“I feel like this is the most important project I’ve ever worked on,” Mike said about his blog YoungArchitect.com. Mike Riscica runs a blog, podcast, and has built a thriving community for young professionals in the architecture field. The idea for the blog came from a pain point in Mike’s life, and for many others – passing the Architect Registration Examination (ARE). After failing to pass the exam 4 times (before passing) and seeing his peers struggling, Mike started blogging about his challe...
Aug 16, 2018•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I tell people I work on my cleaning business about an hour a day because 5 minutes doesn’t seem believable,” Chris Schwab said. Chris is the founder of ThinkMaids.com, a residential house cleaning service in the Washington DC area he started on the side while still a university student. Less than two years later, the business is doing $60k a month worth of cleaning work, all without Chris ever lifting a mop or dusting a shelf himself. In this episode, Chris shares some of the unique tactics he ...
Aug 09, 2018•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rene Delgado started an online drop shipping store with no ideas and no inventory and went from $0-300k in his first year in business. It was the search for an extra stream of income that led Rene Delgado to consider e-commerce; selling physical products online. “Drop shipping” is a form of e-commerce where your suppliers ship products directly to customers on your behalf. Your role is to drive traffic to your storefront, forward the purchase order details to your supplier when a visitor makes a...
Aug 02, 2018•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bill Nowicki has a unique side hustle. He has a podcast show called MariettaStories named after Marietta GA, a suburb of Atlanta with a population of about 60,000. Having a podcast show isn’t unique but producing a show that’s focused on a local community is something a little different – and something you might consider doing for your local community after hearing Bill’s story. Bill is a former Navy submariner, still a nuclear engineer by day, and had different side hustle aspirations at first ...
Jul 26, 2018•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Austin Miller built a $1.2 million real estate portfolio at 31 years old -- for free. He's a side hustling real estate investor specializing in "creative" financing deals -- houses he can buy without using his own money. Austin is the author of Free Houses: How To Build Your Real Estate Investment Portfolio With No Money. His basic strategy is this: Find a killer deal on a house that needs some work. Buy it with the creative financing methods Austin talks about in this episode. Either do the wor...
Jul 19, 2018•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 6th installment of “20 Questions” so feel free to go back and binge on the older ones too: 271: Brilliant Blogging, Ruthless Productivity, and Guaranteed Success: 20 Questions with Nick 245: Network Marketing, Imposter Sy...
Jul 12, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Willpower predicts academic and professional success better than IQ, or charisma, or having rich parents. It’s not the only ingredient in our success recipe, but it’s a critical one -- and one I certainly struggle with at times. Derek Doepker of ExcuseProof.com is an expert when it comes to increasing willpower and strengthening this critical success muscle we all have. He is the author of 7 bestselling books in personal development, a speaker, consultant, trainer, and specializes in helping ind...
Jul 05, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast May Najafabadi earned $12,000 in 8 weeks -- working just 1 hour a day. Her side hustle? After school enrichment classes teaching crafts and jewelry making. As a long-time entrepreneur in the e-commerce space, May was used to enrolling her son in these classes to buy herself an extra hour in the afternoons. Over the last couple years though, she wanted to diversify her income away from Amazon and wondered if she could be the one selling those classes instead. May chose arts and crafts, a subject ...
Jun 28, 2018•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 5 years and 5.5 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 21, 2018•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast 10 months! Just 10 months after starting his side hustle, Jonathan Mendonsa was ready to quit his 6-figure job and take the business full-time. What's the hustle? A podcast called Jonathan co-hosts with this partner Brad Barrett ChooseFI. “You need to either be first or be different. We couldn’t be first, so we wanted to pivot and be a little different,” Jonathan said. When the project started, he was working full-time as a pharmacist, living a frugal lifestyle, and was an avid consumer of finan...
Jun 14, 2018•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast “It’s the best-kept secret in the real estate industry,” Mark said, talking about becoming a loan signing agent. You can make $100 an hour as a part-time, and the only real requirements are that you know what you’re doing, and you have a notary license. (A loan signing agent is the person who walks you through the giant stack of forms and contracts you have to sign when you close on a new home loan.) I was first introduced to this side hustle early last year, when I first sat down with Mark Will...
