576: Audience Growth Hacks w/ a Multi 6-Figure Creator

23:24They'll say, hey, we'll run some impressions for your show if you run some impressions for this new show in our network, because we've already tapped our network to promote that show. I think that's a great opportunity. I've seen anecdotally, maybe we can test this if I could send you a charitable link, that if I go on a show as a guest, and it works a lot better if I'm talking about money and optimization, this one's a little different, but the conversion rate is like somewhere around three or 4%. Three or 4 % of the people that hear that episode go and check out my show. If I do a promo swap, which involves them reading like a 60 second promo for my show, that usually converts around half to 1%.

24:02So being a guest is somewhere on the order of like five to 10 times better in terms of conversion. But it's a lot harder to be a guest. It's just you have to have a thing this day, like it's a lot of work. But promo swaps are a lot easier. You say, hey, I'm going to read an ad for your show, you read an ad for my show. And that still converts pretty well. Like if you can get 1 % of someone's audience, that's awesome. The catch is that you need to offer something in return. So if your show has 1 ,000 downloads, you can only offer 1 ,000 promotions for something. So it's a little bit tough. The hack here, and it hasn't worked a lot, but it has worked a little, is to say, hey, I'll have you on as a guest.

24:39And maybe in return, you can promote my show on your podcast. And when that happens, people aren't thinking, oh, impression count comparison. They're just thinking, oh, yeah, that's cool. So I have had an example where I had a guest on my show and then they promoted my show in the form of like a 60 second promo, but their audience was like four or five times bigger and there was no discussion about the size of the audiences. So that's maybe an option if you can land a guest that has a podcast, they might be willing to talk about you. They might also be willing to swap guests. You can go on their show, they go on your show.

25:14I think for some reason, when you're talking about guests, it's not about the numbers. But when you're talking about swapping ad impressions, it's just like, okay, should we swap 30 ,000 or 5 ,000 or 25 ,000? So it can get a little trickier. You could also just pay. Like, you could also just pay for someone to read ads for your show. You could pay for someone to per subscriber on platforms like Sparkloop to pay for subscribers. You could pay for ads on podcast platforms. And in general, I think it's not a good thing to do until you're confident the ROI works. And so early on, you probably aren't monetizing your audience that well.

25:48So to spend on growth can be just money out and no money in. However, I am a fan of very small budget advertising on platforms that give you metrics as a way to test your show. So, for example, Overcast is a podcast player app. It's not the biggest. It's not Apple. It's not Spotify. But that works to your benefit. you can buy ads on Overcast for as little, depending on your category, as a few hundred dollars. And when you do, and I'm looking at an example here that I ran, I bought an ad in the leisure category for$270. And what they said was, we expect 350 to 500 people to tap on this ad. And from that, we expect you to get 20 to 30 subscriptions.

26:32So I pay the$270 and I got 615 taps which is above their range but i got 61 subscribers which is almost 2x there actually it's more than 2x their range so what that told me is compared to the average show the title the description the cover art is probably about average you got about the number of clicks they expected maybe on the high end of average maybe it's a little good maybe i've been good about the way i described the show but there are people that subscribed is 2x what they saw which made me feel like, wow, I have content people like. They checked it out, they clicked on it, and they subscribed.

27:09If you did that experiment and yours was, you didn't get 20 to 30, you got five, then I would say, go back to the drawing board on the content before you do anything else because something isn't working. Now, maybe you picked the health and fitness category and your show is true crime and it didn't make any sense. Okay, that's fine. But I like doing a little bit of paid experimentation because it allows you to get in front of an audience that's completely not bought into you. If you go guest on a show, people are like, oh, I like this guy. I kind of want to give him a shot. But when you're just seeing an ad, you're not like, oh, let me click on this ad just to be nice.

