The Side Hustle Show

Jodi Carlson has been running her blog LeaderConnectingLeaders.com part-time since 2014 and has slowly built it up to $5-6k a month in revenue.The earnings come from a combination of mostly digital product sales, as well as advertising, and affiliate relationships.The surprising thing – to me at least – is that she’s done this in a niche that theoretically doesn’t have any money.Her readers and customers are almost all volunteers and they’re donating their time to local non-profit groups – in this case, Girl Scout groups.On the surface that makes it seem like it’s as tough a niche as any to tackle, which makes Jodi’s results even more impressive.She brings more than two decades of experience in Girl Scouts to the table, as a scout, then as a troop leader, and even though the blog didn’t start out with dollar signs in mind she’s turned it into a substantial income stream.“I actually started it to help myself, and to then help troop leaders in my community,” Jodi said.Jodi started documenting the activities she was doing with her Scout Troops in her blog and making PDF books so she could refer to them again in the future, and shared her articles with a small circle of other leaders in her community.It wasn’t long before Troop leaders further afield started asking for her activity books. This sparked the idea to start selling her books and growing her blog.Tune in to hear how Jodi comes up with product ideas and prices those, how she made her first sales, how she’s grown her traffic to more than 100k pageviews a month, and income to $5k + a month – all while working full-time and raising a family.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The $5k a Month Part-Time Girl Scout BlogRelated: Check out my free video series on how to start a blog.

Could you live for free?That's what The Side Hustle Snowball framework proposes: to erase your expenses with new income streams.Start out with your smallest monthly expenses and work your way up: Gym memberships Life insurance Netflix Utilities Cell phone bill Car payments Car insurance Day care Student loan payments Rent or mortgage We all want our business to cover our costs of living and then some, but the "Snowball" framework (apologies to Dave Ramsey) allows you to work your way up to that ultimate goal of financial independence.Celebrate the small wins along the way.In this post / podcast episode, I'll break down the 15 income streams I'm working on right now. Which ones can you start or add to your existing business?Full Show Notes: The 15 Income Streams I'm Working on Right Now

Things were going great; he had a bunch of happy customers, he’d quit his engineering job to focus on it full-time, and he was doing what he loves.You might remember Jacques Hopkins from episode 223, where he broke down how he turned his hobby of playing piano into a solid $20k a month online business at Pianoin21days.com.BUT….Between customer support, email, social media, phone sales, and all the other day-to-day tasks, it was taking a full 40 hours a week to run.Since then, Jacques set out to automate, optimize, and outsource different elements of the business. Those initiatives cut back his time commitment to maintain the biz to just 10 minutes a day — and still grew revenue to $30k a month.Jacques isn’t one to sit still, he’s using his newfound time freedom to work on more strategic growth projects and his other project; TheOnlineCourseGuy.com.He’s launched a podcast interviewing other people who have successfully launched online courses, and sells his own course giving customers a behind the scenes look at how he built and sold his courses on Pianoin21days.com.Tune in to hear how Jacques “plugged holes” in his course, outsourced time-consuming repetitive tasks to a virtual assistant, and successfully increased his revenue while reducing the time spent on his business.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Catching Up with the $30k a Month Piano Teacher — How He Grew His Business While Cutting Back His Hours 97%

300!In this special 300th edition of The Side Hustle Show, I’m excited to feature 5 listeners who took action on specific ideas they heard on the show or read on the Side Hustle Nation blog -- and turned that action into concrete results.Those results range from their first $1000 on the side, up to a $700k e-commerce empire, but the point is they made something happen.Tune in to hear how they got it done, and check the text summary below.Full Show Notes: 5 Listeners Who Took Action and Are Seeing Awesome Results

Remember the Red Paperclip Guy from a few years ago? In 2005, an out-of-work Kyle MacDonald started with a single red paperclip and traded his way up to a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan.Remarkably, this barter adventure took only 14 trades and was completed in less than a year. Kyle started out small, each time seeking something “bigger and better” in exchange.For example, his first trade was the red paperclip for a pen shaped like a fish. Then he traded the fish pen for a doorknob, and on and on up the ladder.The story certainly has some feel-good elements to it, and after a while the media attention definitely helped speed the process along, but I think it’s worthwhile to revisit because we’re all trying to “trade up.”By “trading up”, it’s important to note I’m not necessarily talking about acquiring a bigger house or a better car, but more along the lines of making bigger impacts and living better stories.I was reminded of the red paperclip story by last week's episode with Rob "The Flea Market Flipper" Stephenson. He talked about a challenge inside his community to start with something small and keep flipping the profits into bigger deals to see how much you could trade up over the course of a year.I think we all have a red paperclip story. Like Kyle, even starting with almost nothing, you can make big things happen with a little initiative and a little help from others along the way.This episode is about connecting the events that got you to where you are today, and thinking about where you want to go tomorrow.What’s the next trade you’d like to make?In the spirit of the red paperclip story, I’m going to use my own entrepreneurial journey to illustrate this; and similar to Kyle, I’ll use a series of 14 key decisions or trade points. But unlike Kyle, this took me a lot longer than a year!Full Show Notes: Trading Up: From $8.65 an Hour to Retired at 25, Plus the Next 10 Years

