When the pandemic hit, Timmy Bauer from DinosaurHouse.com pivoted his business from being a traveling children’s book author to running a children’s book production company. Timmy was enjoying working as a traveling children’s book author, but he was forced to change directions when schools started locking down and not allowing guests. His story is the perfect example that you don’t always need to make a complete 180 if your business hits a wall. Sometimes you just need to make a slight re-calib...
Feb 10, 2022•42 min
From a $10,000 a month “blog” to a 7-figure “Media Company” — a lot can happen in six years. Today’s guest is one of my most important real and virtual online business mentors — I’m always trying to pay attention and keep an eye on what Robert Farrington from TheCollegeInvestor.com is up to. Fun fact: Robert was one of the very first guests on The Side Hustle Show back in 2013. Our last update was 6 years ago, in early 2016. Back then, The College Investor was earning $10k a month and Robert was...
Feb 03, 2022•1 hr 6 min
There are a million and one ways to make money online, but they almost always come down to helping other people. Today’s guest, Kat Norton aka Miss.Excel, has been doing plenty of that. She’s reaching hundreds of thousands of followers as a spreadsheet influencer — you didn’t know there was such a thing, did you? Kat started on TikTok in June 2020 and already has over 734k followers, she later branched out onto Instagram and has already built a following of more than 573k followers there, too. S...
Jan 27, 2022•43 min
While he was a full-time student, Johnny Robinson built OrangeWindowCleaning.com into a $700k a year operation. If you want to start your own business, it doesn’t necessarily take a never-before-seen business idea to have a never-before-seen impact on your life. Johnny's a long-time Side Hustle Show listener, and we actually recorded this on his last day of college. Tune in to The Side Hustle Show interview to hear: How Johnny got his first customers The marketing engine you can borrow for your ...
Jan 20, 2022•53 min
People out there will pay for your skills, you just have to find them. One person who’s done an excellent job of finding them over the last 9 months or so is Georgia Austin from WizardOfContent.com. Georgia took her skill of writing, and despite a crowded world of other writers out there, did over $500k worth of work through the Fiverr platform last year, including $90k the month before we recorded. In this episode, Georgia shares her top tips for getting started on Fiverr and quickly gaining tr...
Jan 13, 2022•48 min
Inside my biggest wins, best purchases, favorite books, most popular episodes, and most important projects. Full show notes
Jan 07, 2022•54 min
Happy New Year! May this be a year of stacking up incremental improvements and optimizations — getting 1% better every day — that’s the idea. To help out with that goal, I’m excited to introduce Chris Hutchins. He's a serial entrepreneur, a new dad, a professional life optimizer, and host of the new AllTheHacks podcast. The stated mission of All the Hacks is to help listeners upgrade every aspect of their life while spending less and saving more. I think that’s a mission we can get on board with...
Jan 06, 2022•1 hr 8 min
The Side Hustle Show is a top-rated podcast featuring the ideas, actions, and results you need to start and grow a successful business. Put a little hustle in your earbuds as I extract the actionable tips and business strategies from successful entrepreneurs. Each week you’ll get new business ideas, side hustle opportunities, and high-value content to help you make extra money and make the most of your time.
Jan 01, 2022•1 min
Selling JPEGs and other digital collectibles - do NFTs present some of the hottest investment opportunities right now? You could hardly open your laptop or unlock your phone this year without reading about NFTs or non-fungible tokens. When you start to see jpegs selling for tens of thousands of dollars, you can’t help but ask, wait, what’s going on here? And as is often the case when these new shiny things pop up, I try to learn from those who are a few steps ahead. In this episode you’ll meet M...
Dec 30, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Smart side hustlers go where the cash is already flowing… One place it’s been flowing at a rapidly increasing pace is Facebook Marketplace. What started as a Craigslist competitor — a place to buy and sell secondhand stuff — has morphed into an e-commerce powerhouse in its own right. How Facebook Marketplace works will not be new to most reading this. But how today’s guest, Andrey Kozlov is taking advantage of this platform will be a real eye-opener to most. So, how can you take advantage? In th...
Dec 23, 2021•48 min
How does turning a passion into a profitable side hustle sound? That’s exactly what this week’s guest, Luke Lorick of Tailgating-Challenge.com has done. Luke took his passion for tailgating — the pre-game parking lot party variety, not the annoying driving habit variety, and turned that into a long-running and profitable online side hustle. It wasn’t an overnight success. In fact, Luke says himself that “Overnight successes don’t happen overnight.” Luke has put in years of hard work building str...