Jun 07, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I set up a big business just selling somebody else’s stuff,” Wes said. Wes runs TheSalesWhisperer.com and is the host of The Sales Podcast which started around the same time as The Side Hustle Show back in 2013. He’s an Air Force vet, a father of 7, and has built up an interesting side hustle that on the surface looks like a typical consulting business but is done in such a way that it’s set up to generate recurring passive income. Wes has been side hustling since the 90’s and started his onlin...
May 31, 2018•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Abbey made $8000 from her 1000-person email list, she knew she was on to something. Over the last several years, Abbey Ashley has gone from earning $25 as a virtual assistant, to coordinating monster 6-figure launches of her own product. I actually met Abbey at the bar during Traffic and Conversion Summit. Her “Virtual Assistance Is My Jam,” t-shirt caught my attention and I had to know more. Eight months pregnant with her first daughter, she couldn't imagine putting her child in day care j...
May 24, 2018•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast You've got less than 3 seconds to make a first impression online. Is your website turning would-be customers away without you even knowing it? Your site and the words you use -- your copy -- could either be making you money or costing you big time. I invited copywriting pro Laura Belgray on the show to do some live "copy audits" of listeners' sites. Laura is a professional copywriter with nearly 20 years of experience. During this time, she has written everything from TV promos, launch campaigns...
May 17, 2018•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast FoodTruckEmpire.com generates $60k a year on the side from Brett Lindenberg's marketing consulting job. Why'd he start a blog about the food truck industry? “I started the blog at a time in my life when I was looking at just a whole bunch of different business ideas,” Brett said. Originally, Brett wanted to start his own food truck. While researching how to start a food truck business he discovered there wasn’t enough quality information online. So, he did what all good entrepreneurs do – capita...
May 10, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his first 3 months, he'd booked more than $4000 worth of work. “I’ve never been very good at working with people, so I wanted something that was flexible,” James said. Sound familiar? These are the words of someone who was not happy being a shoe salesman and wanted out. James was looking for that location independent lifestyle, and when he was approached to ghostwrite a book for $300 he knew what he wanted to do from that point on. Fast-forward a couple of years and James now charges $300 per...
May 03, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Corey Jeffreys turned an $800 investment into $3k in the first year and has been growing his business and adding more automated processes each year. His entrepreneurial adventure began by exploring the world of real estate investing, when he happened upon a slightly different rental business model: inflatable bounce houses. Corey started out renting a bounce house to his aunt as his first customer and doing all the labor himself, to where he is now with a virtual assistant from Upwork taking boo...
Apr 26, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Go big or go home, that’s kinda my whole philosophy with SEO,” Matt said. And his results speak for themselves. It’s been more than 200 episodes since we last heard from Matt Giovanisci. Back then, Matt was explaining how he was growing his authority site SwimUniversity.com with epic content and strong SEO. Since then he’s started 3 more authority sites and has fine-tuned his SEO practices for even bigger and quicker results. His latest site BrewCabin.com is just a few months old and Matt is al...
Apr 19, 2018•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast A $425k exit on a 2.5 year old business!? Recently a friend of mine posted about how he sold his 2.5-year-old Amazon FBA business for over $400k, which I thought was incredible. The twist was it turned out the buyer was a familiar face as well. Spencer Haws of NichePursuits.com was the seller, and Ace Chapman of AceChapman.com was the buyer. They are both previous guests of the show. Spencer was on episodes 18 and 70 of The Side Hustle Show talking about niche sites and software, and Ace was a g...
Apr 12, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Brodie is a former special needs teacher turned 11-time Amazon bestselling author. What started as a side hustle writing about his own weight loss journey turned into a string of bestselling titles on Amazon, $3000 paid speaking gigs, 1-on-1 self-publishing coaching, and ultimately the group coaching program I invited Paul on the show to share more about. Why go down the group coaching route? After working with other authors on a 1-to-1 basis and seeing them achieve similar success self-pub...
