665: The Path to $1k/mo with Mini Digital Products

23:00And then I just go back into Canva. I just like change the listing images. I change the actual product itself. I change some of the tags. I slightly altered the description, but I can actually use a lot of the same features from that initial listing. So for me now, if I were to actually do that using this real example, like if I were to have a father's day card that I want to make into a mother's day card, it would probably take me like 15 to 20 minutes total. I might on the actual design, change the colors from blue to pink. And I'm obviously going to change the word father to mother and some other changes like the tags, you can use 13 tags per Etsy listing.

23:34I would change some of those to be specific to the holiday. But using the entirety of your Etsy listing as a template is something not many people do. Like even the listing images you were just asking about, Nick. Yeah, I have eight listing images that I'm using for all my products. And it's just drag and drop. Like I'm using Canva templates using like the frames feature. And so when I create the new product, I'm just like dragging and dropping back into those same templates. So I'm not having to recreate the wheel every single time with my listing images. In terms of what works, clarity is key.

24:05So something I see new sellers do so often is it's either their title or their description or their listing images, especially that main listing image. I like to think of that as the gatekeeper to sales because like if someone's scrolling through Etsy, let's say they type in mother's day card and your listing image doesn't attract them at the start, even if you have the best product in the world with the best title and the best description, and you have an ugly main listing image, you're not going to make the sale. It's the gatekeeper. It's kind of like a thumbnail on YouTube. Like you need a good thumbnail to get people attracted and clicking into your video.

24:38Now, once they get in, there's a whole bunch of other different things that you can do to make them convert. But if they don't get in in the first place, then you're screwed. So I like to say that clarity is key. Like you want your title to be exactly, exactly what the person is going to get. You want that main listing image to be very clear on what that person is going to get. A concrete example from our community, someone posted a couple of weeks ago, they're like, Hey, this is my first listing. And they were making holiday gift tags. I think it was gift tags for Valentine's day. Okay. And for their main listing image, it was like an eight by five, eight by five.

25:10It was an 8.5 by 11, just like a letter size sheet of paper with all of the gift tags on it. Like it was very unclear what the actual product that the end user would be getting. So we in the community were like, Oh, actually, it would probably make a lot more sense if you were to mock this up and like show this gift tag on an actual Valentine's gift. And someone is it's a lot more clear what the end user is buying. So clarity is key. And far too many people make the mistake of just like having this like abstract, maybe they're trying to like keyword stuff in the title or the description or their, their main listing image just looks weird, there's too much information on it.

25:46And it's your buyers are going to have when they see your product show up in search, the more likely they're going to buy. And because people are still buying convenience, you're not worried about, well, just, you know, if it's a simple printable and I'm just, I just literally gave it away. Like there's an image of the thing. Not really worried about that because it's a different buyer mindset than the do-it-yourselfer. So to be clear, it's not just a PNG or a JPEG of the finished product. Like that's not the main listing image. It's usually mocked up. Maybe there's like a nice like wood background or something like that with shadows, you're still showing exactly what the printable is or what the digital product is, but you're not just giving it away.

26:24You're not just like having the PDF as the front runner, the showcase of what the product is. Because to your point, you don't want people just going in, screenshotting it, and then printing it out and using it. That's not what I'm recommending at all. Okay, what do you recommend? I mean, how do you show it without showing it? Okay, let me try to think of a good example. So let's just use, I'm using thank you cards a lot in Mother's Day and Father's Day cards. let's use a mother's day card so mother's day card i might have the five by seven card like add an angle kind of with like a shadow effect on it to make it pop on like a wooden background or maybe on a table with flowers in the corner and so it's not just it's not just the piece of paper like it's a whole mock-up sure sure so like if someone were to go in and try to like screenshot at it like and you know try to crop it it's not going to look great it's not going to look great they're just going to pay the four or five bucks for the finished product so that's what i mean Like you are showing the entire printable or the entire digital product, but it's not in a way where someone can just like screenshot it or download it and use it immediately.