27:42You actually have to have something people are interested in. So that was a little bit of a detour from what you asked, which was about cross promotion and community stuff. But I do think that paid growth at small scale is a good way to test your show. And then once you're monetizing, I think it's a good way to actually grow if the ROI is there. However, a few other things. Current events. One of the few things that people search for in podcasts is topical things. So when inflation was happening, they'll go, oh, inflation. If your show covers current events, make sure that the title kind of really hits home on it because there are people searching for topics.

28:19It's not going to be the easiest way to grow. but I just to the extent you're thinking about a couple topics and one of them is in the news a lot could be a good thing to post about that week easy one I put in my signature on my email for the first year of the show if you want to upgrade your life money or travel check out this podcast I can't remember the exact way I worded it I probably should go back and look at I think I have it in this slide deck I gave but the funniest thing was I actually got a few people respond and they're like thanks so much for suggesting I checked it's like they didn't actually realize it was even an email signature yeah i said want to upgrade your life money and travel check out my podcast and they thought it was just like me telling them like this is a cool way to do a thing and they didn't realize it was like me putting an ad in my email signature but everywhere you are and by the way the person that said that was the response from a live support chat request that turned into email for floor mats for our car that were the wrong size so i got a listener by responding to customer support for another product with a link to my podcast.

29:23So like everywhere I can look, how can I make sure that people know I'm doing this thing, have an opportunity to do it? If you like to write, maybe offer to guest post on someone's site, offer to guest write a newsletter. All these things can, I think, help. Yeah, I think the email signature is underused marketing real estate. I like that one. I remember I wore, I think I had like a hashtag podcaster shirt or something from a podcast movement conference or a FinCon conference or something. I wore that to Trader Joe's and the guy's like, are you a podcaster? Like, you know, look down. Yeah. He's like, hey, what's your show all about?

29:56So I tell him, he's like, dang, man, I'm going to check that out. So you never know where people are. So we have had stories of people like going out at local fairs and festivals and handing out some little trinket or something that encourages people to download. It's like, you got to get creative with this stuff. And I think that's really the maybe the main takeaway is like everywhere you are, you got to be kind of pushing your thing a little bit, but in a way that's like, hey, if this is a fit for you, let's make it out. And that's kind of how I approached my initial email outreach to I didn't have any audience to speak of, but had 10 years of Gmail history or whatever it was.

30:30So just, you know, email, hey, it's been a minute, what are you up to these days? I just started this new project. If you know anybody interested in making extra money, like, perfect, like send them my way. You want to plant that seed that this is what you're talking about. Like if you want to become the go-to person for whatever niche it is, so you want to be top of mind for those referrals. So I think that is a helpful one. I want to switch gears to the monetization side. And especially as it relates to the paid advertising math, if you're buying subscribers from Overcast in this case for three to$10 per subscriber, and then turning around and selling ads at a, even a$50 CPM, Like you're going backwards in a hurry there.

31:11Talk to me about how the show is monetized or how the business in a broader sense is monetized. And what's bringing the cash register? Well, it's like you were reading my mind because I was just doing the math to answer this question, not knowing you would ask it. So I was looking and said, OK, well, let's say you said 50. So the industry averaged 20,$25 CPM. But let's say you got a really cool niche and you could charge a little extra and you got$50 CPM, which means for every thousand downloads, an advertiser pay you$50. And let's say you can do one episode a week. So you're doing 52 episodes a year.

31:44And let's say you're doing it for an hour and you can put five ads in an episode. So for every 1 ,000 listeners, you're getting$50 times 52 weeks times five ads, you're getting$13 ,000. Now, if you have 50 ,000 listeners, you're getting a lot more than that. But that would say you're getting$13 ,000 per 1 ,000 listeners a year. Divided by 1 ,000, you're getting$13 per listener per year. most listeners aren't listening to every episode so let's say they listen to a third of the episodes you're probably getting about four dollars a listener per year if they listen to a third i don't actually have great data and one of the worst things about podcasting is that the analytics but if you assume someone listens to one third of your episodes and they stop after 12 months and they never listen again i think you could probably expect that listener to be worth somewhere between, let's call it$2 to$4.

