If you have an online business, chances are you’ve tried your hand at outreach. If you want to expand and grow your business, especially from an SEO standpoint, you need good quality links pointing to your site from other websites. The problem is that getting other sites to link to you is not easy, as I’m sure you’ve found it. The “traditional” method is to send out dozens, even hundreds of emails to other site owners trying to land a guest post. But, as today's guest Brendan Hufford explains, t...
Oct 03, 2019•45 min
Sick of trading time for money? Looking for ways to turn a service or a skill you already have into a digital product? This is exactly what Matt Bochnak of HowtoMotorcycleRepair.com has done. He’s turned a "blue collar" service business--repairing motorcycles--into a lucrative business with multiple streams of time-leveraged income. This is a “Where are they now?” episode. I first caught up with Matt early in 2016 when he was a guest on episode 160 of the Side Hustle Show. Back then, Matt’s reve...
Sep 26, 2019•42 min
A small blog doesn't have to mean a small income. By helping a specific group of people solve their problems, Carol Tice has attracted more than 1500 members -- at $25 a month -- to join her community. Carol went from working as a freelance writer, to coaching others how to become freelance writers, to building one of the largest online membership sites for freelance writers. (I found Carol while doing keyword research for terms like “get paid to write” and “make money writing” – and Carol OWNS ...
Sep 19, 2019•43 min
I wish I was half as smart now as I was at 16! But learning everything you don't know is part of the process. One thing I love about my work is I feel like I learn new things every day. Sometimes they're small little tweaks and hacks, and other times they're broader strategies or ideas. I originally drafted this list 7 years ago, after my 30th birthday, but decided it was due for an update. (I updated it at 35, too, but keep learning more!) For context, that was pre-Side Hustle Nation, pre-podca...
Sep 12, 2019•36 min
The fastest way to multiply money? It might be reselling. That is, buy low, sell high, repeat. Keely Stawicki started reselling when she was just 12 years old, flipping a horse saddle on Craigslist and making $100 profit. Fast forward 15 years--and more than $270,000 in sales--and reselling is now her full-time gig. Today, Keely focuses mostly on vintage goods, clothing, and furniture--all items in great demand right now. Reselling is a business model we keep coming back to because it checks som...
Sep 05, 2019•52 min
Buy a house. Rent it out. Tenants pay it off for you. It’s possibly one of the oldest side hustles in the books, right? Done right, owning rental properties can be an attractive long-term income and wealth-building strategy. But done wrong, it can be a recipe for headaches and a mountain of debt. It’s a side hustle that I know a lot of the Side Hustle Nation readers and listeners are interested in (as am I). For this one, I collected my own real estate investing questions, and gathered more from...
Aug 29, 2019•46 min
She always knew she wanted to start her own business, she just didn’t know what kind of business. Sound familiar? So, Sylvia Inks asked friends and colleagues what they saw her as an expert in, and what they go to her for advice and help with. Their answers? “They said I’m great with finances, and they said I have great research skills,” Sylvia told me. This helped Sylvia narrow down her focus to financial coaching. From there she started networking, wrote a book, and worked diligently on her pr...
Aug 22, 2019•44 min
Creating content. Marketing your site. Monetizing your traffic. There’s a lot that goes into running a money-making website! In this episode, I want to shortcut your learning curve a little bit. To do that, I’m joined by a couple of gracious volunteers. The first is Side Hustle Show listener, Jamie Robe, who’s started a new website to help people in the path of hurricanes and tropical storms. As a resident of Central Florida, it’s a topic he knows plenty about! My second volunteer is professiona...
Aug 15, 2019•55 min
Michele Mattix of SedonaMeditationExperiences.com has a unique side hustle where she gets paid to breathe. As a tagline that sounds great, but there’s a lot more to her side hustle than just breathing. In fact, in Michele’s own words she describes her business as helping, “people experience the spiritual side of Sedona and to bring more awareness and wellness into their life through meditation, mindfulness, and a deep connection with nature.” Michele is able to offer all of this because she is a...
