577: Scaling an Online Business for Recurring Revenue: From Course to Membership

24:34But it was really a good opportunity for me to help develop my voice in terms of what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it and saying it over and over and over again in different ways, which was nice. And that was also another thing that helped me with that, developing my voice, was the webinars. So during the six months where we were growing to 100 members, that was another thing that was definitely key to our growth, was I did a webinar every single week for 12 weeks. And it was the same webinar, but I would update it and tweak it a little bit as I went and kind of got feedback from students.

25:09And I would drive traffic to it from the Facebook groups that I was commenting in. It wasn't big each week, I would have anywhere from one to a dozen people attending live. Oh, okay. So it wasn't a lot, but I could usually always get at least one to three members from those people that attended. Because of course, I pitched my offer at the end as well. Okay. So you're doing those every week, just trying to build that, you know, putting those reps, build that confidence in speaking and delivering this material and then delivering the pitch at the end and then seeing some positive results from that.

25:44Yeah. And there is definitely something about just taking a deep breath and selling your stuff live because it builds a muscle inside of you. I think that we often, I'll tell you this, when I was in nursing school, one of my mentors was my psych nursing instructor. And she told me something I'll never forget. She said that one of the problems with the nursing profession is that nurses tend to be such helpers that they have a problem looking at somebody and saying, hi, I am a nurse and this is how much I charge because they feel like they should do it for free because we're helpers. But what we do is valuable and we need to be compensated for it.

26:25And no matter what part of nursing you do, even though she was not an entrepreneur, her advice has stuck with me, even as an entrepreneur, a nurse entrepreneur. I always think of her voice and hear her voice when I get to the pitch or when I'm like now the current offering that we have, we sell a lifetime membership for$1 ,000. And if I am talking to somebody one-on-one and I have to say that price, the first couple of times, you kind of get that stabbing in your heart. You're like, oh my gosh, I'm about to ask somebody to give me$1 ,000. But you fake it till you make it. And you're like, no, you know what?

26:58What I offer is worth it. Yeah. And to state it with confidence and instead of being like, it's$1 ,000. Yeah, exactly. I say it's$1 ,000 and you're going to be so glad you have this accessible to you when you are in nursing school and you realize that you're not sure how to understand the content that's on your next exam. You're not going to want to go around finding a tutor to help you at that point when your test is coming up. You want somebody that can help you now or who's been helping you to prevent problems. So you learn. It does get easier with time, for sure, because you see more and more results of the people I've worked with and the testimonials that I get.

27:37It's definitely encouraging. to hear all that. Yeah, that's super helpful. So the podcast, the Facebook groups, and not just your own, obviously, I think it's helpful to have your own, but other groups as well. And then these weekly webinars, inviting people from the Facebook group, inviting people from the email list, hey, we're doing our weekly session on whatever the topic is, come in and join the water's warm. And important to note, hey, if we got 10 people to show up, that's fantastic. That's 10 people who are going to hear this message and a percentage of those are going to find value in the offer and go ahead and buy it, like stacking up these incremental wins because you have to look at it.

28:15It's like, well, I didn't just make this one$27 sale or, you know, this low ticket first month. Like hopefully the person sticks around for a year and that ends up being a pretty significant sale. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I show up the same if there's only one person on the webinar than if there was 12. and I feel like that just helps my energy and gets me the reps in. More with Nicole in just a moment, including how she's building a stronger relationship with her target market and driving free organic sales, all with short TikTok videos. But first, let me ask you if this sounds familiar. You're trying to start and grow your business and you're juggling a dozen different tasks.

28:52Yes, you are the CEO, which is awesome, but you're also the sales manager, the marketing director, the accounting department, IT customer support, and maybe even the janitor. And that's okay. hey, that's totally fine. Everybody starts out this way wearing all the hats. But somewhere along the way, your marketing starts to work, the word of mouth engine starts to spin, you start to get booked up. And if you don't have an organized system for managing appointments, payments and paperwork, it's easy to get overwhelmed fast. That's why I'm excited to partner with our brand new sponsor, Practice for this episode.

