as you possibly can, right? And I've personally never landed on that perfect business where I can just... spend tens of thousands of dollars every month. And I know I'm going to make tens of thousands of dollars in profit because I'm buying that traffic. But some people have.
Some people have. You know, one of those examples that has been very public about it is Matt Paulson. He owns marketbeat.com, where it's a financial newsletter business where he... spends essentially as much money as he possibly can to get people on his email list. And he now has, I think it's, it was either five or six million subscribers that he just passed. Wow. On his email list. So it's a huge business.
Uh, at this point and he's calculated out. Okay. I know I'm going to make this much in the first week. you know, because we send this many emails and this many convert, we know we're going to make this much after the first month or lifetime value of the customer. And so He just keeps pouring gas on the fire there.
Well, yeah, so you can get that flywheel spin and spend as much as you can. Yep, exactly right. And so this might be part B of this side hustle trend. The trend that maybe has been around for a little while is newsletters, newsletters as a business. Right. I think is what I'll put that category in is a lot of people are sort of foregoing the traditional website and they're truly just focusing on. We just get people on the email list.
And then we have sponsors that pay to be listed in our email newsletter, right? A little ad spot. And so you get 50,000 or 100,000 people on your email list. And you know you're going to make $1,000 every time you send an email newsletter out to your list. You do that two times a week, right? All of a sudden, you're making $8,000, $10,000 a month. And so this has been a trend, definitely a side hustle trend. that I've seen is monetized email newsletters. And that is the platform. Like that's it.
Yeah, it's interesting. Well, we create all this content with the goal of getting people on my newsletter. What if the newsletter is the content? And it's working really well for some people and maybe an even clearer path towards that. lifetime value of a subscriber metric that you're trying to figure out and like okay now i can go out and and buy subscribers essentially you've talked with ryan smitten on like the nap town scoop like local newsletter for annapolis it's like
well, you know, based on this ad load and this frequency, it's like exactly what you described. Like, oh, yeah, I can totally go out and buy subscribers. But like for a local newsletter, it's like, well, the population is 80,000. Like I'm going to cap out at some point where it's like, you know, the market share is only so big. But for something that is a little bit broader, then you really can go huge with it. Yep.
Or you go to more locations, right? It's true. Franchise it out. Yeah. We do five cities now, you know, or whatever. So, but yeah, yeah. Super interesting, you know, email newsletters as a business. Yeah. We've got a few newsletter-based episodes, that one with Ryan on the local side. Cody Sanchez has been on the show early on.
In her journey, this journey to her first 50,000 subscribers, definitely a viable model there. If the websites are going to be a little more difficult, there's other ways to... monetize that content otherwise to create and share that content the next one on my list is what i'm calling
everything as a service you know you can't just pay for something now you got to pay for it every month and i don't know this is you know the product of netflix or product of you know everything is just you know it's a tiny amount it's just you know a little bit and it becomes
from the consumer side like almost hey sure i can afford that but at a certain point it's like the death by a thousand paper cuts it's like oh it's just one more there's one more little sass tool to add on but from the entrepreneur's standpoint It's almost baked into your pricing model, this assumption that it's going to be a recurring monthly thing. And so you can lean into that and get people used to paying for your thing over and over again.
Yeah, and I was just looking at a perfect example of this, a hosting company. you know, where usually, you know, in the past, you might get a domain along with your, you know, hosting package. But now a lot of hosting companies... You get a full website builder, you know, that's a visual builder. You get the hosting, you get the domain.
Now some are offering AI tools. You get an AI image generator. You get an AI, you know, writer. You get, you know, an AI blogging tool. You get, you know, it's like everything. to like run your online business now and it's just one friendly, you know, monthly fee, right? But yeah, I'm seeing that more and more as, you know, these companies that are building in lots of tools. It's like, well, I'll just, you know.
spend 10 bucks a month to do all that then i guess yeah yeah makes sense if you're you're providing a consistent service if there's a community element to what you're doing like hey you know it's 50 bucks a month it's 100 bucks a month Stay a member of this community. We've seen people doing paid newsletters. Sure, the free newsletter tier offers this, this and this.
But, you know, the paid tier offers, you know, a way you're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. So here's, you know, more in-depth, you know, curated content, whatever is behind the paywall. We talked about it in the context of little micro SaaS projects, software tools.
