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 like this style of show, you might consider checking out last year's round-up episode as well, which asked 25 people how they made their first side hustle or business income.You can see the participants and the approximate timestamps of their advice below. Enjoy!Full Show Notes: 27 "Weird" Productivity Hacks You Can Try Today

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 Sales and Marketing.(You can get it on Amazon, but you might want to get it at PerryMarshall.com for just "a penny plus shipping" -- which will get you a front row seat to some of the best copywriting and upsell sequences in the biz.)Over the last 15+ years, Perry has built a business as a copywriter, an author, and a sought-after trainer and consultant.In this episode we dive into the Tactical Triangle, looking for areas to improve traffic, conversions, and economics to double your business in the next 30 days.Tune in to hear Perry’s Star Principle, how to position your business to be #1, how to run an 80/20 survey to find out what your customers really want, and why you might consider adding a Power Guarantee to your business.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Tactical Triangle: How to Double your Business in 30 Days

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 opportunity.“Bottom line is I’m a middleman,” John said.John hit the pavement and started knocking on the doors of industrial businesses, large warehouses, distributors, and scrap yards.He asked if they had pallets and other shipping byproducts they didn’t need, what they were currently doing with these items, if they needed any items, and explained how he could help.Wanting to operate without storage space and employees John has found the perfect balance between supply and demand. He spends his mornings picking up items from one business and selling them on to another just a few miles away.“It’s quite simple…but has to be set up in the correct manner for it to work,” John said.It’s certainly one of the more interesting side hustles, and it sets the cogs turning to think of other niches that can fit this model.Tune in to hear how John found his first suppliers and buyers, how he sets his prices, and how he transports this stuff without having to store it.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Middleman Method: A Real-Life Example of Turning Trash into Treasure

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 little side side hustle is now John's full-time focus, and today GetCredo.com is generating $500-600k worth of deals for its partner digital marketing agencies.As the connector and facilitator of those deals, John takes a commission. It's affiliate marketing, just with a bit of a twist from the kind we've covered before.“I purposely set out to build a brand that is outside of just me,” John said. “I’m really trying to make this a high-touch service to really help businesses connect with the right agencies for their needs.”Tune in to hear how John earned his first finder's fee, how he's built up both sides of the Credo marketplace, and how he's priced his service in this high-touch affiliate marketing model.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: High-Touch Affiliate Marketing: How to Get Paid to Play Matchmaker in Your Niche

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 talks through the new benefits for pass-through entities, changes in C-Corp taxes, the new standard deduction amounts, changes to child tax credits, and more.Tune in to hear Josh talk through the most important tax changes and how they affect you as a small business owner or side hustle entrepreneur.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How the New Tax Law Impacts Entrepreneurs and Side Hustlers

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, Monetization, List-Building, a Day in the Life, and More: 20 Questions with Nick 198: Blogging, Branding, Book Writing, and Finding the Right Side Hustle for You: 20 Questions with Nick 181: SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Self-Publishing, Udemy, and More: 20 Questions with Nick A common piece of advice you’ll hear is to take audience questions and turn them into content, so here’s a meta example of that in action.This episode covers questions on blogging, affiliate marketing, productivity, my new email system, making time for your side hustle, the idea of guaranteed success, and more.Tune in to hear my responses to those questions and a dozen more below.Full Show Notes: Brilliant Blogging, Ruthless Productivity, and Guaranteed Success: 20 Questions with Nick

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 lead magnets to attract potential customers, setting up onboarding sequences and follow-up emails to keep them interested, and converting them into paying customers.The best part is that it doesn’t need to be complicated as his own simple 4-step formula from Facebook ad to paying customer proves. Plus, when your marketing automation sequence is set up it runs itself bringing in new clients all year round.Tune in to hear the types of lead magnets and sales strategies Greg sees working today, the questions you have to ask yourself before writing any email sequence, and how he communicates with prospects on an ongoing basis.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Systemize Your Business with Marketing Automation

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 business, a group mastermind program could be the answer.In fact, a paid mastermind was the first thing I sold on Side Hustle Nation, but I put the program on hold after our son was born. All of a sudden that extra hour or two in the evening became a lot harder to part with!I wanted to pick her brain on how she set everything up and sold it to her audience.“What I’m trying to create is an amazing brainstorming opportunity for the women that join the group,” Natalie said.Today she’s running five separate premium-priced masterminds for 5- and 6-figure entrepreneurs, with prices ranging from $600 to $2000 a month.But it almost didn’t happen. She was a few weeks away from putting BizChix on pause, when a fateful few customers sparked a major turning point.Tune in to hear how Natalie sets up her groups for success, structures the meetings, and 20x’d her rates in 3 years.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Set Up and Sell a Paid Mastermind Group

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, and shared her "date your list" and "core affiliate strategy." A few months after that recording, she started posting consistent $100k months from her blog, so of course I had to invite her back to hear what changed.If you guessed creating her own products and driving paid traffic, you'd be the big winner.“I eliminated anything that wasn’t important for my growth,” Rosemarie said.Tune in to hear how Rosemarie started selling her own products, the sales funnels tactics and tools she uses to turn subscribers into customers, and her tips to keep improving your ROI so you spend less time working while increasing your revenue.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Blogging ROI: From $18 to $100k a Month in 2.5 Years

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 important one, and one I’ve been overlooking for a long time.This is foundational stuff, and before you dismiss this as way to fluffy for a Side Hustle Show episode, let me give you a couple points to consider on the mindset front.The first comes from one of my favorite podcasts, Tropical MBA. Their theory is for entrepreneurs making: $0-100k - the barrier is mindset $100k - $1M - the barrier is marketing $1M + - the barrier is your team I’m sure there are counterpoints but I think there’s a lot of truth in that breakdown.The second point to consider comes from Dane Maxwell, who was a special guest on episode 119 of The Side Hustle Show, during my public coaching experiment. Dane created several software businesses before founding The Foundation to teach others what he’d learned.He said the easiest way to test if your mindset is in the right place is to ask if you have or are you getting the results you want?If not, something must be missing, right?There’s some brutal honesty in that question, and it took me a minute to wrap my head around it, but the gist of it is this: if you’re not where you want to be, there’s room for some mindset growth or changes.In this episode I’ll share 10 traits of the hustler’s mindset and do my best to illustrate those with examples from either my own businesses or those of my guests.Full Show Notes: The Hustler’s Mindset: The 10 Traits of Successful Side Hustle Entrepreneurs