Rob is a professional "money multiplier."The good news, he says, is it's a skill that can be learned.You might remember Rob "The Flea Market Flipper" Stephenson from episode 147 in late 2015. At that time, he was earning $30,000-$40,000 a year flipping random products on the side from his day job.Since then, the father of 3 has taken his buy low, sell high model and turned it into a full-time 6-figure operation.Rob doesn’t discriminate what the products are he’s flipping, as long as he can pick it up for a great price he’ll flip it.I can’t blame him, since some of these single deals are worth thousands of dollars in profit. In fact, Rob only buys items he estimates he can 10x when he flips them.Since we last spoke Rob has fine-tuned his processes for finding and flipping items. He still hits the flea markets weekly, but he also uses some interesting tools and apps to find more items.He’s also found a way to save big on shipping cost, enabling him to go after bulky items with even bigger markups.In this “where are they now” episode, I invited Rob back to learn how he scaled up his business, what his buying criteria or flipping process looks like today, and what he’s got cooking next.Full Show Notes: $100k a Year Flipping Random Items: The Return of the Flea Market Flipper

"I'm this close to firing you right now."That's what Hung Pham's boss told him when he reached out about ways to get his team more engaged with the company's overall mission."If you want passion and purpose," she said, "you've got to look somewhere else."Frustrated with the internal cultures at the organizations he worked in, Hung wanted to attend a culture-building conference.The only problem? That event didn't exist.Sensing a void in the market, Hung was inspired to create Culture Summit.With nothing more than a website, a few contacts booked as speakers, and a whole load of enthusiasm, Hung started emailing prospective attendees and getting the word out within the right circles.He had more than 200 attendees for that first event and was profitable from day one.By year two, Hung’s Culture Summit, at CultureSummit.co was a 6-figure business – all on the side from his day job.This was after Hung almost gave up and his partner left the business when they didn’t sell any tickets for the first three months.Tune in to hear how Hung validated his idea for his conference, how he sold his first tickets, and how he’s grown this side hustle into a full-time business with attendees from 5 continents, and where he wants to go from here.Full Show Notes: Event Hosting: How to Bring Your Tribe Together and Build a 6-Figure Conference on the Side

“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 challenges.“[My story] resonated with people in a pretty serious way,” he said, and he started seeing traction within the community.He started monetizing his blog from day one with affiliate products and continued to add more revenue streams to scale up his business with courses, speaking gigs, books, videos, and more as his traffic grew.Today his blog in a full-time business. He's had the opportunity to travel the country with his dog doing speaking gigs, has helped hundreds of students pass their ARE, and has some interesting plans for the future.Tune in to hear how Mike grew his blog, how it rings the cash register in at least half a dozen different ways, and the strategies you may be able to lift for your own project.Full Show Notes: Blogging for Multiple Income Streams – How a Part-Time Blog Became a Diverse Revenue Engine

“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 used to start and grow his cleaning business, and then remove himself from the day-to-day operations.Tune in to hear how Chris came up with the idea for his cleaning business, how he found his first customers and cleaners, and how he manages the entire business remotely.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: A Local Service Business that Scales - From Zero to $60k a Month in Revenue

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 purchase, collecting the retail price and buying the goods at wholesale.Rene went through a very specific product research process and ended up starting BounceHouseStore.com, where he sells bounce houses and other products related to bounce houses.He’s already started scaling his business on the success of his bounce house store. Rene has now outsourced the day-to-day operations of this store and started a new drop shipping store that has already turned over double what his bounce house did in its first year.There’s no luck here. “It’s hard work,” Rene said. That and some careful planning and execution.Tune in to hear why Rene was attracted to drop shipping, the criteria he used to find the bounce house niche, and how he generated $300k of sales in his first year in business.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Start an Online Store with No Ideas and No Inventory (and still sell $300k in your first year)