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30:04Do more of what pays the bills and what lights you up and less admin back and forth. I want to invite Side Hustle Show listeners to start a free trial today at practice.do. That's practice.do. And when you love it, and I'm confident you will, use promo code Side Hustle to get 50 % off your first three months. Once again, start your free trial at practice.do. And big thanks to Practice for sponsoring the show. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call? It's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O.

30:41It's the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3 ,000 reviews on G2. Quo works right from an app on your phone or computer, and it means your team can share one number and collaborate on calls and texts, just like a shared inbox. And here is what is really cool, because if you can't answer the phone, Quo's AI agent can. It can qualify leads, it can route calls to the right person, and it's going to make sure no customer is ever left hanging. Think of it like having 24-7 support without the 24-7 payroll.

31:22More than 90 ,000 businesses are already running on Quo, from solo operators to growing teams. Try it free when you go to quo.com slash side hustle. That's Q-U-O dot com slash side hustle. You can even keep your existing number. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. We've talked about Facebook. I did that for about a year, year and a half. But honestly, I was getting tired of it. Because it was pretty intensive. It was tedious to go through all the groups and find posts to do. And I was tired of doing a webinar every week, like we wanted to evergreen it as much as we could to get my time back.

31:59And I had been looking at TikTok for a few months, and just kind of getting a feel for it and wondering, can I do that? And that's also when Facebook Reels were just starting, and they had like bonus programs and stuff. And I was like, oh, well, maybe I could do Facebook Reels because I'm already on Facebook. I thought, you know, if I'm going to do Reels, it's the same format as TikTok. Maybe I'll just throw some things up on TikTok and see what happens. I bought a$27 guide to getting started on TikTok by a creator called Brianna Puente. And I just followed it step by step. Whatever she said in that document, I did it.

32:32And it was consistent and started putting up content. And I would say in just, gosh, probably within two weeks, I had hit a thousand followers. And in less than a month, I was up in the office working and my husband hollered up at me one day and he's like, Nicole, Nicole, I think that like somebody must've shared your link or something. I was like, why do you think that? He's like, just to give you some context, we usually only got like, even with the Facebook group, only about like maybe 10 to 12 new email leads per day. And he's like, we have 300 new emails today. Yeah, I see this huge abnormal spike on the thing.

33:08You're like, what is going on? Yeah. I'm like, oh my gosh, are you kidding me? But I knew what it was. I didn't tell my husband I started posting on TikTok

33:18because he thought I was already too busy doing all these other things. And he's like, you don't need to add one more thing to your plate. And I'm like, okay. But I just didn't tell him. And I started doing it anyway, because I wanted to. And it seemed like it was fun. And it was fun. And I really, really enjoy TikTok. So I started doing TikTok and I just find it's a really great platform. There's still so much opportunity for organic reach. We've been doing it for over a year now and it's by far our number one source of traffic and it's quality traffic. Like it's people who are nursing students and who are wanting to work with me, a percentage of them.

33:52Yeah, because you have to imagine the algorithm is only showing your stuff to people it believes are also nursing students. it's a niche audience. It's not probably going to go crazy viral, but like, give a sense of what led to 300 email subscribers in a day? What type of viewership? I think it was started getting over 100 ,000 views. And that particular video, which was my first, I call it going mini viral. Like I said, in my niche, I don't expect to get a million views on anything. Like, I don't think I'm ever going to get to a million followers or anything like that. I think I'm somewhere probably around 70, in the upper 70 ,000s right now for how many followers I have, which to me, I'm still kind of like floored that I'm like, wow, I think that makes me an influencer.

34:34But yeah, so that feels kind of strange. But I use that stat to show off to my kids as friends, though, just by the way, it's like a bragging stat. I'm like, hey, I've got over 70 ,000 followers on TikTok. And they're like, you do? And I automatically go up like a couple of steps. So that's always fun to tell them. So what kind of stuff are you posting over there. I think the reason I took off relatively easy on TikTok was because I did all the reps that I've told you about. I did the Facebook webinars and things. I knew how to create hook, content, call to action. That's like the simplest formula that I always stick to in all of my videos.

