585: Giving Away Ideas, Getting Great Guests, Growing Your Business, and More: 20 Questions with Nick

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1:15It's time for another round of 20 questions with Nick. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. It's the business podcast. you can actually apply. Now part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. I've got a 20 questions episode for you today, diving into the old listener mailbag. As is customary on these episodes, I've pulled out 20 questions from the Side Hustle Nation community over the last few months. I think I've got 18 actually to go through today. And I'm going to attempt to answer those for your benefit and entertainment.

1:49This is the 15th installment in this series, probably the longest running series in the history of the Side Hustle Show. So you'll be able to find all the links to all the resources mentioned at sidehustlenation.com slash Q &A15. Now, if you're new to the show, welcome. Thank you for tuning in. You might be thinking, Nick, you got 580 something episodes. Where should I start? Well, I would love to have you binge on the entire archives. I also understand that might not be realistic. That might not be the fastest path to get you where you want to go either. So what to do instead is go to hustle.show and get your own personalized money-making playlist.

2:23How it works is you just answer a few short multiple choice questions, and I'll give you a custom curated playlist you can add to your device. You can learn the tactics that work and you can go forth and make some more money. Once again, that's at hustle.show. Question one is if these ideas worked, why are you giving them away? Now, I love this question and kind of had a similar fear a decade ago where if I came up with something I thought was like really unique, I wanted to protect that because my thought was, well, anybody I tell, all of a sudden they're going to stop what they're doing and they're going to start it and they're going to do it better or faster than me And of course, it sounds kind of silly today because everybody else is too wrapped up in their own world to go drop everything and outright steal your idea.

3:05And that's one reason why I'm giving them away. It's like I'm busy doing my own thing. I think this is cool, but I don't really have the time or bandwidth to start it. And the more important thing is that ideas are everywhere. It's the execution that really counts. We've talked about that on the show. So I'll give away ideas all day long. It's just on you to go out and make them happen. That's the hard part. In the case of Side Hustle Show guests sharing their story, it's an abundant world out there with unlimited different niches. So should you go and do exactly what they're doing exactly where they're doing it?

3:38Yeah, probably not. But I think you can apply the tactics and strategies to make something similar work. And I get that feedback all the time. Even when the episode isn't super relevant to me, I almost always pick up a little nugget I can use. That's question one, if these ideas work, why are you giving them away? Question two, my only hang up to starting is not knowing how it will work with taxes and what the government will throw at me for self-employment. So it is true that there are going to be some bureaucratic hurdles you're going to have to jump through, maybe some extra paperwork filing, but those are solvable problems.

4:12Don't let that be what holds you back because the upside of a business that works is so much greater than whatever annual LLC filing paperwork, filing fee that you have to do. And on the tax front, the good news here is that there is no such thing as the 100 % marginal tax bracket. So even though your side hustle is taxable, every dollar that you earn will have you better off than if you didn't earn it. So I understand these are concerns, but they are solvable problems and they become a very small segment of your mental bandwidth once you've got a business that's working. question three came in from kelly she says my husband and his friend's podcast has grown to a decent following a thousand downloads an episode 280 000 views on youtube last year but it's been four years with no income and we need to change that part of that is growing the audience using tactics i've learned from your show but part of it is advertising and i'm reaching out to companies and i'm met with radio silence i'd love to know how you got your first advertiser and what you focused on in order to continue to secure advertisers.

5:18Well, Kelly, first of all, thank you so much for tuning in. My first official sponsor, I want to say 2016, maybe early 2016, was Teachable. And I'm pretty sure it was from a direct relationship with Ankur, the founder. He'd been a guest on the show back when it was still called Fedora, Teachable is such a better name, and some other early employees at the company and affiliates. So because I feel like I ran into the same wall when I first began reaching out to potential sponsors. I thought this was such a genius idea. I had my assistant go through the last two months of Entrepreneurs on Fire archives, create this spreadsheet of all their sponsors.

5:52And I went through and identified the five or 10 that I thought would be a great fit, started reaching out through cold email. That's where the trail kind of went cold. It was just really difficult to get through to the right decision makers. And some people did reply and they said, well, it looks like a fit, but we do all our ad buys through this third party agency and our budget is already allocated for the next quarter. What worked better was setting up shop on sites like AdvertiseCast, like Gumball.fm, Podcorn is another one. Some of these kind of like almost ad brokerage sites where they take a fee.