27:23Do you use Etsy ads at all? Are you relying 100 % on just the SEO of these listings or the search volume that's there? For this Etsy challenge, I tried not to use ads for the beginning part when I made it to$1 ,000 per month. But after that, I was like, okay, no holds barred. Let's see how much I can pump up this revenue with ads. and it was actually like the week before Christmas. And I started pumping out my ad spend like$100 a day just to see what I could do. Cause Christmas is huge. Holidays are huge on Etsy. And so with this new shop, I spent just over$900 in 10 days on ads. And that ended up bringing in an extra$2 ,200 in revenue.

28:05So like 1300 in profit, if I can do live math on a podcast. So yeah, I do use ads. I use ads in my main shop. I was trying to use ads very sparingly in this new shop until I hit that goal because I didn't want to I don't want people to be like, well, the only reason you got there was because ads. I was like, no, I'm getting here because of keyword research and SEO. But then I turned the ads dial up to 10. That's work. Yeah, I'll trade 900 for 2200 all day. Yes. Ads do work if done correctly. But I also didn't want to teach people the wrong lessons. If people think that they can just solve problems with ads, what I like to say is ads buy you eyeballs.

28:38So if you already have a product that's converting, like people are already buying your product here and there, sure, you can throw some ad money at it, see if it works. But if you just have a shop full of stuff that's not selling and you're paying for ads, all you're doing is buying more eyeballs that are probably not gonna buy the thing because it doesn't have any proof of conversion. So like, I don't want people to think or get the idea that just spending money on ads is gonna solve their problems. And all of a sudden, this side hustle that's bringing in zero for them is gonna be$1 ,000 per month overnight.

29:06Like you have to do the hard work of the keyword research and the SEO and figuring out what buyers are searching for. Then once you figure that out, then you can start experimenting with ads. Does Etsy give you data on, you had a thousand views on this product and 50 people bought, so you had a 5 % conversion? Like what's, do you get any of those metrics or what's good or what's a good benchmark? Yeah, Etsy does give you those metrics. I like to be anywhere between three and 5 % conversion rate on visitors. So I was actually, when I was publicly documenting this, I was like, okay, I'm getting 100 visits a day.

29:37Hopefully that means three to five sales. And it actually did end up being around that. So basically to hit my goal of$1 ,000 per month, I needed to get somewhere between like 175 and 200 visits a day. And so I'm like publicly tracking the first days, like, you know, 12 visits. The end of the second week's like 25 visits. But yeah, that's a good benchmark to get back to your question. Like three to 5 % conversion rate is awesome. But even then to be able to put something out onto the internet and get views, even if it's just 10, 12, 20, you know, the first couple of days. Yeah. Compare that to starting a brand new blog and shouting it to the void of the internet.

30:13Google's not going to rank your brand new site right out of the gate. I think it's an important contrast to draw. Some of the other Etsy sellers that we've talked to have been trying to collect emails from their shop. Oh, get a free bonus template when you enter your email here. And they're trying to wean themselves off or maybe build up their own traffic source to their own self-hosted storefront or their own Shopify store for digital products. you doing any of that? Or is it just like, I just want to take what this marketplace is going to give me? With this new shop? No, I really wanted to just focus on Etsy generated traffic.

30:45So I didn't do the email list stuff. I didn't really lean into ads. I didn't do social media for it. For my main business, Goal City Ventures, absolutely. We were collecting email addresses, using printables as lead magnets, which is something I was going to talk about later today. But yeah, in my main business, I'm all for it. But the reason I started this new shop was like, I don't want people to think they need all that stuff because you don't, you really don't. Like you just need the keyword research and SEO. But if you do wanna scale this and build a bigger business out of it, definitely go for it.

31:14Like there are tons of ways. And I listened to those other episodes you had with Debbie and Becky. There are great ways to get people on your email list, whether that's with a freebie or like a bonus or a bundle or other ways. And then you can, obviously, once they're on your list, you can then sell them similar products to what they've already bought, but it's not a necessity. You don't have to do that to be successful on Etsy. Yeah, or work your way up the value chain while you bought this. So the next thing you might need. Yeah, exactly. Lots of different marketing things you can play around with once you get going.