35:13And just do plug and play with those three steps. But I basically just talk about how to be successful in nursing school. I'm always going to be encouraging. That's just part of my brand. I don't want to scare people. There's enough people out there. That's one of the way I differentiate. There's enough people out there scaring nursing students. They're already scared. They don't need to be more scared. They want somebody who's going to make them feel better, make them feel less scared. So I'm always encouraging. I speak to their pain points. Turns out that my fears when we launched the membership and I got back working more individually with people was not necessary because the problems that I had when I was in nursing school are still like, for better or worse, still exactly the same problems that nursing students have nowadays.

35:55So I know their pain points. And so I talk about their pain points and I talk about how to solve them. And just like at the end of a webinar, the answer to every question, to put it kind of bluntly, is buy my stuff. I don't put it that bluntly in the videos, but best way that I can help them is if they work with me. I want to help them. It would be doing a disservice to them if I didn't encourage them to at least check out the options to work with me. And TikTok is nice too, because it's video. I think everybody knows nowadays that video, you get to know somebody and trust them and like them so much better when you can see a lot of videos about them.

36:32They feel like they know you. Another weird sensation for me is that since I've grown on TikTok, I will have members who join now. And the first time they come to one of our live group tutoring sessions, they're like fangirling me. They're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I'm actually talking to you on Zoom. I can't believe that you feel that way about me, but that's really cool. Yeah, like I'm here every week. This is what we do. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, I'm just a mom with six kids who loves teaching. So that's definitely been interesting. I talk about the same things over and over again, just in slightly different ways and different variations.

37:09It doesn't feel old. It seems like it would when you're doing content creation and planning your content. But when you're just trying to be real, you're just trying to help people. You're just getting out there and helping people feel heard by describing their experience. Like I would say that's one of the biggest ways I connect with my audience is because I do know exactly how they feel. I know them very well, even though I've never met them individually, right? I know them as a whole. I know how they feel crazy because they are doing all of the things to study. They are taking all of the advice.

37:42They're doing everything their instructor says, but they're still not doing well on exams and they don't know what else to do. And so now they're starting to think maybe they are just not cut out to be a nurse. And I can say, I can jump in and I can be like, I can describe their experience. So they're like, yeah, that's exactly me. And then I can reassure them. I'm like, it's not that you're not cut out to be a nurse. It's that this is the problem and this is the solution. And I can help you with that solution. And then I invite them to follow me on TikTok or check out my links to work with me or something along those lines.

38:12So that's typical, like, hey, follow along for more tips or check out the link tree bio for join our upcoming webinar or join the email. Like what's typical visitor or viewer flow? If somebody is just interested in beginning a TikTok account, I would recommend that the only call to action you do is to follow me. Either follow or leave a comment to get some engagement and start building your community on TikTok. but once you get above that thousand follower mark, then you can start switching it up. I will do a mix of follow for more nursing school tips. I will do a mix of leave a comment. Tell me if you've ever experienced this before, or I'd say, Hey, if you want to learn more about how I can help you study better, go to the link in my bio for options on how to work with me or something along those lines.

38:59Cause I figure even if people follow me, the TikTok algorithm is really good. When I'm putting out consistent content, then I will consistently show up on their For You page, on their feed. And then another strategy that I like to use on TikTok is their TikTok Lives. Right now, I'm going live about twice a week. I don't always do that, but we're trying to grow some more this summer. I'm showing up twice a week on TikTok Live. And like what Facebook Lives used to do, this pushes it out to brand new people who've never seen me. So if people are seeing me, or if I can get them just to follow me, then they're probably going to see me when I'm on TikTok live.

39:38And now not only have they watched my videos, they're familiar with me, they're warmed up, but now they kind of get to talk to me, at least through comments on their side. And they can hear me. They can really get an even better sense for my teaching style, for my personality, for how, hey, I'm not going to make you feel dumb no matter what question you ask in nursing school. I am 100 % here to support you and I really can and help you. And this is why. Do you feel pressure to, I got to post three times a day, I got to keep coming up with new, or like you said, new ways to say the same stuff. It seems like a almost daunting creative exercise.

40:14Right, it does. And in some seasons, I'll be honest, some seasons, it does feel daunting to me. But what I found that works, so when I first started, I posted twice per day, just to get things rolling. Now, in this season, like we're growing pretty regularly. My goal is just to post daily. So I only post once per day. And I've gotten my routine for like how to do it pretty down right now. So I batch my content, I will have like a little research session where I figure out I might pick like 14 different topics that I want to do a video on. I'll choose the hook I'm going to use to make sure because most people if they're going to scroll away from your video, it's within the first three seconds.