32:36So if you could buy them for$1, great. If you could monetize outside of just ads, so we talk a lot about credit cards and we have a credit card affiliate partner. If people want to sign up for credit card links, they can go to the cards page on our website, allthehacks.com slash cards. And some people click those links, sign up for credit cards and support the show. And that increases the revenue we make per year. Sometimes we have affiliate deals with certain partners. We launched a membership. I sell a spreadsheet that I made to optimize credit cards. And so if you add all that up, maybe you can get that number up closer to$10.

33:10And if all of a sudden you've got it to$10 and it costs you$4 to acquire a listener and you think you can make$10 per listener, well, then it's just a matter of how quickly can you make that$10 so you can recycle the cash. And for me, it's not that fast. So I haven't spent a lot of money on paid growth. But if you had a course and that course allowed you to monetize. And you said, on average, we can sell a$500 course in the first few weeks and we sell it to one in a hundred people. Well, then that means you can make$5 for every new listener. So if you could buy listeners for two bucks and you could sell the course within a week, you should spend unlimited money on growth until those economics stop working.

33:49Ads is a path to monetization. It is definitely not the only path. I have met people that monetize their podcast through coaching, who monetize their podcast through masterminds, who monetize their podcast by planning trips, consulting. There's just lots of selling products, selling service. There's just so many ways. Advertising is one, but typically it's probably the hardest one to get going only because most advertisers don't want to spend$50 to advertise. So in that example I gave, to advertise on an episode with a thousand downloads, it would be$50 an episode. Most advertisers, it's just not worth their time.

34:26So I typically think that you cross a threshold where the advertiser is spending $1 ,000 per episode to advertise and it starts to become interesting. But to get to$1 ,000 an episode at even a$20 CPM means you need almost 50 ,000 downloads. Not to say you couldn't get there with a smaller number of downloads, with a more niche show, but I would say when you're not at 10 to 20 ,000 downloads an episode, the advertising conversations are just much, much harder. That's helpful to know. But to your point, advertising, kind of a longer term play, because it takes a while to reach that kind of audience size.

35:03More with Chris in just a moment, including the other ways he's monetizing all the hacks. But whether you're a student juggling multiple assignments, a creative professional collaborating on a complex project, or just a busy entrepreneur trying to streamline your workflow, our sponsor Notion AI has got your back. With its intuitive interface and intelligent algorithms, this all-in-one workspace helps you stay focused, organized, and ahead of the game. You may have heard of Notion as a place to manage your projects, to take and keep notes, and store important documents and process files. In fact, Chris is about to mention Notion as the place where he tracks all of his online business revenue.

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36:12Try Notion AI for free when you go to Notion.com slash side hustle. That's all lowercase letters, Notion.com slash side hustle to try out the incredible power of Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting the show. Thank you for that. So try Notion AI for free right now at Notion.com slash side hustle. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100 % of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot. They phased down those what ifs and they got their answers through taking action.

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37:28Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. Shopify.com slash side hustle. the affiliate side much easier to do after you're collecting emails so is there a coherent or consistent like call to action to join the all the hacks newsletter that you found effective in your case the best way i found to grow the newsletter is to do swaps with other newsletters because the newsletter readers are actually listening to that or so convert kit has this creator network where they've made it easy for you to partner and share things share newsletters with each other with creators. But I have found it pretty hard to get people to convert cross-channel.

38:07The one way I did it was I did a survey and I did a giveaway. And I said, hey, if you want extra entries to the giveaway, you can go follow me on social or follow the YouTube. And then I realized now I'm just getting people to subscribe and follow, but they're not actually engaged on those platforms. So that was probably a terrible idea. Maybe it juiced the numbers, but it didn't actually result in like a passionate listener base. I think what's really important is getting the kinds of people who really want to engage in your content, really want to be those thousand true fans, which is an article that if someone hasn't read, I'm sure you have and you will link to in the show notes, which is fantastic.