Dec 16, 2021•43 min
Turning a passion into a 6-figure business is the goal of many entrepreneurs, and that’s what this week’s guest, Jennifer Sobel has done. Jennifer has combined her lifelong passion for belly dancing with her skills in digital marketing to create TheBellyDanceSolution.com, one part of what’s become a 6-figure online business. There are 3 big ideas in this episode that you may be able to use to improve your own sales funnel: The power of combining two or more things to come up with a new idea - Th...
Dec 09, 2021•49 min
100 members of the Side Hustle Nation community shared their path to $1000 and beyond in my latest book, $1,000 100 Ways. I just got approval for the audiobook edition, narrated by yours truly. Here's a sneak peak of the stories inside. Learn more: http://1k100ways.com Get the audiobook free with an Audible trial
Dec 03, 2021•34 min
Struggling to perform at your best from the moment you wake till you go to sleep at night? In today’s episode, we’re talking about a key component of your physical and mental foundation to be a high-performing human, and one that we probably don’t give a lot of thought to. Still, it’s something you spend roughly a third of your life doing, so it’s a huge lever to pull in terms of optimizing your energy and your output in the world. Yes, we’re talking about sleep. I promise this episode won’t put...
Dec 02, 2021•46 min
This week — in what has become a Thanksgiving tradition on the show — we’re diving into 10 creative side hustles that make real money. This is the 4th installment of the series, so I encourage you to go check out the other episodes if you like this format -- those are episodes 310, 363, and 420. Tune in to learn about how real people are making real money from everything from tarantulas to luxury picnics, from invisible sculptures to reselling driftwood that you can go pick up for free. Full Sho...
Nov 25, 2021•37 min
From hating photo booths to seeing an opportunity in the market and taking her photo booth side hustle to 6-figures in 18 months… That’s the story of today’s guest, Cat Bloch. Cat told me you would never “catch me dead” using a photo booth at a party. That was until she came across a modern photo booth, and it completely changed how she looked at this popular wedding venue and Gala attraction. Cat saw a gap in the market for an upmarket, modern, photo booth. Something that does much more than yo...
Nov 18, 2021•58 min
Can you really make money flipping phones? To find out, I sat down with pro cell phone flipper Jeff Duhon from the Smart Flippers Facebook group. In a typical week, Jeff resells 20-30 used iPhones with a target profit of $100 per flip. If you did half that volume, you could be earning $1000 a week. Flipping phones for profit can be a lucrative side hustle or grow into a full-time income stream, but, like any business, there are some pros and cons. The used cell phone industry is already huge, an...
Nov 11, 2021•52 min
Struggling to come up with a side hustle or business idea? To help get the creative idea juices flowing, I’ve invited Joel Hansen, a member of the founding team of Kern.al on the show. Kern.al is kind of like Reddit or Product Hunt, but for business ideas that don’t exist yet. Just a few minutes on the site definitely sparked some creativity for me so I encourage you to check it out. In this episode, Joel and I bounce some different business ideas back and forth that are free for you to run with...
Nov 04, 2021•58 min
Like it or not, we’re all marketers. Whether we’re selling ourselves in a job interview, pitching our product or service, or trying to get people to pay attention to our content — we’re all marketers. And you should know this is one of my all-time favorite topics. So, how do we solve the awareness problem? How do we position ourselves so the right people can find us — and the wrong ones leave us alone? To spark some inspiration and maybe breathe new life into your own marketing efforts, I asked ...
Oct 28, 2021•43 min
At the end of nearly every episode of The Side Hustle Show, I ask my guests for their “#1 tip for Side Hustle Nation.” There’s always a great variety of responses, and I wanted to take some time today to go through some of my favorites from the past 50-ish interviews. This has become an annual tradition on the show, which is now almost 8.5 years old and recently passed 17 million lifetime downloads. If you like this short-and-sweet meta-style show, be sure to check out the others in this series:...