40:53So I want to make sure through what I'm saying and what I have on screen text that the right people know that this video is for them so that they're going to be more likely to watch it through. And so I just take a few notes so that I know. And a lot of times what I'll do is as I have ideas throughout the month, I have a spreadsheet that I just jot them down in. So what will happen is I might have after one of my group tutoring sessions, I might think, oh, that student asked a really good question. I bet I could do a good TikTok video about that. And then I'll jot that down. Oh, okay, okay, yeah.

41:25Yeah, so when it's fresh, because you know the best content comes directly from our audience, right? And if they're already my paying audience, then I know that other people who have that same question might also be likely to benefit from my paid programs. So I can put that out that way. And then when I go to sit down to actually do my recordings, it's not as daunting because I have my plan all there. I have the ideas. I just have to sit down and record them. I use a combination. Well, nowadays, I'm mostly using CapCut, which is a free software made by the same people who do TikTok. It works very similar to TikTok, but they have cloud storage so I can record it on my phone.

42:04And then I upload it to the cloud storage. I used to edit my videos. I don't like editing videos. So now my husband, I let him know whenever I have a batch of videos ready. And then we have streamlined. I tell him what titles go on it. And we kind of have a templated format for how I generally like my videos to be edited. And then he'll go through and edit them for me, reupload them to the cloud. And then I can just download them onto my phone and upload them to TikTok, which I know sounds like a lot, but it's actually not that much. So now I can get a TikTok video recorded in 20 minutes or less.

42:38And I can do that. So if I do 14 of them, usually I'll record like five or six TikTok videos in a day. Yeah, try and batch them together. Yeah, yeah. If I do more than that, I tend to go brain dead just because I like get distracted, but I have the ideas there. So if I run out, I can always like quick go up and film a new one and then just keep adding ideas on a rolling basis. Yeah, again, I encourage you to check out Nicole on TikTok. It's your nursing tutor. Again, 77 ,000 followers over there. Most of them recorded in the same office. I recognize the background there and i'm just scrolling through 43 000 views for easiest dosage calc method 10 000 views on this other one 34 000 for pharmacology study tip it's like i never would have expected somebody to you know but hey if i'm studying pharmacology and nursing school like yeah that's gonna be super valuable for me and it's like you said hook content and then call the action.

43:37It was one of them that had like 90 ,000 views. If I find that one again. Yeah. 660 ,000, too much textbook read. Oh, it's a great hook, right? Please do not read your textbook in nursing school. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought I was supposed to read this thing. Yeah, of course people are watching this thing. Absolutely. Yeah. That's one of my most successful mini viral video this summer was that one in particular. So of course, guess what kind of a video I recorded this last time I batched them? It was another, you shouldn't read your textbook in nursing school, but I just hit it from a different angle.

44:07I use a different hook, talk about it just slightly differently, but it's the same content. And then I'm going to do another call to action at the end. So on the checkout, the link in bio, find out different ways to work with me, which links to a Linktree page. And at this point, at the time of this recording, it's Christmas in July sale, a lifetime, you know, special deal on lifetime access. I talked to our team to learn how we can help discounts on looks like a couple of those mini intro courses or standalone courses, and then to the podcast. And so is there, it looks like almost linking directly to products, because we've built up this relationship, we built up this trust versus join the email list, or like some call to action, like, you know, get this freebie.

44:48And if I'm interpreting correctly, it's like almost, and people are entering lower in the funnel versus higher up, and you're going to try and warm them up through email. Okay, so you remember how I said that my audience is weird? we used to do freebies and we found that there's a lot of nursing students who are just, I call them resource hoarders because of this high anxiety. They tend to just collect, collect, collect, but they don't always take action on it. So what we would find is that we were never really, no matter what we did, we never felt like we had a lot of success converting people on our email list to paid members.