Lots of different ways to go about it. But thinking of that recurring revenue first versus a one-off purchase, and this relates to the online course thing too. It's like, hey, I'm going to collect $200 one-time upfront payment. You got lifetime access to the thing.
We've seen a little bit of a shift and maybe it's the entrepreneurs getting a little more savvy. Well, that's great for my launch. But then what happens 12 months later? It's like I keep having to serve these people over and over again without collecting any additional revenue. So we've seen people. shift that pricing model to more of a community base or add a recurring element to it. Yep. I think that's smart business. Anytime you can add recurring revenue, I think that's smart business.
Cool. Oh, you got another one? Yeah, I do. I've got a couple more. This is, I don't know if you call this a side hustle trend, other than I've seen this opportunity and I haven't seen it talked about a lot. I don't know if it's been covered on the side hustle show. Maybe it has been. So forgive me if this has been mentioned, but people are publishing content on MSN. So I don't know if you've seen small publishers, you know.
MSN.com, truly, MSN.com, right? A lot of older people tend to still have that as their homepage. It gets millions and millions of views. every month, but you can be a publisher to contribute content to MSN. I just had a buddy just this last month. He's had a few things go really viral, and he made just over $20,000 just from... publishing on MSN. Wow. Right? And so... It's one of these really unique opportunities you can apply to get your website approved.
So if your organic traffic is going down from Google, well, you can publish content on MSN.com. They're still getting a ton of direct traffic. Right. And the population of viewers on MSN is probably skews a little bit older. And so if you have content that does really well in that demographic.
you can get millions of views, right? So I've heard of lots of people doing this, but I happen to have a buddy that's been giving me updates over this last month. He's doing really, really well. Yeah, we're a part of the... MSN publishing program, Microsoft Start program, it was maybe called early on. It may have changed. We've never had anything go that viral, but...
I think our best month is maybe $150, $200 a month. So it's not $20,000, but it's another place to syndicate the content that you're already creating for pretty low lift.
One of the strategies that was shared with me, it's like if you can... somehow like sync your rss feed and i don't know i've got like a lot of short code and stuff in my posts where it's like i don't know if that would look right or I don't know maybe they would strip that out But if you can syndicate your RSS and like if you're creating listicles, like the top 12. ways to make money online in 2025.
like it will create like a gallery and so people have to page through obnoxious from the user standpoint but msn's racking up more page views racking up more ad views right and so that's going to improve your take your your rev share from that content versus having a a scrollable list post. Yep. And I think a lot of people are now publishing content
directly just on MSN. It's not even on their website, right? And so you can create these like image carousels or video. I can't remember what they're called. There's a particular thing that you can get. that it's really just on MSN that you have to scroll through these, yeah, 10 images.
So anyways, kind of an interesting opportunity that's been around for a long time, but I've seen several people doing really well recently with it still. Yeah, it's one of the income streams for Side Hustle Nation, but maybe there's a way, like everything. There's a way to like triple down on the thing and really, really go for it. You just got to pick the one, yeah, that you're going to go all in on, right? It's hard to do them all.
Yeah, publish, you know, 10 times a day or whatever it's going to take. I remember talking with John Dykstra a few months ago. He's like, I'm really double down on email. Like when you say double down, what do you mean? He's like, I send three emails a day. It's like, Jesus, like, oh, okay. And we're over here doing one or two a week. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Next on my list is a service-based side hustle observation, and that is the increase.
in acceptance for fractional support, or maybe a buzzword around fractional support, fractional CTO, fractional CFO, stuff like this, where if you have expertise in a particular field, that Calling yourself the fractional person, I think, elevates you above, hey, I'm your freelance accountant or your freelance bookkeeper. No, I'm going to be your fractional CFO. And I think it allows you to command higher rates, higher prices. And plus, people are...
Maybe becoming more willing to hire that type of person or agree to a contractor relationship with that type of person lends itself really well to niche. agencies, niche productized service providers? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we see this all the time, you know, from a user perspective, if I go to Upwork, and I'm looking to hire somebody, and I get people that apply that are sort of generalist.
right? They say, oh, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. You know, I can do it all versus somebody that says, I create financial spreadsheets. in in google sheets and that is what i do right you're gonna hire that guy if you're looking for a financial spreadsheet And you're going to pay way more. Yeah, I'm going to be willing to, right? I'm like, $30 an hour versus the $10 an hour guy. But I'm going to do it because that's what you do.