31:41There was a question I wanted to ask. To the extent that it matters, do you need to have your shop niched down? Like, you know, the thank you card Emporium and that's all we sell. Or could it be a little bit broader? Or do you find that that matters? I find that it doesn't matter much. Now, if you're someone who it doesn't make any sense, like let's say you started a shop for South Hustle Nation and it was all about South Hustles. but then all of a sudden you started throwing like wedding printables in there that might just make your audience be like what the heck nick what are you doing um so if you already have an established brand and you want to be like you know the thank you card guy or girl or you want to be like the personal finance guy or girl okay then it might not make sense to branch out but for the average person it's totally fine to have a whole hodgepodge different types of printables in there and etsy actually has what's called sections in your shop so you could silo different stuff you could be like, oh, here's my thank you card section.

32:30Here is my planner section. Here is my editable template section. And so you can silo them off like that. But just in terms of buyer behavior, most people aren't like searching for a shop and then browsing the shop and seeing like what's good in there. Most people are typing a product into the search bar, seeing what shows up on search results, and then clicking buying that product. And then they might not ever see you again. So it doesn't really matter if you have a whole bunch of different stuff in there. That's fair. That's probably consistent with my own Etsy buying behavior. It's, you know, search and discovery.

33:01Yes. And I don't know if I've ever reordered from the same shop again. It's like, they solved my problem and now I'm gone. What are you buying on Etsy, Nick? We have a cool map downstairs that says, you know, adventure awaits. It's like this cool, like watercolor map. I've bought other gifts on there over the years, like maybe birthstone jewelry stuff. A few purchases, not a prolific Etsy shopper, but I spent some time on there. But I'm kind of inspired to throw up some of these templates. You don't have to clean up some of the templates that I've been using, but there is a Side Hustle Nation shop with a handful of t-shirt designs up there, but I've failed to prioritize it very well.

33:41So I'm excited to maybe take a crack at it this year. Why not? Extra revenue stream. And for someone like you, we can talk about this later or now, but anyone who's an entrepreneur or side hustler, having an Etsy shop is, it's kind of a different way of advertising, right? Instead of spending money on say Facebook ads or Google ads or YouTube ads, like this is a way you can get people into your ecosystem. Like let's say you had the side hustle shop and someone downloads your side hustle tracker or your big list of side hustle ideas, they might not have ever known you before. And you're getting these people, not only are you getting paid to acquire them as customers, like you're not paying like a Facebook ad or a Google ad or a YouTube ad, but you're building goodwill with them.

34:19Like if you deliver something of value, if you have like this rockstar side hustle income tracker, that's like five bucks, you got them into your ecosystem. You figure out a way to get them on your email list. Now you've already built a good rapport with them. So now when you launch, you know, some kind of a side hustle course or a membership or some other bigger digital products, like they're already gonna be like, oh, you know, this guy already delivered so much value for me with this little$5 printable that he sold me. And so, yeah, it's like, it's like a great entry point into your business with these printables.

34:45And Etsy is a great search engine to get people into your ecosystem who might have not gotten there before. Yeah, the side hustle business planning template. We came across some people who are doing this for kids' summer businesses. Like, here's the, you know, we want to teach our kids entrepreneurship. Here's the lemonade stand, you know, business plan template that they would buy and make their kids fill out. I love it. There's probably a ton of these. We'll plug these into eRank and see what we can get. Now, at the time that this episode is airing, Gold City Ventures is in the middle of their semi-annual e-printables course launch.

35:18So we can link up your reference to that in the show notes for this episode at sidehustlenation.com slash Cody, C-O-D-Y. And we'll be right back with more with Cody in just a minute, including his business idea donation for Side Hustle Show listeners right after this. There are less than 100 days left in 2025, which means less than 100 days left to hit those goals that you said or to refocus your energy on what really matters. If you've got some catching up to do and maybe you've been procrastinating on taking that next step, our sponsor Indeed can help you find the best candidates for the role you need to fill and find them fast.

35:56In fact, three and a half million employers worldwide already use Indeed to hire great talent fast and it'll be my first stop when I need to make my next hire. Don't struggle to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. Plus, with Indeed sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay for results. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. Side Hustle Show listeners get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show.