45:25And it was really, really frustrating, especially that six months while we were growing. It was mostly like new growth, not people from our email list growth. And it still shocks me how many people will never be on our email list and just show up as a like pay me$1 ,000 for lifetime membership. We just started doing the lifetime membership the last few months. So we've only had a handful, but a noticeable percentage of them are coming in completely cold or not cold because they have this relationship with you through these videos. But yeah, probably on TikTok. Yeah. Yeah. But that's what I've always found.

46:02Even before we had the membership, people would just come and I didn't know how they found me. They just were like, and I think it's partly because they have this very strong internal sense of motivation because they're afraid of failing. they have a timeline, they have a test coming up, whatever it is. And so that's one thing I think that's unique about my market versus maybe somebody else who's looking for business coaching, like, yeah, maybe they could do it today. Maybe they could do it next month. Like, it's just kind of like a judgment call. But with nursing students, they're like, nope, I need it now.

46:35Like, I feel desperate. They feel desperate. So basically, with that, they're just kind of jumping in that way. But with our email list, they didn't always convert at the high rate that we thought they should. So we actually stopped doing freebies to get on our list. I think it might've been in January. I think when we converted, we actually took one of my freebies on dosage calculations and turned it into a paid course. So when you were asking earlier about like, did people complain about, oh, you used to sell this as a course and now it's a membership, whatever. I kind of had that fear when we converted my freebie to something paid that people would be like, hey, you used to offer this for free.

47:14What's the deal? That's how good it was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it solves the pain point that nursing students have. I would imagine it more the other way. Like if you took a paid product and then made it free and the people who paid were like, whoa, people are just giving it away. Right. Yeah. But it did take a while. I still will occasionally get somebody who says, hey, you have this video that you said you give this away for free, but I don't see it for free. And then I have to tell them, sorry, it's not for free anymore. This is an old video. And then I just hide that video on TikTok once they've identified it for me.

47:45And it hasn't been a big deal. It hasn't been a big deal. But now people can still get on our list without buying something because we started running TikTok ads a few months ago. And so right now, the only way to get on our email list is if you come in through a TikTok ad or if you've bought one of our products. The Christmas in July sale that we're doing right now is actually a little bit of a test on our product offerings because like I said, oh gosh, we changed too many things at once. That's the one thing we do too. And so we've made a lot of changes this summer, adding the lifetime membership option at the higher price point.

48:20And we had a payment plan, but then we were also still offering a monthly option. We've increased our prices again. So we've increased our prices at least three times since that original$27 launch. And we're currently charging$97 a month. I don't anticipate us going higher than that. I think that would be a little too far out of our market for what nursing students generally are able to handle. But I'm really comfortable with that, especially for what we provide, because they can't get live tutoring support for anything close to that if they're doing it one-on-one. Yeah. And you may find, and that's the reason you test these things, you may find a number of buyers goes down, but the overall revenue goes up.

48:58Or you might find the perceived value is higher. And so the raw number of buyers goes up. You just, you never know until you test that stuff. Actually, that's exactly what we've found. so far this summer is that our number of members has decreased, but our recurring revenue has increased. That makes it, although it's a little scarier to have like less of a wide base of members, it's also nicer because it allows me to get to know people a little bit better, provide that deeper level of support. I can offer more of myself to the individual members in the live group tutoring session because there's fewer people doing that.

49:32But one of the things we're testing with this Christmas in July sale too is, here we go. To me, this is a shocking stat. So our churn rate for our membership is 30%, which is huge from what I hear from my friends who have online memberships, like Steven, who was on your podcast. I think he said it was like 10 or 12. I don't remember what he said. Yeah. His is 10 to 15. Okay. Which he said was high. Yeah. And he said that was high. I know. And when I was listening to his episode, I was just laughing because I'm I'm like, Stephen, you know, mine is like double yours. So every month, if you have 10 members, three of them are going to drop off.

50:07Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So we have been long trying to find ways to solve that hole in the back end of our membership, because if we could fix that and drop that down just in half, that is going to dramatically increase our monthly revenue. Just that alone. Well, it just relieves the pressure of having to refill that 30 % every month. And I got to do 40, 50 % if I want to grow. Absolutely. And there's a lot of reasons why sometimes people graduate. I mean, ours is a time-limited membership. Yeah, it's like selling a product for pregnant women. It's like, hey, at a certain point, you're not going to need this anymore.

