How to Earn $15K Monthly with Signs

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0:42Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at rss.com. Welcome back to the podcast, we have a really interesting side hustle for you today. We really feel like some of these smaller ones that you wouldn't necessarily think of and that maybe there's not a lot of content about are some of the best, most profitable ways to have a side hustle. So this one is all about having signs inside of restaurants and then having different little advertisements on them.

1:23So Jane's going to break this down. Jane, where did you hear about this and what's it all about? Yeah, so before we get into that, I wanted to tell everyone every week we post a bonus episode over on our school community. We have over a thousand members. I think if you were listening about a month ago, we had about 300 members. We've now grown to over 1 ,100 members in the last month. We were seeing some absolutely crazy growth in the school community. And it's an amazing place. There's so many different people building so many interesting things. If you want to see the inside scoop of what Jamie and I are building, go check it out and join over a thousand members inside the school community.

1:58Okay, so this side hustle is pretty interesting. My wife actually brought it up to me. She was interested in it. And I wanted to cover on the podcast today because there is a one hour long interview, which I recommend if you're gonna start this business, it'd be interesting for you to go check out on the Chris Corner podcast. But that being said, if you don't wanna spend an entire hour to get the just of the business, I'm gonna try to give you a quick five, 10 minute summary of how it works and some of the most interesting things and the financials on this business, because there's a lady that started this.

2:27Essentially how this business works is she would go to local businesses and put a daily special sign. She would give them a free sign, kind of like a chalk sign that they could draw on. They could draw their daily specials on it. And at the bottom of that sign, if you're watching on video, there's a little section that says support local Missoula businesses. She's based out of Missoula and it has six or seven ads for local businesses. Now, the way she ran this business, it cost her about$350 to get the sign printed at a sign printing stand or a store. And it's kind of like this certain type of material that you can draw on with those chalk markers and erase them.

3:04So it's got a special finish on it, but it costs about$350. She would get it printed with the local businesses like printed straight onto it, which I thought was kind of crazy because I would have assumed, you know, maybe you have like a little section below. And honestly, if I was to run this business personally, I probably would have like maybe a piece of like plexiglass on the bottom that you could switch out the ads because every year she would have to re get it printed. So but anyways, I think she had a good system for it. So you have six or seven ads at the bottom. And each of those, she would go to local businesses and charge them$600 a year to get added on to this.

3:44And how she would pitch it is she said she would always go find the restaurant first. So she'd be like, hey, you're going to be in Tiffany's Burger Shop in Missoula. They typically have, you know, 300 customers come in every day. So in a year, that's, you know, times 365. So she'd give them an estimated amount of foot traffic. She said the sign is going to be at the beginning of the business. So everyone that walks in is going to see it. It's going to have their local specials. So people that are waiting in line are going to actually be looking at the sign and reading it. And so she would go find a you know she'd go find a restaurant first and be like hey can I give you a free sign and I think she actually made them do a few agreements she was like it's like a free sign you can put your specials on it I guess a lot of restaurants are kind of strapped for cash so they're like okay um they're you know and and she's like and it will help support local businesses there'd be like a little ad at the bottom of it um and and then you know and they're like okay fine they get like a free sign they can put their specials on and they you know quote unquote support local businesses once she had the restaurant signed in signed up then she would go to all businesses, tell them the foot traffic estimations and be like, it's$600 for a whole year.

4:45And you get this sign. So she would sell from the ads per sign. I think she would sell about 30, um, about$3 ,600 in total, um, per sign that they would generate. She would spend$350 on the sign. So, you know, she's making around$3 ,200 per year per sign. Um, today, after about six months of doing this business. She said it was actually pretty easy. I guess$600 isn't like a crazy amount of money, especially when a business is like, look, you're going to get on the sign. You can tell them actual foot traffic numbers. So I think that's interesting to people. It's going to have this much foot traffic and you get it for an entire year.

5:24If you don't like it, whatever, 600 bucks. I think a lot of local businesses would have 600 bucks that they could spend on something like that. She said in the first six months, the business was making between $10 ,000 and$15 ,000 in monthly revenue. And she said she had about an 85 % to 90 % profit margin on all of those boards. So with all of that being said, Jamie, give me your take on this local business. What do you think? I mean, I think it's pretty smart. I think, you know, it's sort of like back in the day, you'd have at a coffee shop or something, there'd be a bunch of business cards sitting there.