36:31Just go to Indeed.com slash SideHustleShow right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash SideHustleShow. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. One of the tools I've personally seen make a huge difference for business owners is Quo, formerly OpenPhone. It's the same great business phone system you've heard me talk about before, just with a new name. When you're running a business, you know that every missed call is a missed opportunity. So Quo, formerly OpenPhone, this is the number one business phone system that streamlines your customer communications.

37:05It works through an app on your phone or your computer. So no more using your personal number as your business line. No more carrying two phones around. With Quo, your team can share one phone number and collaborate on customer calls and texts just like a shared inbox. So anybody can jump in to keep response times fast. And this is where it gets super cool. You can set up Quo's built-in AI agent in just a few minutes to handle calls after hours, answer customer questions, and capture leads on autopilot. I want to invite you to get started for free. Plus, Side Hustle Show listeners get 20 % off your first six months at Quo.com slash Side Hustle.

37:43That's Quo.com slash Side Hustle. Look at them getting that three-letter domain. Quo.com slash Side Hustle. And if you've got existing numbers with another service, Quo will port them over at no extra charge. Quo, no missed calls, no missed customers. All right, we're back with Cody Berman from The Fi Show and Gold City Ventures for round two in this episode. Round two is your business idea donation. This is something you think listeners could run with. This is something that you might start yourself if you had more hours in the day. What have you got for us here? I even have a name for this business for your listeners, Nick.

38:22I'm hoping, I'm trying to scratch my own edge here. I'm hoping that someone creates this. I don't have the time. I don't have the resources. I don't have the connection. It's called The Hub. And it is an all-in-one business service for entrepreneurs. So this is legal, accounting, a development team, marketing, HR, everything that you could possibly want as an entrepreneur all packaged into one. And I'm sure you have felt these pains, Nick, where you're looking for, say, a new accountant or you're looking for a legal team. It's like pulling teeth. I'm asking all my mastermind groups. I'm posting in Facebook groups.

38:52Everyone's giving you different recommendations. You don't know who's good. It's so much. And as we've scaled up Gold City Ventures in our company, like there's just all these different pieces and all these different places. If someone were to develop the hub, like we'd pay literally, I'm not even joking. We pay like$5 ,000 a month for that to get rid of all the other individual people that are like tangentially attached to our business just to have like this one awesome rockstar team in place. And obviously there'd be different tiers. Maybe a new entrepreneur is paying a hundred bucks a month.

39:19The more developed businesses are paying 10 ,000 plus dollars a month. I don't know, but I would love for someone to do this because it has been so difficult and so much work for us to like to find those key players that again, we don't have the expertise. Like we're not developers, we're not legal, we're not accounting, we're not HR, but they're important people. They're important people that you need to make your business succeed and to be compliant. So I would love if someone took this idea and ran with it. Okay. Talk me through this. So are we thinking like a directory of sorts of like, here are the top legal professionals that deal with online business e-commerce.

39:51Here's the top accounting professionals that know this type of business. You know, Sam Parr from Sam's List, right? My First Million and Hustle. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So he was doing something like this for accountants, right? Yes. So not that, not that. What I want is, And this is why it's so difficult. You need some kind of attractive reason for these people to want to work directly with you. Like if I'm paying the$100 a month,$5 ,000 a month, whatever it is, whatever your scale of business is, I would want them to just assign me. Like here's your lawyer, here's your accountant, here's your dev person.

40:21And they're just kind of at your beck and call. Like if you need a funnel completed or you need like a website thing done, you just hit up the dev guy that's already part of your package and he does it for you. Or if you need a legal contract, you have like a new joint venture that you're doing, you hit up the legal team of the hub subscription that you're already a part of and they take care of it. So not a directory because I think directories still kind of, you have to go through the hard work. You have to interview a bunch of people. You have to pick one, get recommendations. That's not what I want.