50:42You're not going to need it. Let's hope. Yeah. Or maybe they're on summer break and they just want to cancel for the summer or something like that. So what we're doing is we are offering for the first time, we're saying you can get lifetime membership for the monthly membership price. So this big, painful cash out of pocket right now, but you can just pay the regular$97 per month that you would be paying anyway, if you wanted to join. But all you have to do is make 12 payments. And then we're not going to charge you anymore, but you can keep access for as long as you need it. We're going to give you lifetime membership with a 12 month payment plan.

51:18What I'm hoping, time will tell, but what we're hoping is that that's going to reduce the cancellations. Because even if they're, oh, it's December, December's our worst month ever. It's horrible. and they're like, even though it's December and I want to cancel, if I cancel, then I've already paid for five months towards this lifetime. So I'm going to have to start from scratch if I just cancel. So we're hoping that that's going to improve retention that way. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Trying to figure out how to, how to stop that leaky bucket in a way. Yeah. And one thing I don't want to do, cause you know, I've considered doing like the fitness memberships do and be like, okay, you have an upfront fee to join.

51:57Yeah. Yeah. Like you joined the country club or something. Yeah. Yeah. But it just feels gimmicky to me. I don't like doing that to my members. I just don't feel like that's a good customer experience for my business. So hopefully this will do the trick. We shall see. Well, cool. Are you comfortable sharing where you're at now in terms of the number of members that are in this thing? Yeah, sure. And I'll give you the roller coaster too. So when we, let's see, in the first year of business, like I said, we got up to about 100. And then we kind of stayed there. It was kind of stagnant. It was kind of hard.

52:30And then we hit December and we lose a lot in December. Nobody wants to study in December, huh? Nobody wants to study in December. Absolutely not. I get that. We went from like 100 members down to like probably 70 or eight members that first year. And then we were able to build it back up to around 100 members. And then we hit TikTok. I started my TikTok and when we had that, my first mini viral video, then we got our email list exploded. Then we were able to grow through the end of that year up to like around 150 to 160 members. Dipped a little bit in December. We played with our offers some more.

53:05We got up to almost 200 members. And then December hit again. And we dropped back down to around 150. And then And it was just kind of there and going down. And now that we've gone up to the$97 price point, we've dipped down. Because I've had a lot of people who've been with me for quite a long time at those very much smaller price points, like the$27 to$47 price points. And those people are graduating now and no longer need the membership. So a lot of them are leaving. Now we're actually down to about 90 members again, which is where we were at the beginning. But like I said, our revenue though is up because our price point is up.

53:44So I like that. I like being able to work better with the people. And then, like I said, if we can fix this churn, then that's going to start increasing our membership again. And now next steps for us, we've been doing TikTok ads and we're also looking to branch out onto Instagram and Pinterest now. So we're hoping that by diversifying our lead sources, not only is that going to give us a little more security because I have to admit that I do feel a little nervous that most of our leads come from TikTok. Because if my account, for some strange reason, got banned overnight, it's like that Google algorithm problem I had.

54:19Right, right. Yeah. You're relying on one algorithm change away from... It's fragile in that sense. But if you've done it on this platform, you can do it on another similar short form video platform. It's not the only place where nursing students are hanging out. Exactly. Exactly. So that's kind of what's next for us in terms of social media and marketing. And then hopefully, like I would love to get back up to 200 members by the end of this year at the price point we're at now. Yeah. Which would be fantastic. That would be great. I should say the 90 members, that's 90 monthly recurring members.

54:51That doesn't include the people who are joining at the lifetime membership too. Oh yeah. Yeah. Those are nice when they come through at a thousand bucks a piece. Like, yeah. Exactly. 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. Our partner Shopify helps turn what ifs into why nots. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world from household names to the very guests on this show.