38:40But there are a few other things we haven't talked about that you can do to build that. So show notes is an interesting one. I find that diehard fans get a lot of value of the fact that I'm putting links to everything we talk about in the show notes. I'm putting some chapters in there. So if you're listening on Spotify, for example, you can jump between the different sections. You want to make sure it's easy for people to find all this content. So I think that's one way to build that excited, passionate, loyal listener base. Who is going to recommend your show to their friends and ask that? I say, hey, could you leave a recommendation?

39:11Those are some things. Leaving reviews helps validate your show when people are searching the app store. Asking your listeners to share with their friends helps grow the podcast. There's a lot of stuff you can do there when you build that diehard audience early on. Solicit lots of feedback. Give out your email address. Tell people how to get in touch with you. Run a survey. Try to understand that early audience so that you can do more. And one great question. I asked everyone, what other shows do you listen to? What blogs do you read? What newsletters do you subscribe to? Because I was like, I want to find more people like these people.

39:44So now I'm like, oh, the biggest overlap of my show is, let's say, Choose Fi, Financial Independence Podcast. I'm like, great. And I don't know if it is, but I was giving it as an example because I know you and I both know that show. that would be a great podcast for me to try to come up with a really tailored pitch to go on because clearly people that listen to my show like that show there are probably other people on that show because it's bigger than mine that haven't heard of my show so i should go on that show yeah that's a great thing to ask any user certainly even if you have 25 people on your email list you could just ask them individually like hey where did you find out about this what other shows do you listen to?

40:23That's a question I don't know that I've considered on my audience surveys in recent years. But talk to me about this membership that you've launched because we've talked to a handful of other podcasters who have membership products as kind of their primary monetization. And like what's behind the paywall there? So when I launched a membership, I had this idea that I didn't want it to be a content gated membership, right? I didn't want to do two episodes a week and put one behind the paywall. I like getting the content out there. I like impacting lives. So that was not what I want. I didn't want ad free because when I think about brands I partner with, they're only products I use.

41:00If I get an email from a brand and they're like, here's our product. If I couldn't see myself using it and then I actually will try it or use it already, I'm like, I don't want to advertise this brand. I want people to know that when I'm saying sleep on an eight sleep cover on your mattress, it's because I love my eight sleep. Like I actually use it every single day. And I'm sad when I travel and don't have it. That's the kind of brands that I want to work with. So what I wanted to do was come up with something that would add more value. And so what that started at was around the deal standpoint, was me going to some brands and saying, hey, can you come up with exclusive offers that you will give our members that we have four or five brands that offer discounts you can't get anywhere else.

41:40So if you're doing estate planning for your family, Trust and Will has a 50 % off promo for all the Hacks members. I kind of envisioned what would AARP look like if it was for our generation. It's like all these retired people join this club to get these deals and information, but they're all focused on these like random deals that are not relevant to our audience. And so what would it look like to start to build that out? So there's a lot of stuff coming down the road. We're working on a hotel upgrade program. We're working on discounted hotel rates. We have deals. And then the other is just like kind of freeform conversations with me and with the community about topics that are just maybe not polished enough to be an episode.

42:22And so I'll do listener questions where I'll go in and I'll just demo me using a bunch of tools. So I did one where it's like, how do you search for flights? And I made an episode where I just, or a member's call, we do once a month member call. And I just walked through how I use these tools, which doesn't suit itself well for a podcast. Maybe it does for YouTube, but my audience isn't really on YouTube. So we do monthly members calls. But what it's evolved to be, and I haven't launched this yet, but it came from the last members call. And if you do join the membership, you can immediately get access to a site that gives you all the past member calls, all the past member emails, all the deals, a directory of people.

42:59was people wanted to have a forum to talk to other people that were like them, other optimizers. And so we're going to start doing like weekly debriefs of episodes. So episode comes out on Wednesday, maybe on a Friday, we have a call where you can dial in and talk about how am I going to, for example, in a couple of weeks, we're doing an episode on meditation. How am I applying meditation? How has it worked for you? What didn't stick? What did stick? How have you tried it? What do you think about the tactics that were in this episode? So it's kind of a little community element there. We have intentionally not built a community platform.

