The Side Hustle Show

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, online content, and tons more.She is also the co-creator of The Copy Cure, an online copywriting course with Marie Forleo to help you "write like you talk and make people love and buy what you sell."In this episode, we check out the sites from our brave volunteers and critique their language and structure. We looked at sites in e-commerce, service businesses, and blogs.Listen in for some common mistakes that could be killing your conversion rates along with Laura's copywriting tips for compelling lead magnet offers and taglines.I'm confident you'll get a ton of value from listening in on these website reviews and have some homework to go home and implement on your own site right away.Full Show Notes: Your Copy Sucks! Website Reviews from a Professional Copywriter

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 – capitalized on this gap in the market and started his own blog.Brett creates the bulk of his content interviewing food truck owners and influencers in the industry.He’s grown his blog to $60k a year in just 4 years through building an academy course, securing paid advertising, running AdSense, and selling ebooks.And spoiler alert: he never ended up starting that food truck!Tune in to hear Brett's content strategy, the different ways he monetizes his business, and how you can apply these methods to your own blog.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Build a $60k a Year Part-Time Blog

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 1000 words for his freelance writing, and most of his work is at least 2500 words ($750).He’s also started up a cool business at FreelanceWritersSchool.com teaching others how to follow in his footsteps.Tune in to hear how James landed his first clients, his strategies for growing a portfolio, and some of his favorite hacks to overcome writer's block.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Start a $1000/Month Freelance Writing Business in 60 Minutes a Day

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 bookings and a delivery guy from Craigslist handling the delivery.This is a very different side hustle from the online businesses we see more often, but Corey managed it with a small up-front investment and it set the cogs turning with possibilities of other industries this can be applied to.Tune in to hear how Corey found his first customers, grew his business through word-of-mouth and online marketing channels, and hired help to automate his business processes and remove himself from the day-to-day operations.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Start a Bounce House Rental Business (Investing in "Inflatable" Real Estate)

“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 already ranking well for high traffic “money” keywords – without building backlinks or promoting this content.How is he doing this?It’s not through longtail keywords.Quite the opposite, Matt goes after those high traffic keywords and outranks his competitors by producing epic content that people want to read.Tune in to hear Matt explain how he does his keyword research, how he formats his content to ensure strong on-page SEO, and why he’s seeing such rapid growth across all of his sites.Note: This is "round 2" of SEO for Bloggers. Round 1 was this conversation with Joseph Hogue last year.)Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: SEO for Bloggers: The Simple Way to Get More Free Traffic From Google

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 guest on episode 182, talking about investing in digital real estate.Why did Spencer decide to get into the Amazon FBA business?“I had an idea for a product I used every day, couldn’t find exactly what I wanted on Amazon. So, I decided to find a manufacturer that can make a variation of what I like,” Spencer said.Why was this business an attractive deal for Ace and his investors?“The thing that I liked about the deal was the different sources of income,” Ace said.I decided to invite them both on the Side Hustle Show to give you both sides of the deal.You’ll hear how Spencer built up the business so quickly, why he decided to sell up, and how Ace found himself on the other end of the deal.Tune in to hear how Spencer built an FBA business from $0-400k in less than 3 years with no prior experience in this private label space, and how Ace helps his clients raise the funds to buy online businesses.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Selling an Amazon FBA Business: My $425k Exit ... and the Guy Who Bought It

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-publishing their books on Amazon, Paul had "an epiphany.”By developing a group coaching program there was no limit to the number of authors he could work with.Paul dove right in with a live webinar to test his idea for a group coaching program without a huge audience or list of his own. With 5 students signing up on the spot at $1.5k each, he started work on the content and drip-feeding modules out on a weekly basis.Tune in to hear how Paul used the momentum from self-publishing books on Amazon to open up several other business opportunities before landing on the group coaching program.He covers how he set the price for his program, the methods and tools he uses to automate accepting new students, delivering the weekly modules, and where he goes from here.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Set Up and Sell a Group Coaching Program

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