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57:14I had a note here to ask about email funnels, which is kind of already answered. Like we've kind of shortcut this whole system. Like I think in certain niches, like, hey, test it out. I think that's great. I did want to ask about the tools and tech that are helping run the membership and just run other elements of your business. I think you mentioned one called CapCut for editing, which was new to me. Anything else on the tools tech side that you swear by? Well, we use Kajabi for our website. We also have a WordPress site because my website predated Kajabi. but the membership side of things is all run on Kajabi which is really nice because it just makes it super simple to do that without having to do extra plugins and things like that and so we've actually made our WordPress site is just simple it's almost like a calling card now although the blog is still there but you can't find it unless you find it in a Google search yeah I was gonna ask because I was like I don't see it linked anywhere from your nursing tutor.com it's all just hey come on in give me some money I keep wondering if I should change that but I'm like you know what what we're doing, it seems to be working.

58:17So I'm just going to leave it that way. One tool that I really do like is called repurpose. I think it's repurpose.io, if I'm remembering correctly. And it basically puts my content repurposing on autopilot. So since TikTok is my primary channel, and that's what I'm specifically creating my videos for, repurpose will automatically, every time I post to TikTok, it republishes it on whatever channels, whatever other channels I want. So we have it set up to post, I think, to my Facebook business page and to my YouTube channel, which I've never had a targeted YouTube strategy. When I was doing my podcasts, I would do videos with my podcasts and often post that up on YouTube just to have a presence there.

59:00So now it's posting the TikTok videos as the short form YouTube. And even with not having a real strategy, it's growing in a very small audience there. But someday I imagine I will focus more on YouTube when that becomes my next step. And it's always easier to build off of something that when you already have a little bit to work with. So I'm looking forward to that. And that makes it easier. It also will automatically repurpose also automatically saves my TikTok videos, I have it set up to save to my Google Drive. And it strips out the TikTok logo that will happen if you just download it directly from the TikTok app.

59:37Right? So you download that directly, and you post that on Instagram, it's getting buried in the algorithm. They don't want to see that TikTok. watermark. Exactly. But this way I'm building up a library of videos that I can reuse later if I need to and when I want to. Cool. All right. Well, thank you for sharing that stuff. This has been awesome. I'm taking a ton of notes as I always do. I'm curious. So by the end of the year, hopefully we can get back up to that 200 member mark. Anything else on the horizon? What's got you excited these days? I think that the biggest things that I'm excited about right now are the Instagram and Pinterest.

1:00:11I love learning new things and implementing new marketing strategies. And although it's a little bit daunting, like I've stayed away from Instagram for a reason. Like, I'm not sure I understand the platform, but you pick up a course and I just do what it says. And that's what I'm doing. I bought a course literally yesterday. I started going through it this morning before, shortly before we started this podcast interview. And I'm just going to do what it says. I'm like, that's how I got started on TikTok, right? I just bought from somebody who knew a little more than me and did what they said, and then go through it.

1:00:43Now with Pinterest, we decided to hire a company. We're hiring Simple Pin Media. Oh, yeah. Kate's been on the show a couple times. Yeah. I love Kate. I followed her for years and years and years, and always wanted to work with her. And so I'm like, yay, it's fine. It's like, that's one of my like personal entrepreneur, I've made it wins is like to be able to hire Oh, that's great. Our company. Yeah, yeah. That's like just one of those weird little personal things. So yeah, we met with them this week and we're gonna be doing their accelerator programs for them because again, Pinterest is interesting because I knew early on that nursing students are on Pinterest too because when I was exclusively blogging many years ago, I started noticing in my Google Analytics that I was getting traffic from Pinterest.

1:01:25And I'm like, I don't even have a Pinterest account. How can that be? And I explore it. And it's because people were finding my blog posts and pinning them to Pinterest. If they're doing that organically without me doing anything to tell them to do that, then I would probably benefit from having a purposeful strategy there. And I'd played with it a little bit at one point, but not for a long time. And I didn't really stick with it because Pinterest isn't something I use either personally. But now that we wanna branch out and now we're in position to diversify our marketing a little bit more, I think it's gonna be a fantastic opportunity for us.

1:01:59Yeah, it's taking what you already have, what's already working, and then just going out and adding a new tentacle over here, just going out into these different platforms and trying to find more people that you can serve. So I think that makes a lot of sense. Nicole, she's at yournursingtutor.com. Check her out over there. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. So this is coming from a homeschooling mom of six who's been a stay-at-home mom, now turned online business entrepreneur, is that the first best thing when you're working on your business and marketing your business is consistency.