Oct 21, 2021•37 min
Where there’s pain, there might also be profit… That was the case for today’s guest, Pete Mockaitis. Pete was seeing some traction with his podcast, the HowToBeAwesomeAtYourJob Podcast, but was struggling to keep up all the off-air tasks — the show notes, the editing, the social media. For Pete Mockaitis, that pain turned into AwesomePros.co, a niche drop-servicing company that he co-founded with Brian Kearny and is now doing $10k a month in recurring revenue. This is something that will work in...
Oct 14, 2021•52 min
One challenge that most new businesses face is the awareness problem – nobody knows you exist. To help erase this problem, I’ve invited Dustin Lien from JumpXmarketing.com back on the show. Dustin first appeared on episode 251 back in 2017. Back then, he was just ramping up JumpX after shutting down his own physical product business. Since then he’s grown it into a 6-figure operation and built it in such a way that it only requires part-time attention. What’s been his key driver? Partner worksho...
Oct 07, 2021•49 min
Ever thought about turning your expertise in an everyday subject or topic into an online business? For Delilah Orpi, her expertise was on taking care of her curly hair — and starting as a side hustle, she turned that into an online business earning around $8k a month at HolisticEnchilada.com. Delilah has some interesting strategies she used to grow her audience, build her email list, diversify her multiple income streams -- all of which can be applied to a topic of your choosing. Tune in to The ...
Sep 30, 2021•50 min
There are tons of ways to make money online — the root of all of them comes down to helping people. Two common ways entrepreneurs help a wide audience is by packaging up their knowledge and experience into an online training course or a membership program/community. But which model makes the most sense for your business? To find out, it’s time for another Side Hustle Showdown. For the debate, I’ve invited back two Side Hustle Show favorites: Jacques Hopkins has sold over $2 million worth of his ...
Sep 23, 2021•59 min
We’ve been on a bit of an audience building kick lately in our conversations with Dickie Bush about Twitter, with Tori Dunlap about TikTok. Today you’ll meet a long-time listener of the show who built her audience on Facebook. Chantal Lavergne is the founder of FunSensoryPlay.com, which started as a Facebook page in early 2020 — and that’s important because that’s years after the supposed death of organic Facebook page reach. Since then she’s grown the page to nearly 80,000 followers using some ...
Sep 16, 2021•55 min
Tired of toiling away on social media for lackluster results? Tori Dunlap earned her first 200,000 TikTok followers in just a couple weeks, and has added another 1.4 million since then. All that attention has helped her turn a healthy 6-figure business into a multi-7-figure operation. Tori is the founder of HerFirst100k.com and host of the Financial Feminist podcast, where she helps women become more financially confident. She argues that TikTok is the best social media platform on which to grow...
Sep 09, 2021•47 min
If you’re looking to add some time-leveraged cash flow to your bottom line, two of the best options are investing in rental real estate and buying small businesses. Both are viable options, and to help you figure out if either or both of these investment options are right for you, it’s time for another Side Hustle Showdown. For the debate, I’ve invited back two Side Hustle Show favorites: Chad Carson is the owner of over 100+ properties and the author of Retire Early with Real Estate. Codie Sanc...
Sep 02, 2021•57 min
Online arbitrage is the process of buying inventory from one site to resell on another (usually Amazon). To help school me on this side hustle is Chris Grant, a longtime Amazon seller and the founder of ClearTheShelf.com and OAChallenge.com. Chris has been involved in the online arbitrage space for the last 10+ years and is currently selling $75,000-80,000 per month. In this episode, Chris explains the systems he’s built and the tools he uses to help him find more “winners”, minimize the risk of...
Aug 26, 2021•54 min
Few words will get as polarizing a response among freelancers and side hustlers as Upwork. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a fantastic platform to connect with well-paying gigs and quality clients … or it’s a hopeless, desperate race to the bottom, overly-competitive bloodbath with no chance of success. Like a lot of things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and a lot of your outcome will depend on your strategy and how well you show up. Upwork is the world’s largest freelance...
Aug 19, 2021•49 min
Today’s guest has gone from zero to almost 50k followers in the last 12 months and has turned that newfound attention into a 6-figure online business. This is impressive in itself, but what’s even more impressive about this story is that Dickie Bush has built his audience on Twitter. You know, that social media platform that's always just ... been there. One of several platforms that I’d kind of written off. In fact, in 8 years and 450 episodes, we’ve never done a dedicated conversation on Twitt...
Aug 12, 2021•50 min