43:33Our membership is$99 a year or$19 a month. It's not a high enough price point that I think people are willing to commit to a ton, a ton of work. And so I didn't want a platform where people are posting in a forum and responding because I just, I asked all these members, I said, how often do you really want to do this? And they're like once a month and you can't have an engaged, lively community online with hundreds of people participating once a month. So we're probably going to do an annual summit where we can all get together and do something. How many people do you have signed up so far? I think we're close to 300.

44:08Okay, 300 people at 100 bucks a year. And it's like, yeah, adding on incremental revenue streams. It's really cool. So it's interesting having a revenue stream that is like recurring annually, but you don't know how many are going to sign up next month. So like when you launch your membership, you might have your best day is going to be like in your first week and then your next month it's like you know does it keep coming in regularly well only as often as you talk about it and add features to it and all that good stuff yeah that's really cool it kind of goes to show there's a lot of different ways to do it and to structure it this exclusive deals model we're building aarp for our generation it's kind of like you buy the costco membership so you get access to the deals and you still got to go to the warehouse.

44:51I guess you could shop online. We had Jack Spierko on the show years ago, who hosts the Survival podcast. And this is kind of how he structured his membership. I forgot. He's like the insider. He had a name for it. And it was exactly this. It was exclusive deals on a ton of products and services where if you're trying to become more self-reliant, you're going to want the stuff anyways. That's kind of how he sold it. Like, look, you're going to be buying this stuff anyways. You might as well get a deal. And that's how he sold it. So I think that's a creative way to monetize as well. You mentioned selling your card tracker as a digital product.

45:26So now we're up to four different revenue streams between advertising, affiliates, the membership, and digital product sales. Anything else on that front? Yeah, let me look. I've got an entire Notion page that is like I track all my revenue in. So I've done a little bit of coaching for people who are trying to get a podcast off the ground and really just want more than someone to just listen to this episode. They're like, can you help me for the next three months get that off the ground? It's not cheap. I think one of the hardest things, especially when you have kids, to value is your time. But I have one podcast coaching client.

45:58There's one podcast that I met who had a big show but had never monetized. And it was a similar audience. And they said, I really like all your advertisers. Can you just help me monetize my show? Like a little podcast agency with one client to help people do that. I'm in the process of building out a course. So we talk a lot about credit card points and miles. but you've got to go back and listen to 20, 25 episodes and piece it all together. But if you want like a front start to finish, like course on how to level up credit card points and miles, I'm going to take all the knowledge that you could go get free listening to the podcast, but make it really easy to follow and really actionable and put it together in a course.

46:35And that's not out, but that's something I am working on right now. And then I've given a couple of talks, like someone reached out to me and was like, can you come to our company and tell everyone how to optimize their credit cards and we'll pay you and i was like i will do that so we've got speaking we've got a podcast agency we've got coaching we've got memberships advertisers and then affiliates sure i was gonna ask i think the last we recorded was early 2022 and this was the 33 life hacks episode great episode encourage people to go back and listen to that and i think you're still working the day job at that point so at some point in between then and now decided to call it quits at what point were you comfortable saying i guess this is a business now i'm going all in far later than i should have is the honest i always tell people if you're thinking about quitting your job ask yourself what advice you would give to someone in your position now taking that advice is a lot harder i probably would have given myself the advice to quit six months earlier and i think i was in a little bit of a unique situation because we just had a child so i was on parental leave so the difference between quitting while on parental leave and not was you know, it's not like there's a lot more work.

47:44But the thing that really ultimately pushed me over was work just got busy enough that I couldn't focus on what I was doing with the podcast. And the podcast was making more than my day job. So yeah, I mean, that's a good place to be. It's a great place to be. Now, when it was making more than my day job, I was getting both those salaries. So it was like it was a hit to quit the day job because I had podcast salary plus day job salary. And then I transitioned to just podcast salary. But at some point, you've got to ask yourself, where do you want to invest your time and your money? And a really smart friend of mine yesterday told me, I was asking him how to think about investing money and spending it on your own business.