6:29Yes, but they kind of build these pseudo networks. Advertisers in most cases aren't looking for Wednesday, Tuesdays, I want to spend 500 bucks here. I want to spend a thousand bucks here. They're like, I want to buy a million impressions, right? How am I going to get in front of this big audience? And just the way the economics work makes sense to go through some of these services that can help put you into a bundle and put you in front of those different advertisers. That and along with connecting with other media brokerage services that can proactively picture show. Adopter Media is one. True Native Media is another.

7:00I came across earlier this year a site called Stack Influence as a potential way to connect with brands and just showing up at conferences. Some FaceTime always helps too, that those brands might be attending or your target brands, your Dream 100 brands. I will say this, for a lot of shows, the best monetization is probably some combination of selling your own products, your own services, or a membership, just because unless you're doing it daily and you have a big audience, like this sponsorship math may not really work out in your favor unless you're kind of in this B2B niche with like really high customer acquisition costs.

7:36I think maybe it could work out there and we'll have an example of that on the show in the next few weeks. But some episodes or some examples that might be useful to explore. Episode 524, this is Megan Champion. We talked about monetizing a small podcast. In her case, it was kind of a parenting podcast for moms. And so she started a membership called Moms Together, I want to say. That was kind of her primary monetization strategy. I remember talking with Garrett and Sabrina from the I Know Dino podcast, Dinosaur podcast. Absolutely love this story. They were monetizing through sponsorships, but also through Patreon and some of their own product sales.

8:11That was episode 502. You want to learn how a part-time Dinosaur podcast became a full-time business for those two. And 229, an older episode with my buddy Steve Young, who runs App Masters, kind of an app marketing themed podcast. but in that show we talked about how that turned into multiple income streams and a big chunk of that was his agency like hire us to do app marketing for you so lots of different ways to go about it but that's kind of how i've approached it question four was from dimitri also podcast related i've just relaunched my podcast and i was curious how you estimate the ltv and the cac for a podcast so ltv is customer lifetime value and cac is the cost of acquisition how much does it cost to acquire a customer.

8:56Dimitri says, I am tempted to invest in Facebook ads for some episodes, but wondering how am I ever going to measure the ROI on that? So Dimitri, good to hear from you, long-time listener. Definitely tricky to measure for a podcast. A little bit of context was we talked about this on our episode with Ben and Kevin from Yo Pretty Boy, their skincare brand. And the direct-to-consumer math is, I want to see my customer lifetime value is greater than my CAC, my cost of acquisition, I'm going to spend all the money I can acquiring a customer because over time, and there's obviously some timing of cashflow issues here, I'm spending all this money up front to acquire a customer and I may not realize that lifetime value for months or years down the road.

9:35In the podcast context, we talked a little bit about this with Chris Hutchins on how he grew all the hacks. That was episode 576. And some of the math was like, well, let's say an incremental thousand listeners is worth a hundred bucks an episode if we assume four sponsors at a$25 CPM. So every listener is worth 10 cents and it's rarely going to be this direct, but also like recognizing that they might listen to hundreds of episodes over their lifetime as a subscriber or as a listener to your show. So you start to do some math on that, what that might be worth. Now, some podcast apps are going to let you advertise.

10:12You can go out and buy sponsors. Maybe you have a way to do it through Facebook ads, you can do it through Overcast, my podcast listening app of choice. And some of their guidelines are like$5 to$20 to acquire a subscriber. I think with those types of numbers, it makes it hard to make the math work on a sponsorship model alone. So going back to Kelly's question, if you've got other monetization methods, if you've got cheaper acquisition costs, maybe you've got a strong word of mouth engine, then that game can change. But you can think about this math in just about any business that you're in. We talk a lot about organic marketing methods, how to get people into your product or service for free.

10:49That's one side of the equation. You're paying with your time in a lot of cases there. And then on the other side, how can you make your product or service stickier so that you can improve your LTVs, your lifetime values? And the farther you can pull those numbers apart, the more margin you've got to work with in the middle. More great questions and hopefully more great answers right after this. 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.

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13:19Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. Shopify.com slash side hustle. question five was from dan have you considered sending your newsletter from beehive i've seen a ton of creators migrate over there recently well dan i have been hearing more and more buzz about beehive lately and have noticed some of their branding and links coming into my own inbox but haven't looked too closely at it yet the reason for that is it looks like a good newsletter platform but lacking a lot of the automation tools that i am currently using inside ActiveCampaign. But if you run a newsletter business, it may be worth a look for you.