Aug 08, 2019•43 min
It’s time to dive into the ol’ listener mailbag and answer a few questions in this week’s edition of The Side Hustle Show. I’ve had quite a few interesting questions come in since the last Q&A episode, and picked 20 to talk through in today’s show. Like this format? This is the 8th installment of “20 Questions” so feel free to go back and binge on the older ones too: 320: Multiplying Money, Morning Routines, and $100k Side Hustles: 20 Questions with Nick 291: Email, Ebooks, Platforms, and Co...
Aug 01, 2019•36 min
Jaime Masters has interviewed more than 500 millionaires. On top of that, she runs some premium mastermind programs and is a sought-after business coach. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to get on the podcast for years, and I think we came up with something unique and hopefully compelling. Jaime agreed to actually coach me on a couple of areas of my business. In preparation, she: took a look at the last 12 months of my business finances asked me to complete a time-tracking study to se...
Jul 25, 2019•49 min
A location-independent consulting business that replaces your day job income in a matter of months? That's exactly what Paul Minors accomplished with his virtual software consulting business. You might recognize Paul’s name. Paul is a productivity blogger and consultant from New Zealand. He was part of a fun productivity roundtable episode we did towards the end of 2016 -- that was episode 197 if you want to go back and check it out. What I now know, is that at that time Paul was putting the whe...
Jul 18, 2019•50 min
We all have a limit to our capacity. For some entrepreneurs and small business owners, that’s a tough pill to swallow . But when you’re up against that ceiling you have to decide between two options. You can: Settle in. Ask for help in breaking through. This episode is about growing your team in such a way that you have some breathing room in your schedule and in your mental bandwidth to do the work that’s required of a business owner. Even though I’ve been hiring virtual help in my businesses s...
Jul 11, 2019•57 min
Is options trading legit? Is it a viable side hustle? In this episode, we’re tackling trading options -- a topic that’s been frequently requested by listeners, but is somewhat foreign to me. To help school me on this, I’m excited to welcome my friend Kirk DuPlessis to the show. Kirk runs the super popular site OptionAlpha.com, where you can get all sorts of free options trading training. He’s been at this for over 10 years and the site has over 150,000 members. Options trading (when done right) ...
Jul 04, 2019•50 min
Amy Feierman and Kristin Ostrander of MommyIncome.com have generated over $2 million in sales on Amazon over the last 12 months with a unique strategy that has high margins and lower costs per sale. What are they selling on Amazon? Bundles -- Think shampoo and conditioner, peanut and butter, or any 2-6 products that compliment each other and provide some added value and convenience to the buyer. Amy and Kristin have both been selling online for over 10 years, but recently they have shifted their...
Jun 27, 2019•1 hr 4 min
Over the last 10 years, the bulk of my energy and attention has been on building audience businesses. These types of businesses (usually) involve creating some helpful resource, and then figuring out a way to monetize the people who come by to use it. In my case, that's primarily been through affiliate marketing and more recently, advertising on this podcast. But you also have the flexibility to sell products and services to your audience once you have their attention. In this episode, I'll play...
Jun 24, 2019•37 min
Robert Brandl is a German entrepreneur now living in Spain with his wife and twin 16-month olds, but 10 years ago he was working full-time, wanting to travel, and was just trying to figure out how to get a blog online. He did what most aspiring bloggers would do--he turned to Google for answers. But he was disappointed with what he found. Nobody was doing a great job answering his question and comparing all the different options. With that, WebsiteToolTester.com was born. This is Robert’s flagsh...
Jun 20, 2019•51 min
This week I’m excited to introduce one of the hottest side hustles of the moment, and that is low-content self-publishing. What is low-content publishing? Let me explain -- self-publishing has been around for a decade, and we’ve covered that quite a bit in both fiction and non-fiction -- it’s one of my favorite and perhaps most passive side hustles. Write the book, hit publish, collect royalties for years. Cool, right? Well, it’s the whole write the book part where a lot of people get stuck. You...
Jun 13, 2019•48 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, and we just passed 6 years and 8.5 million downloads! If you like this short-and-sweet meta-style show, be sure to check out the others in this series: Episode 50 Episode 124 Episode 1...