48:23And he's like, look, you've got money saved up in a brokerage account. And you're expecting it to earn, I don't know, five, six, 7 % a year in your passive index funds. Like, what do you think it would earn if you bet on your business? And I was like, wow, well, I think it would earn a lot more than five or 6 % based on the growth I've seen in the last two years. So it kind of got me really comfortable with this idea of investing your own money and time in yourself because the upside is so big and you can always get another job. You know, it might not be easy. It might be a hard time, but like it's possible.

48:55So I just had to pull the trigger. And then funny enough, I don't even know if you know this, but it got to be, there's so much happening now between memberships and trips and partnerships my wife was like i want to work on this too so she her last day is in two weeks and she's coming full-time to work on this which okay okay haunting because that means we have no more stable income an entire creator income life but i don't know we just felt like we had to do it this is the next chapter the next stage yes so we just felt like we had to do it so it felt right and i try to think of these things is not on an ongoing basis.

49:32So don't think about I'm losing my salary per year. Think about I'm losing six months of my salary to test this out. And by the way, you pay taxes on that. So like if you make 100 grand a year, it's like, well, if I want to test doing this on my own, it's only going to cost me 50K after tax, which might only be 35K or something. So how much is it going to cost you to bet on yourself for six months? Don't think of it as I'm going to have to make up for$100 ,000 a year for the rest of my life. That makes it seem very daunting. But maybe I have to make up for$35 ,000,$40 ,000 to test it for six months and see what I can do.

50:09And that seems a lot more accessible to a lot more people. Yeah, I mean, different ways to mitigate the risk in your own mind. But I think the key there was having built up the side hustle to the point where it had already surpassed the day job income, which I think is something that a lot of people will definitely aspire to. So what's next? You got a lot going on. You mentioned your wife is joining the team. Anything else coming down the pipeline for the remainder of this year? I realized that I'm creating all this amazing content, interviewing someone or researching a topic for a solo episode.

50:38And I'm only hitting people on podcasting. I started saying, OK, what if I took that content and I wrote it as a newsletter, but not a transcript or a link to the podcast? But let's write a native newsletter about the topic that hopefully I'm not going to like hide the fact that I interviewed someone to get this content. I'm going to give them all the credit. But someone reading it doesn't think, wow, I'm reading a podcast. They think I'm reading a newsletter. There are a handful of other channels that I think I have not figured out or had the resources or time to tackle, one of which is video.

51:09Yes, I upload the video on YouTube, but I don't spend the time and energy that I would like on the titles, the intros, the thumbnails, the editing that I think it deserves to actually do justice on that platform. I similarly don't do the find the best moments and cut them and clip them and put graphic overlays and do all the things to make videos work on things like TikTok reels and YouTube shorts. Similarly, not doing the same thing on Twitter and LinkedIn and maybe Instagram posts where the value is more on text or images or infographics that could come from all the same content. And so if you go through, there's probably four or five platforms that you could, I'm not going to say repurpose, but like adapt the content for that you could get a lot more ROI than just repurposing it.

51:58Like if I just cut a video and put it on YouTube, it will be there. But if I cut it for YouTube and do it in a style that makes sense and put the right thumbnail there and do a different intro, it'll probably be a lot better. So the next big thing I want to tackle, aside from everything I already mentioned, is how do I take the content that I have and figure out how to natively and kind of organically make it for other platforms? That will likely require me to hire some freelance people to help with that. So if anyone listening is like, I am a pro in that thing, feel free to reach out, Chris at allthehacks.com.