13:57We'll link Beehive up in the show notes, sidehustlenation.com slash Q &A15. Question six was from Steve. He says, my experience and expertise are in the area of residential trim, carpentry, and cabinetry. I'm trying to figure out how to create new income streams and creative income opportunities. Any idea what that might look like for somebody with this background? Well, Steve, it's kind of funny because we just went through this spring, a kitchen slash downstairs remodel and some sort of carpentry, cabinetry consultant might've been helpful to have, a project manager of sorts, something on the design side.

14:35We ended up doing a lot of the design ourselves. But yeah, I think there could be something around creating maybe first some DIY content on YouTube to help homeowners build confidence to tackle the projects themselves. I think that's a common path. Hey, I have this skill. Now I can help other people learn to do this skill versus me swinging hammers and doing it all myself, like a way to create something once and hopefully get paid for it over and over again in the form of either YouTube ad revenue or digital product sales. A couple of examples from the DIY space. We had DIY Pete, Pete Sven on the show years ago.

15:10Somebody sent me woodworking for mere mortals the other day. Like this guy's really blown up his channel. So that would be one option, kind of the DIY type of content. Another angle would be to create the training material for new professionals who want to get started in this niche. The example that comes to mind here is Brian Orr from HVAC School, helping other people kind of start their HVAC training school. Like, here's the science and the processes that you need to learn anyways. And we're going to do that in a helpful and digestible podcast format in his case. So that was kind of the content path that he went down.

15:45Another angle could be creating a marketing service or a website, social media service for other professionals in this niche, for other cabinetry and carpentry builders. I'm not exaggerating when I say our contractor's Instagram presence was a decision factor. It looked really great. It looked better than all of the competition. On the website front, a really interesting model I'll throw out is Ryan Golgoski's 180sites.com. I think 180 came from maybe his original price point where instead of charging$5 ,000 upfront to build a website and he started in the power wash, I'm going to build websites for power washers, like really, really interesting niche.

16:25But instead of charging this big upfront fee, it's like, look, I'm going to charge you 180. I'm going to charge you 200 bucks a month for a period of two years. So I kind of flipped the pricing model on its head, built this up for recurring revenue for a period of time. And I think when we had recorded that episode, episode 550, he had just closed his first $100 ,000 month. It was crazy. I thought that was just such an interesting way to go out and sell it. And of course, as you build one, you start to build this kind of library of templates that you can use where your hourly rate starts to really, really improve there.

16:57I thought that was a really, really profitable, really cool example of a business that could be pivoted to a different niche, such as trim carpentry and some of these builder or contractor niches. And one final idea that I'll throw out is generating leads for other trusted service providers. It could be worthwhile since a remodel contract is worth quite a bit. And we've got episode 545 with Link Moser, where we talked a little bit more about this. He was doing this in kind of high-end vacation luxury real estate, where I'm going to take essentially a referral fee for kind of getting in front of this buyer's lead.

17:34And it was like, for not a lot of work, hey, I'm going to send this email introduction to kind of help walk this process through. In some cases, that could be worth 40, 50 grand. It's like, oh, my gosh, crazy, crazy stuff for a essentially a digital business. Right. And that was really interesting. So, Steve, really appreciate the question. Lots of different routes that you could go there. Question seven. This one came in from Twitter. What's a parrot head? So I'm surprised I hadn't gotten this question earlier. This has been on my Twitter profile for years. A parrot head is a slang term for Jimmy Buffett fans.

18:04We grew up listening to his music because mom was a Parrothead herself and we being my brother and I. And it rubbed off behind a lot of the well-known drinking anthems are some pretty thoughtful and sometimes pretty funny lyrics. And maybe most applicable for Side Hustle show listeners is, I don't want to swim in a roped off sea. There's so much more to life than punching the clock at your roped off cubicle. And side note, Jimmy was a super savvy entrepreneur as well, worth an estimated billion dollars. at the time of his death earlier this year. Not bad for an artist that a lot of people would have considered a one-hit wonder 45 years ago.

18:42So good work, Jimmy. You'll be missed. And yes, Parrothead for life. Question eight was from Duncan. He says, I'm looking to build my knowledge of SEO. What resources do you recommend? Also, do you recommend WordPress for building an affiliate site? Duncan, yes, WordPress is still the way that I would go. And the reason is for content sites, it's the most proven and the most supported platform. Now, I would challenge the language around building a quote unquote affiliate site. Instead, what if you could position it in your head as I'm going to build the most helpful resource for a given audience, for a given niche audience with affiliate relationships being one monetization strategy that I'm going to pursue.