40:47I've been there, done that. I want them to just like have really high quality vetted people that I can trust that I can just give them these tasks that I don't want to do or don't know how to do. Okay. So I'm now understanding it better as a have like a on-demand fractional agency, fractional support for... Basically fractional everything. Fractional everything. Okay. It's like, it's not worth having somebody on staff full-time or even part-time, but like there are needs that come up. Exactly. For legal, for technical stuff and say, just, I will, you know, I want a resource in my back pocket to, to go to do that and not have to, somebody else does all the vetting and I don't have to go out and, and ask friends for recommendations on here.

41:31I just have a membership to this thing and people are standing by ready to help me out. That's it. If someone did this well, I would pay. And I'm sure a lot of other people would pay. I talked to a lot of other entrepreneurs who have the same pain points. People would pay a lot of money for this if it was done well. Yeah. When I had the virtual assistant site, there were, especially in the overseas companies in India and the Philippines, they would kind of promise this. Like, oh, you need web development done. You need funnel building done. You need copywriting done. Like, hey, look, we've got it all in house.

41:58We got the experts to do this design, whatever you need. The question mark is always the quality component. And so that's kind of where the vetting comes in. Like, well, how, you know, and the level of trust you have to build to get somebody to sign up. How tight is this legal contract again? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. All right. That's the hub, the all-in-one business hub for entrepreneurs. Now you've got that business idea. That's your next side hustle. You can run with that. Let's go to round three, the triple threat. the first component of this is a marketing tactic that's working right now.

42:31This does not have to be Etsy related. This could be related to any of your other businesses. We kind of touched on it before, but one that's working and it's worked for years is printables or digital downloads as lead magnets or low ticket offers. And we discussed a little bit using the side hustle Etsy shop as an example, but it's just such a great way to get people into your ecosystem. It's almost like a tripwire product. I don't really like that term too much because it sounds like you're tricking people into buying something, but it's just a great way to get people exposure to what you've got, like what you've got to offer.

43:00And if you can wow people out the gate with something either free, like a lead magnet or cheap, like a low ticket offer, maybe it's literally seven bucks or 17 bucks. They're going to be so much more prone to purchase whatever other things you have to sell, whether it's a course or membership or services or whatever, one-on-one coaching, they're going to be so much more prone to sign up if they already know that you're someone who delivers value. And you're able to sell these on Etsy? Is that the primary strategy or is it just through your website? Like where were you finding eyeballs and buyers?

43:30For Gold City Ventures, it's a whole bunch of things. So not so much Etsy anymore, but especially, I shouldn't say that. We do have a lot of people who come from Etsy, but like most people who join our email list are not from Etsy. But so we have like, you know, affiliates who promote our stuff. We use SEO, like we have a huge blog and YouTube channel and we're doing paid ads. So like there's a whole bunch of different ways that we're getting people to download these lead magnets or buy these low ticket products. But again, it's building that trust. Now, we did a really fun episode with Pete Boyle, who has his$1 product challenge.

44:05And his argument was like, yeah, you can build your email list with a bunch of free lead magnets. But the question is, are you building a list of subscribers, you build in a list of buyers. And he's like, that$1 barrier was enough to really accelerate sales of everything else that he had to offer. He's like, obviously, I'm not going to make a living off of this$1 product. But it led to, in his case, led to higher ticket consulting business. It led to higher ticket digital product sales too. But just that little hurdle, that little bit of commitment. And we talked about people who pay attention.

44:38And if you can wow people, you deliver, you know, 10x or 100x the value for that$1 thing, then all of a sudden that level of trust really skyrockets. Absolutely. All right. That is our marketing tactic. Digital downloads as lead magnets, low ticket offers, figure out what you might be able to create. And probably what Pete recommended was working backwards from your core offer, or, you know, peeling out a piece of that, that solves some initial pain point. And like, okay, what's the natural progression of somebody going through this if they ultimately are going to need your your full service what's a logical first step there the next question here of the triple threat is a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now we mentioned erank we mentioned everbee we mentioned canva we've had a few different tools here but what else have you got for us something i started using way too late so i've been using chat gpt for a while but i hadn't really experimented with custom gpts i think I actually heard you talk about this on a podcast.