1:02:32But the second best thing is to be inconsistently consistent. And that's what I was for years. Think about that. To be inconsistently consistent. If you're in a season of life where things are busy, I just want to encourage anybody out there If you have your kids if they're making you pull your hair out if you're just not sure you have time Don't give up like if you have to give up for a season don't say oh well Just throw in the towel. I haven't done it. Just say okay I'm ready to go at it again and just pick up wherever you left off And do what you can it's better to do a little bit Over a long period of time than to try to wait for the day when you have all of the time to focus on it Because that day is probably never going to come.

1:03:13It's never going to come. It's never to come. You don't have to do it the way everybody else does it. You don't have to do it the way everybody else says you should do it. You just literally need to find what works for you. What's going to be your next best step forward? And then you just do that. And then you figure out your next best step after that. And you do that. I think this idea of it doesn't have to shut down completely. It could kind of just go into hibernation for a while. Because we're looking at a business, your nursing tutor, that's a decade old. and it's like there's these sprint periods and then these rest periods and just coincides with seasons of life.

1:03:46I think it was, I saw John Acuff speak at an event years ago and he had some question from the audience or he was recounting the story. Hey, John, I'm doing the thing. I'm getting up at 5 a.m. and I'm working on my thing and I've got three kids. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. When did I say, you know, it's like there's seasons of life here, buddy. You know, you got to work with what you got. And so I think that's really helpful to hear. I just have a few notes that I want to highlight before we ramp up. The first was, hey, if you want recurring revenue, you got to solve a recurring problem.

1:04:16And even if it is kind of a finite recurring problem, it might still make sense to position it that way. Like you're going to be in nursing school for a couple of years at least. So you're going to have this problem next month, the month after that, like we're here for you. So we can set it up as a recurring payment or membership versus a one-off sale. and then I like all of the different things that you're testing the pricing the offer the call to actions on these videos and just we're gonna find out what works these little optimizations playing puppet master I call it I really like that I think that's kind of the fun stuff as a business owner and like being a little bit of a scientist and at work and trying to play around with different things I'd heard I don't know if this is true or not like at any given time Amazon is testing like a thousand different variables on their website, trying to eke out the next 0.1 % conversion rate.

1:05:06It's like, hey, we can apply the same thing, probably on a smaller scale, at our own business, our own life. We're going to test stuff out. And then finally, I want to highlight the idea of what I'll call low risk content channels. You mentioned, hey, maybe it takes me 10, 20 minutes to throw up these videos on TikTok. But look at the outsized impact that's had on the business. And if they don't work, nobody sees them. They just get buried by the algorithm. Dickie Bush said the same thing about Twitter. It's a low risk proving ground for ideas and content. Like if I put something out there and nobody likes it within the first few minutes of it going live, like probably wasn't that great of an idea to begin with.

1:05:43Let me rework that one. So I call that a low risk content channel versus a highly produced video for YouTube or that 2 ,500 word blog post where you're really putting hours and hours of effort into it. So I just wanted to highlight those again. So you're nursing tutor.com. Check Nicole out over there. If you're new to the show, that's awesome. Thank you so much for tuning in. You might be wondering what to listen to next. I've got a couple recommendations for you. First up, you're going to love our memberships versus courses, side hustle showdown debate episode that we did with Shane Sams. So Nicole mentioned flip lifestyle a couple of times.

1:06:19So Shane Sams and Jacques Hopkins are representing the memberships and the courses side of that. Jacques is the online course guy. That's episode 463. Always have a fun time doing those showdown episodes. Actually got another one coming up for you next week. So be sure to stay tuned for that. Second recommendation is you can actually get a personalized playlist of the side hustle show episodes that are going to be most relevant and impactful for you. All you got to do is go to hustle.show and answer a few short multiple choice questions. And maybe you'll get the online business playlist. Maybe you'll get local services.

1:06:54Maybe you'll get something else. The only way to find out is to go to hustle.show and take that short quiz for yourself. Afterwards, you'll get that custom curated playlist that you can add to your device. You'll learn what works and you can go make some more money. Once again, hustle.show for that. Big thanks to Nicole for sharing her insight. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. 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.

1:07:33We'll see you next time.