Jun 06, 2019•24 min
Dr. Shirag Shemmassian decided to take action on a particular skill of his, and is seeing some impressive results -- all on the side from his day job as a research psychologist. What do I mean by impressive? How about $650k in revenue last year, which was more than double of 2017, which was more than triple of 2016. He’s on a serious growth curve! Full Show Notes: Multi Six-Figure Consulting on the Side
May 30, 2019•50 min
“Everyone is researching a product, I’m telling you to research a problem,” Chad told me. Chad Rubin runs ThinkCrucial.com, a profitable e-commerce business that he’s built by selling products that solve a pain point for people. Every product follows a direct-to-consumer strategy that lets him source and sell in-demand products efficiently and inexpensively. Chad’s story began when he was laid off from his job on Wall Street. He started helping out at his parent’s vacuum shop, selling some of th...
May 23, 2019•41 min
He'd just gained 3000 subscribers and made $8000 in a matter of days, but Chris Ritter's first virtual summit didn't deliver the result was looking for. As a personal trainer for swimmers, he was looking for more clients to coach online. Not a single one signed up. Still, the summit was a serious turning point in his business--one that turned into a 6-figure side project in its first year. He started serving an entirely different set of customers, and went from working one-on-one to one-to-many....
May 16, 2019•48 min
May 13, 2019•36 min
There's a topic that no one really talks about in entrepreneurship or online business, and that's the unfair advantages someone had starting out. Behind every killer case study, every income report, every "overnight" success, there's a backstory you don't always hear. The truth is, no one ever really starts from scratch. We bring our own history, perspectives, and baggage to the table. We also have the advantage of learning from everyone who's gone before us. Like Newton said, we "stand on the s...
May 09, 2019•26 min
Kimberly Gauthier has been running KeepTheTailWagging.com since 2011, but things really started to take off when she niched down her focus to raw feeding for dogs. Raw feeding is basically the paleo diet for dogs -- attempting to mimic their ancestral diet. Her blog had than 2 million page views last year -- almost entirely from organic search in Google, and she’s monetized the traffic with a few different income streams. Tune in to hear how Kimberly arrived at his niche, what drives content and...
May 02, 2019•38 min
WTF man!? Are you willing to fail! Let that be your new mantra. That's the rule Brian Scudamore -- the founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK -- lives by. What started with a $1000 investment (Brian's life's savings at the time) has turned into a home services empire that does $1 million in sales on any given day. Brian's come a long way since that beat-up pickup truck going door-to-door that first summer. His portfolio now includes house painting, moving services, and home detailing--all under the u...
Apr 25, 2019•47 min
A few years ago, a side hustler named Brock McGoff reached out to me with a guest post pitch. The post detailed how he was making, at that time, $4,000 a month, from his blog about men’s fashion, on the side from his day job. Since then, Brock has turned TheModestMan.com into his full-time focus, into a 6-figure income, and into a media empire that expands well beyond the blog itself. In this episode, Brock talks me through how he generates content ideas, how the business makes money, where he’s...
Apr 18, 2019•50 min
Roberto Chavez started his raw land flipping side hustle a little over a year ago, and with persistence, has already built it into 5-figure of monthly revenue. This is a business model that was first introduced to me by Mark Podolsky, from TheLandGeek.com, in episode 108 of The Side Hustle Show. He called it "the best passive income model" because it avoids "the 3 T’s" of traditional real estate investing: tenants, toilets, and termites. How the model works is you: acquire parcels of land on the...
Apr 11, 2019•49 min
"Growth isn't the byproduct of success," Paul Jarvis told me. "Or at least it shouldn't be. The byproduct of success should be freedom." Paul is a talented writer and designer who’s made a living--and a name for himself--by often taking the counterpoint to the conventional wisdom, especially when it comes to entrepreneurship and business growth. His latest book, Company of One, caught my attention. It’s about why building a better business doesn’t necessarily mean building a bigger business. In ...
Apr 04, 2019•43 min
As we’ve mentioned, “scaling” a service business can be one of the biggest challenges with this business model. In fact, it’s a sticking point that keeps a lot of people away from freelancing altogether. But if your goal is to get big or even to just avoid trading time for money your whole life, there are lots of ways to scale a service business. If you'd like to learn more about starting a service business and connecting with your first clients, check out this in-depth interview with Abbey Ashl...
Apr 01, 2019•20 min