So if you can be a specialist, you know, in your field and sort of market yourself as either the fractional or, you know, I am the go-to email newsletter optimization person or whatever it is, you're going to command that higher price. Yeah, exactly. I'm the go-to person for viral Facebook partner program content in your niche. Exactly. And that person does exist. I know who that is. And they have a thriving business. Very good. Very good.
The next one on my list is what I'm calling influencer marketing partners or influencer co-founders. where almost like you might have a technical co-founder. Now you might have an influencer co-founder or influencer partner. And at the very top of the food chain, you have Mr. Beast and Feastables and stuff. But even lower down...
We've had examples of e-commerce sellers on the podcast, you know, kind of tapping into this really, really broad segment of what they called micro influencers, people with like. 500 a thousand up to maybe 10 20 000 followers like not super viral accounts, but they've got people paying attention to them. They have been in the content creation game. They know how to make something compelling.
And sending them samples of the product and really leaning into that as a marketing channel versus trying to go out and... you know, find traffic and buyers the other way or other through other channels. I mean, it's smart, right? Because a lot of times if you have a product, you've got a good idea, you have zero followers. If you can kind of skip that whole step of building things up over the years.
and partner with somebody that already has that influence, already has that following, it's like almost a guaranteed way to launch to success. Now, you just have to be willing to either give up a piece of your business or give up, you know, revenue of the business, and you don't figure out a model that works.
Well, for you, but I think it's a smart business for influencers that, hey, there are a lot of people that have tons of followers, but they don't have any good business ideas. Like they just. you know, they have influence. And then there's other people that have really good ideas. They just, they don't have any influence. So if you can partner that up, it's a cool model.
from the standpoint of we'll give you affiliate commission for everyone that you sell, like through Amazon Creator Connections or whatever. Or we'll just send you a free product or we'll pay you a flat fee to create this type of video. But lots of different ways to structure it. But kind of the secret sauce seemed to be. either casting that really wide net okay i'm going to send out you know a thousand messages to these different accounts
or finding that one really influential partner to bring in who you know can drive consistent traffic. And it was on My First Million where Sean was pitching this virtual assistant company for a while. It was like he bought a stake in that and then turned around and used his influence from the podcast to like drive customers to that business. Yeah, really, really, really smart.
All right, what's next? All right, this might be my last one that I have here. And I don't know if I'm seeing it as a trend. But it's something that I'm going to try a little bit. And I could see this developing into a trend. You tell me whether it is or not. But actually going the other way, more people are going more online, more AI, more technology.
going the other way, going back to physical products, items you can touch, you know, feel. So one thing that I am actually going to be trying is reselling items on eBay. This has been around for how many decades now? Everything that's old is new again. Everything that's old is new again. So part of the reason I'm doing this, I do have older kids that are looking for summer jobs. And so I'm like, what's something that teenagers...
can run. And so we just went out this weekend. We bought Amazon return pallet. I actually picked them up at a liquidation warehouse. Is it the Where You Been store? Somebody, I was like, that's a fantastic name for this bin sale place. But because I know it's in eastern Washington somewhere. Oh, OK. No, there actually is in the Tri-Cities. It's not a bin store. but it's actually, this guy has a bunch of contracts where he, I mean, he had like 300 pallets of just,
Amazon returns, Walmart returns, big box store returns. We bought three of them. We're going to unpack it, try and resell it on eBay. So it's not a new business, but... I feel like going back to the basics of like, there's going to be stuff. That people are going to want to buy for cheaper than they can get in the store forever. That's never going away. So the trend of going to a business. that isn't going to be as impacted by all the technological changes, I think is a smart trend.
Yeah, exactly. The local plumbing service is not worried about AI, you know, he's not going to come, computers aren't going to come and fix your pipes. Yep. Exactly. If nothing else, you'll get some content about the palette. pallet flipping, pallet return business. That's exactly right, right? So I'm hoping I get a summer job for my kids, maybe get some good content for me. I expect to make approximately $0 on this business. I'm hoping that my kids...
you know, earn some money. But who knows? Maybe it becomes profitable. We'll see. I mean, that would be ideal. Yeah. But if I can break even on it, I'm happy. No, that's a good way to expose them to this buy low, sell high.
And is it worth the work of picking through all these things, listing individual items? There's a lot that goes into it, and it sounds like a kind of luck of the draw. You don't get to see everything that's in that palette before you get it, but we do have... an episode on pallet return item pallet flipping just because i
It's something that comes up on people's side hustle lists. I'm curious about it. And somebody was making it work. But similar, they made a couple, maybe 25 grand over the course of a year or two in doing it.