19:20As far as SEO resources, lots of cool places to go check out. Niche Pursuits is a favorite of mine. The Authority Hacker guys are great. Brandon Gailey from Blogging Millionaire does an awesome job. Bjork at the Food Blogger Pro podcast. whether or not you're in the food blogging space. I think that's an interesting one. YouTube, you got the Project 24 guys, you got Matt Diggity. On top of that, Ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F-S has a free blogging for business course. That is a good starting point for anybody. I'll take a moment here to plug my own SEO course. It's thetrafficcourse.com, especially for people, online business owners and bloggers who have been at it for a year or two and are looking to kind of revamp some of their existing content in a really intentional way.

20:02could be a fit for you. Use promo code podcast for a special listener only discount on that. Question nine is from Johnny. This was in the Facebook group. He says, I'm looking for ways to grow my fitness photography side hustle. I've had some success so far just reaching out through Instagram DMs, but it's a numbers game and it feels a little spammy on my part. Well, Johnny, I like how you've already niched down your service. Hey, I do a fitness photography business and I was instantly reminded of a friend of mine, Scott Colby, who for years, he ran these series of what he called fit for photos challenges where participants would do like an eight or 12 week fitness program.

20:42He was the personal trainer in this case. He wasn't the photographer, but then at the end, he would do this professional photo session where the participants could show off their new ripped body. Like look at the, and he'd have before and after pictures to prove that program worked. So there might be a strategic partnership here to be had with local personal trainers, either as like an add on to their service, or just maybe they foot the bill, you know, for the first one, like to get those really great before and after pictures. I like this niche. And I think there's definitely an angle here. Question 10 is from Scott.

21:15He asks, how do you find these guests every week? Well, this was definitely a fear of mine. When I started back in 2013. Am I going to run out of people to talk to? What did I just commit myself to? I do this every week. Luckily, 580 episodes later, that hasn't come to fruition. Like there's always more side hustles coming across my desk than there are days in the week to have time to record. But how it started, it started with my own small circle or network. My goal as a host always to turn one listener into two by creating content that you hopefully share with a friend. But a similar question could be on how could you turn one episode or one guest into two?

21:51And the question that helped early on after turning off the recording is, do you know of anyone else who might be a good fit for the show? Because entrepreneurs tend to know other entrepreneurs. And that was a way that I've been able to connect with some other guests. You could also do that in kind of an email follow-up after their episode goes live. Hey, thanks so much for joining me. By the way, do you know of anybody else who might be a good fit for the show? Because those recommendations and introductions from guests have been great. For example, it was Jason Tan from Video Husky who introduced me to Ryan Golgoski from 180 Sites.

22:24Jock Hopkins from the online course guy introduced me to Spencer Russell from a couple weeks ago. Another source of guests for me is the Side Hustle Nation community on Facebook. It's just a central hub. And by just listening and paying attention, you start to see people kind of coming out of the woodwork. That's how I found Craig Odom in his backyard nursery slash YouTube side hustle. That was a really interesting episode. I also get Google alerts for side hustle related keywords. And I think that's how I first came across Emily McDermott and her spreadsheet selling business on Etsy. That's episode 560.

23:00Somehow she came across my inbox in one of those feeds. And I can't remember if I asked somebody for an intro or was able to just cold reach out and say, hey, incredible story. I want to hear more about it. Another source for me is inbound. For full disclosure, it's mostly PR junk, but occasionally I'll get a compelling cold inbound pitch. Now, what happens more often is I see interesting stories and angles coming through the official application form. That's at sidehustlenation.com slash pitch. If you want to apply to be on the show, I'd love to hear from you. That's where David Paxton from Daily Golf Steals in episode 583 came across my radar.

23:37I think that's where Kevin and Ben from Pretty Boy in episode 581 came across. They applied to be on the show and say, hey, this is a compelling angle. Let's make this happen. Now, another source is other podcasts where you're listening to another show and you hear somebody that might be a fit for yours. At least, you know, they're open to guesting if it's a fit. So it's less of a stretch if you're doing cold outreach. And you probably don't want to air the exact same conversation. But if you have a slightly different angle or if something was missing in your mind, maybe you want to go a little bit deeper or you want to explore something else, you might reach out.

24:10Or if you just know it's going to be a hit with your audience, then it's all fair game. I think that's how I connected with Shelly Marmer from Travel Mexico Solo. It was either she applied for the show or I heard her interview on Niche Pursuits or vice versa. Maybe she applied and then I went to listen to her episode. I was like, either way, this is going to be a great episode. Like this is crazy story. Just three years into it, making 50 grand a month with travel sites. fantastic. And then lastly, there's directories like Podmatch, like podcastguests.com. These are sites where the quote unquote expert guests can get matched up with hosts.