45:36Correct me if I'm wrong, Nick. But now I have custom GPTs for a couple of different use cases where like I have a custom GPT that can write something in my voice if I need like a blog post or an email that just kind of will take an information that I give it, kind of spit it out and honestly like reason with itself a little bit and then spit out final products. And it honestly doesn't need too much tweaking sometimes. I have another custom GPT for generating and researching Etsy product ideas. I have another custom GPT for basically researching a guest for my podcast, The Financial Independence Show, and like kind of unearthing some interesting questions or things that they've mentioned before.

46:12And for those wondering, a custom GPT is like, if you're on chat GPT, you know, you just type in like, hey, I'm interviewing Nick Loper today. Tell me some interesting things about him. A custom GPT is basically just a string of queries that you have saved. So it's like, hey, you know, search up nick loper what are his like top episodes what are some interesting things that he doesn't talk about too often and it will you can add as many queries as you want as many kind of actions onto this string of instructions that's basically a custom gpt and i was way too late to this game and they're awesome okay is this something you like would save in the in the sidebar of chat gpt rather than having to punch in those kind of priming prompts each time yes you do need the paid version the 20 per month pro version of chat gpt and then like in your profile at the top right it'll unlock and you'll see like there's i mean there's a bunch of options that unlock with that tier but custom gpts is one of them i don't think there's any maximum number i think you can create an unlimited number of custom gpts for all different use cases interesting i haven't played around with that i've just gone through the you know one specific use case maybe i heard a guest mention it then yeah the one that i would probably need to create is like take this article and and turn it into a compelling youtube script that's like kind of the bottleneck in creating more video content like we've got this huge body of library of content on the site but it's like how do we translate some of that uh over to video and do it in a way that is native and natural to youtube and not just reading reading a blog post i don't think that would necessarily play very well and so you know a series of prompts like you are nick loper from side usillation and this is your task do you understand yes yes and like okay here's here's the copy can you turn this in you know don't include blah blah blah you know it's okay to use some of the same phrasing but it'd have to be word for word do you understand yes okay and go for there but like to have that saved i could see how that would be a time saver oh yeah huge time saver all right and last but not least your favorite book from the last 12 months one that i didn't think was going to have such a profound impact on me because it was really dense when i started reading it i was like oh my gosh this is so boring It's called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

48:18And it's all about human psychology and why people tend to make certain decisions. It's really interesting if you're a marketer and just kind of like the gambling lottery mentality, like loss aversion. There's a whole bunch of really, really good stuff in there and stuff that we as marketers can use to our advantage. Interesting. I have heard of this book for a long time. It's been out for a while, but I've never cracked it open. So thinking fast and slow. It is dense. It is dense. It's not like a fun read, but there's just like a lot of info in there. It's, it's, there's a lot of really good stuff.

48:49Yeah. You would layer this on with a influence by a Robert Cialdini type of thing. How do you, how do we tap into these psychological benefits or psychological triggers to improve our business? Exactly. Okay. Well, very cool. We'll link that up in the show notes as well. Sidehustlenation.com slash Cody. You've got a million different side hustles. Like what's, what's next for you? What are you focused on? What, What kind of projects you got going on? More real estate builds? What's new? Real estate been slowing down on. Honestly, our core focus has been Gold City Ventures and building that out.

49:20We have some exciting stuff that I can't announce yet, but just know that we have some exciting projects in the works, constantly improving, building our community, making the content better and easier to follow. So yeah, most of the new stuff for me, Nick, is Gold City Ventures, which honestly, if you were to ask me this question years ago when we first became friends, I probably would have named 10 news hot hustles I was going to try. I was doing way too much. And honestly, I think I spread myself too thin. So now I've kind of re-narrowed my focus into a couple core things that I'm really good at and just focusing all my time and energy into those.

49:53So yeah, doing more on Goal City Ventures, continuing the podcast, the Financial Independence Show, and that's the main focuses for me right now. Very good. Well, we'll link up all of those resources, included the ePrintables course at sidehustlenation.com slash Cody. Thank you for sharing your insight. This is, again, very inspiring. Maybe hopefully get off the sidelines and into the Etsy game a little bit myself. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.

50:26Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So help spread the word, fire off that text message to somebody excited about planting those little digital money seeds, building extra income streams. 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.