If they didn't, it sounded like if they didn't have the YouTube video of themselves filming doing it, it's like, I don't know if we would really, it would be really worthwhile. But that's a cool one. I do want to piggyback on your... ai isn't going to impact or take away and part of that is this shift towards maybe a shift in interest towards local services the window washing businesses the house cleaning businesses the power washing companies the
you know, mobile car detailing, like these blue collar type of side hustles where you could start relatively low cost, relatively low risk. and don't even need like if you have any level of digital marketing savvy you're probably going to be head and shoulders above the entrenched competition I think that's definitely a trend worth mentioning because we've seen more and more young people, especially young people being interested in those types of businesses.
low-tech good old-fashioned elbow grease go go do the work and get paid for it yeah i think a lot of us that have been in the online world for so long like we We see all these shifts and these changes and it's frustrating. We're like, oh, how are we going to make? this online business work. Well, there's this whole other world out there, right? Where you can go knock on a door and you can meet people in person and have a real phone number where people call you.
So many opportunities for side hustles, whether it's local or, you know, in person or just. you know, the not online business that, hey, there's a lot of things that people need and will always need that won't be impacted by these huge technological shifts. Spencer, this has been awesome. I don't know how many we were up to. I think definitely more than 10 at this point. So probably a good place to wrap up. We delivered on our promise and hopefully a little bit extra on top of that.
But what's next for you? Any projects going on? What's the latest with Niche Pursuit? Yeah, I mentioned the one. Hey, I'm kind of starting a little side business with my kids, so that's going to be fun. That's kind of something I'm dabbling with, the whole palette flipping. idea. But going all in on YouTube videos, my YouTube channel's done pretty decent.
So where I talk a lot about different website ideas that might still be working, the type of trends that are still working online. So covering a lot of that on my YouTube videos. Other than that, no big shakeup. you know, with what I'm going to be doing. I just keep publishing some content on YouTube, got my Facebook page going.
uh, have a little Amazon influencer, you know, side hustle. I've got, you know, videos there. So, you know, kind of keep dabbling on a few little side hustles, keep the niche pursuits brand going. We'll see where it goes from there. I get the impression that, you know, that may be similar. You probably don't need to work anymore. You've been doing this for a long time. You've had some exits under your belt. Like you've had some fantastic earning years and months.
Is there a retirement plan or do you just keep doing this because you love doing it? Yeah, you know, I'm still enjoying things, but I am very much I've removed. a lot of things for my business that I don't enjoy. So I do have the opportunity and the ability, like my Facebook page VA, I'm not going to go in and post things 10 or 15 times a day, right? So I do enjoy the strategy of coming up with ideas. And trying to plug in a system or people
they can run it for me. So I enjoy that. So I'll keep doing that. You know, I'm actually, I volunteer at a local pickleball organization. We have a pickleball community, right? So I'm looking for more volunteer opportunities. maybe work a little bit less, but still, hey, I like the excitement of, hey, there's this cool new idea. Can we make it work? I haven't quite retired yet, Nick, but I'll let you know. But I'm doing all I can not to work quite as much. Let's put it that way.
Fair enough. You know, the love of the game, parse out the stuff that you don't like and keep what you do. Yeah. That's, you know, try and play in that same space. So very cool. nichepursuits.com. Check them out over there. Check out the Niche Pursuits podcast. We'll link up the YouTube channel as well. Like I said, going all in on YouTube, more and more guests are saying, hey, I'm leaning in on the YouTube stuff, doing more video if the website isn't working as well.
I can make videos and it's a lot of fun too. Thanks so much for joining me. I think this was a blast. If you're listening to this and you want to make some extra money, and you're not sure which path to take, I want to invite you to take our free quiz at hustle.show. You can do it right from your phone. It'll take a couple minutes or less.
And then based on your answers, we're going to give you a custom curated playlist to hopefully put you in the right direction. These are going to be eight to 10 side hustle show episodes based on your answers. Hey, what should we listen to next? If you want more Spencer in your life, you can go listen to his three or four side hustle show appearances as well. But hustle.show, that's your personalized playlist quiz.
And just again, a few short questions about your interests and goals. And you can get that personalized playlist added to your device. learn what works, and then go out and make some more money. Big thanks to Spencer for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit upside hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
that is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. 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.