Apr 05, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast What are the quick, simple, and maybe a little "weird" productivity tricks entrepreneurs use to get more done? Well, I'm always curious about that myself so I decided to ask 26 of my most productive and successful friends for the "hacks" and tools they use every day. (And I added in one of my own to round out the list.) This episode was a ton of fun to put together and I owe a huge thank you to everyone who participated! I know I learned of a few new tools to try and I'm sure you will to. If you...
Mar 29, 2018•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's such an elegantly simple -- yet powerful -- way of looking at what really matters in your business. Perry Marshall's "Tactical Triangle" identifies the 3 primary levers in any business as: Traffic Conversion Economics And even more powerful, there's an 80/20 Pareto Principle inside each of those. Start tweaking a few of the most important variables and you start to see some serious impact on your bottom line. (image credit) Perry is the author of one of my all-time favorite books, 80/20 Sal...
Mar 22, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast John made $1614 before 11am the day we recorded this episode. His business model? Buying industrial byproducts, the kind of stuff that’s used for shipping like pallets, cardboard boxes, crates, and so on, and selling them on for a profit. John Wilker started out buying or being given pallets free by businesses that had no need for them and selling them to pallet yards. Realizing the pallet yards were selling them on for a profit to businesses that did have a need for them, John saw an opportunit...
Mar 15, 2018•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Getting paid to turn away work? Being in the position to turn away work as a freelancer or consultant is an envious place to be in, but being in the position to turn away that work AND get paid for it? Even better! John Doherty had spent years working in the digital marketing space, both as an employee and a freelancer. As his SEO consulting business crew, he reached the capacity of how much he wanted to work, and started essentially selling leads to friends and colleagues he trusted. That littl...
Mar 08, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast How much will you save from the new tax law? It turns out that while there are some great "gives" from Uncle Sam for entrepreneurs, there are several potentially costly "takes" as well. Death and taxes, right? To help talk through how some of the most important tax law changes will impact your bottom line, I invited Josh Bauerle from CPAonFire.com back on the show. You might remember Josh from episode 208 where he answered tax questions from the Side Hustle Nation community. This time, Josh talk...
Mar 01, 2018•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 5th installment of "20 Questions" so feel free to go back and binge on the older ones too: 245: Network Marketing, Imposter Syndrome, My Side Hustle Mistakes, and More: 20 Questions with Nick 219: Growing Traffic, Monetiz...
Feb 22, 2018•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast How would you like to add thousands of dollars a month to your bottom line, on autopilot? Sounds pretty good, right? Greg Hickman of System.ly has achieved this for his own 6-figure a month business and does the same for his clients using marketing automation and effective sales funnels. If you're wondering what marketing automation is, in Greg’s own words it's, “How to use technology to enable your sales and marketing and fulfillment strategy.” Greg is a master in the art of offering compelling...
Feb 15, 2018•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Women pay up to $2000 a month to hang out with Natalie Eckdahl for a few hours. The mother of 3 has turned her BizChix podcast (which started as a side hustle) into a thriving business based largely on paid mastermind groups. She curates groups of high-performing female entrepreneurs – and gets paid handsomely to do it. Is this a revenue stream you could add to your business? If you’re in a consulting, freelancing, or coaching role and trying to figure out what the next step is to scale up your ...
Feb 08, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Could a part-time blog really bring in that kind of cash? Rosemarie swears she only works 20 hours a week! Yes, The Busy Budgeter is back for her 3rd round on The Side Hustle Show, and it's a good one. If you missed the first two: In episode 142, Rosemarie Groner's blog was about a year old and earning $5k a month. She shared a step-by-step system for generating massive traffic from Pinterest, which I immediately implemented myself. A year later, in episode 199, she was earning $20-25k a month, ...
Feb 01, 2018•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast This should probably be episode 1, not 267, but if I'm being totally honest, I probably wasn't in a place personally or professionally to record it as episode 1. I’ve avoided doing a “mindset” episode for almost 5 because I didn’t think it was necessary. I thought if people are seeking out business information, entrepreneurship information, they’ve already got the right mindset. They know what’s up. They get it. But older and (hopefully) wiser, I’ve come to see the mindset conversation as an imp...
Jan 25, 2018•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