5:58But a lot of places don't like to do that because it gets just messy and things like that. So I can see where a sign, you know, with your daily specials, I could make some money. What I'm having a hard time with is like, you know, how do you make sure that business is actually going to keep their sign out, you know, and actually use it? Do you know, is there any incentive for the restaurant or the business to keep the sign out? Or is it just like a good wealth thing? I don't think there was necessarily an incentive, but she said she would make them basically sign a contract that had two stipulations.

6:29one of them being like we'll give you a free sign it's going to cost us 350 to print it and make it but we'll give it to you for free and i think even the markers or whatever um but you have to keep it like at the front of your store and the second rule and so like if the business didn't want to do it they would just say no but if they agreed to it at the beginning then you know and then the second one was that it had to be up for a full year including if the business sold to another person that whoever took over the restaurant would also have to keep it up. And she said she thought about other restaurants or other types of businesses, but restaurants just had the highest foot traffic.

7:06And so that one seemed like the best one to, to like, to work with basically. And so yeah, she got a lot of those. But yeah, if someone bought the restaurant out, now I'm not sure how she would handle if, you know, if someone like went bankrupt, and if that would, you know, would mean she would have to go and like refund them or something. so I'm not exactly sure how that works but yeah at the end of the day she she basically just tried to get them all on a contract interesting yeah I'm trying to think of you know if you're listening this podcast how would you use AI to go about about growing a business like this my the first thing that comes to mind for me would be like the outreach and maybe finding these businesses because you're going to need, one, a restaurant business that maybe has a lot of foot traffic.

7:55You're going to want to get the contact info. Although at the same time, it's probably going to be more effective to go door-to-door with it. But I could see that being another way would be in the actual design of the graphics. But, Jayden, what would you say? How would you use AI for a business like this? Yeah, I think the graphic design could be a big element of it. It's nothing too crazy, but the outreach would be big. She said that most of her, a lot of how it would work is she would DM them on Instagram. And then if they followed up, she would go there in person and talk to them. And so I think there's like a little bit of the in-person side of it.

8:34And then a lot of it was Instagram. So I've actually used Claude to go, and I just logged into my Instagram account on like Chrome. And I had Claude go and I have a podcast studio in Arizona. And so I had it sending DMs to realtors in Arizona about coming and recording at our studio. And I had some good success doing that. Claude was able to do it. There are limitations because Instagram doesn't really want bots going and messaging people. But if I, I'm like, look, here's like a list of people. I had Claude go and like find a list of realtors, go find which ones had Instagram handles, go log in and send them like some personalized DMs.

9:09So I think there's a lot of ways to like sort of tastefully do that, especially if you're giving them some sort of offer. In this particular business though, I just wanted to cover some of the businesses that she reaches out to if you're interested. And whether it's this type of business or any other type of advertising business or even a business where you're trying to work and maybe make like websites or do marketing that's AI powered marketing for local businesses, all of these are good ones that have budgets and work well. So this should be a good list for anyone. One of the big ones is HVAC service and repair, dentists, realtors, roofing.

9:42She had some like online banking ones for like local, you know, community credit unions or banks. And then she had gyms. And then at the very bottom of all of her billboards, she had a big section that says local marketing that gets you seen without burning your budget. And she has her phone number and her website and some like graphics and pictures, which are just AI generated, I think that are kind of funny, you know, a guy holding some money that's on fire. But it's actually for her. So if someone sees this and is like, oh, this is a cool idea. I want to get on one of these billboards. What would it cost?

10:13It's also like advertising her billboard business as well. So she has that kind of like at the bottom of the whole thing spanning across the bottom. And I thought that was a good solution. Yeah, I like that a lot. I think, you know, and another one other thought I had with this is I I have a, there's actually a realtor in my neighborhood who is actually, I would say she's my competition because I'm a realtor, but she's also the VP of the brokerage I work for. Okay. So friendly competition. But she actually did a digital version of this where she basically just made an online business directory for Grand Rapids, which we've talked about directories in the school community before.

10:59but she's basically I think trying to do this in a digital way where it's like to be a part of the directory you can sign up and pay you know or or maybe she's just trying to market her own realtor services through it but that's an I think a digital version of this but there's something about seeing something in person as well I think probably would have more reach more conversion than yeah but I think it's a great I think it's a great idea I think it's probably something that not a lot of people are doing. And when there's not a lot of competition, there's opportunity to make money. So 100%. All right, guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today.

11:37If you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you leave the podcast a review. Guys, we are so close to getting 200 reviews. If you haven't left a review already, it would help the show out immensely and we would be super, super thrilled. We read them all. We really appreciate them. But hope you guys all have a fantastic rest of your day. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more.

12:16Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. Even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at rss.com.