52:32Yeah. That could be your next side hustle. I think that's a huge opportunity. And we've seen people build businesses around that. They would call it repurposing, but a step above that, adapting it to be native on these platforms. I think that makes a lot of sense. And it's, it feels like the Wild West or it feels like new blue ocean to conquer. Like I got, I have no presence here. And so it's all incremental gains or incremental audience or tapping into a new set of people. So I'm with you there. It's definitely an exciting place to play. Crisp is an awesome, taking a ton of notes. As always, let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation 2023 edition.

53:11Follow your curiosity when it comes to what you're creating, because it might not seem like there's opportunity in that area. But the longevity and the creativity that will spawn from you being excited about the thing you're doing will trump any amount of audience size or opportunity in the long run. So whatever you're excited about, whatever you're interested in, even if it's saving the whales, there is probably a way that you can turn that into something that will have more opportunity for you than anything else. Yeah, I feel like this excitement and curiosity is being very underrated, especially the curiosity in my case.

53:48That's what has fueled the show for the last 10 years. It just took me probably nine of those years to really realize that and lean into it. Like, hold on. How does that work? Because you get feedback. Oh, you asked the question I thought you were going to ask. And yeah, because I was curious about it, too. Like, I want to figure out how this stuff works. So I appreciate sharing that. Lean into that curiosity and excitement, because that's what keeps you going through the months of like, why is nobody paying attention to this? Like, is this really the right thing? And it can keep you going through those hard times.

54:17I just have a few notes here before we wrap up things I wanted to kind of highlight or hammer home. The first was finding customers, clients, listeners, readers, subscribers in their natural habitat. You said it best. Where are you going to find podcasters? Listening to a podcast. So go guesting, doing these promo swaps and same thing, newsletter swaps. You can apply this tactic in service businesses, in audience-based or content-based businesses. I think that one is super important. We've called it the buy buttons theory in the past. Hey, let's go where the cash is already flowing. If I'm trying to sell something, makes a lot of sense.

54:48The second thing was this idea of really digging your well before you're thirsty. Chris is a very well-networked guy. And so he's able to call in these favors that if you're brand new and you don't have that built-in network, and I might challenge that you probably have at least a few dozen people who care about what you're doing. They may not have a huge audience, but they may be able to support your launch in some meaningful way. But building that without any future ask, even necessarily in mind, just doing that to be a good person and then being able to call in those favors when it is time to launch a thing.

55:23And then the third thing that stood out to me was this focus on the one thing. And you just mentioned at the end, I want to, you know, start adapting this content to all these other platforms, but you didn't do it early on early on it's like look i'm gonna try and build the best podcast around optimizing your life i'm gonna take it seriously i'm gonna publish it every week i'm gonna study and test the best practices and i'm gonna pay for advertising in this case and see if i outperform the you know supposed benchmarks and the reason i bring it up is the early days of the side hustle show it was probably priority four or five on the list and looking back it probably shows like i had a couple other websites that I was running.

56:03I prioritized written content on the blog. I thought of myself as a writer first and foremost. And most of those posts have long since been deleted, like they just didn't get a ton of traction. So it's easy to see why the podcast growth was a little bit slower than it could have been. Even though it was something that I found I'd love to do it, I wasn't giving it the love and attention that maybe I should have early on if I really wanted it to be the thing. So those were my wrap up notes in that case. If you missed our first episode with Chris, I encourage you to go check that one out. It is an hour of 33 rapid fire life hacks on productivity, travel, finances, lots more of that's episode 478.

56:43If you want to check that one out in the archives. And if you're starting a podcast of your own, if you're thinking about that, make sure to download the podcast starter kit. It's got my resources on choosing the right software, the right equipment, my production process, how the sausage gets made in a way, how to market your show and all the different ways that podcasts can make money. Of course, advertising me just being just one of those revenue channels. So that's at side hustle nation.com slash all the hacks, or you can just follow the show notes link in the episode description in your podcast player app.

57:14Big thanks to Chris for sharing his insight. Thanks to HelloFresh, Notion and Ladder for sponsoring this week. You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. It really does make a difference. Thank you. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, make sure to tell a friend. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.

57:55We'll see you next time.