695: The Most Unique Niches, Small Town Side Hustles, Monetizing Art, and More: Q&A with Nick

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1:15Now, starting with money is definitely better slash easier than starting with no money. But I'm not sure that's the right question. Because there's a lot of things you could go out and spend$5 ,000 on. You could go get a beat up pickup truck, you could start a moving service, you could buy 3d printers and try and sell that stuff. You could buy a vending machine and try and find a good location for it. You could invest in some specific side hustle training and go do that thing. But what all of those neglect is what's important to you. What do you care about? What unique skills, interests, connections do you have?

1:48What types of people do you love working with? It's kind of like asking, what's the best side hustle? I don't know. I've been covering this stuff for 12 years, and I still don't know. There are certainly some that are better than others that we've come across when it comes to their upside and their profit potential, but there's no return without risk. The$5 ,000 is better to have than not having it, but it's almost irrelevant. Is it best, quote unquote, best to start a software company because some guy on some podcast said, well, those can be really profitable. Well, not if you don't have some level of validation on product market fit.

2:24I would venture that millions, maybe even billions, have been spent building stuff that nobody wanted. It's an expensive education. So absolutely great that you got some savings for startup costs. That's a really strong position to be in. And what it really does is it just opens up the playbook of potential side hustles a little bit wider than if you didn't have it. But unfortunately, you still got to go through that decision phase, that ideation phase of figuring out, well, what problem can I solve in the market? There's a few different exercises and frameworks to help with that in episode 683, or you can just binge on the archives and see what kind of inspiration strikes.

3:04That question came in from Kylie, and this is the 18th installment of Q &A with Nick. Appreciate you joining me today, and every day you put a little side hustle show in your earbuds. This is the podcast to help you make extra money in your spare time, and we've gotten more questions and answers to help you do just that today. Question two comes in from Amanda. She says, we live in a small town. I've got two little kids under two that I take care of all day. I've sold some homemade preserves, pesto and other homemade products on Facebook, but they're kind of one-off sales. Any ideas on what I can do, preferably from home?

3:39Well, Amanda, kudos to you. Two under two is what I like to call survival season. It doesn't have to be side hustle season. So lots of respect for you for even trying to do something productive with little ones underfoot. I know for me, nothing happened when my kids were that age, unless it was nap time. But give me a one and a half hour toddler nap time. Oh, I can knock out some podcast editing and some other blog post stuff during that time. But the fact that you're already making some sales with homemade products tells me you've definitely got some entrepreneurial instincts and admire you for even trying to get something off the ground.

4:14So let's see if we can build on something that's already worked. So you've got some proven validation here. People are already buying your stuff. Is there a way to turn those one-off sales? Sure, there was some interest, there was some demand around when we posted it, but then it kind of falls off, or maybe it's somewhat seasonal. So could we turn those one-off sales into more recurring revenue? Could we partner with a local coffee shop or cafe and have them be kind of a regular, like a wholesale customer for your preserves or for your pesto or something like that? Could you, for the customers you've already sold to, could you expand into a meal prep or meal planning type of service for local customers?

4:52Instead of this one-off sale, it becomes something that you do every week or every month if you have capacity for that. Could you partner with a local shop that likes to sell, you know, locally made type of products? There's a handful of those in our town that kind of come to mind. And so I could see like a cutesy little packaging jar of jam or preserves and, you know, people would pay a premium price for that if it's even remotely touristy or something like that. Another idea that comes to mind is we'll teach you another people how to do this. It sounds kind of interesting, unique, almost, you know, homestead-y in a way where I think people would be interested in learning this stuff either in person or online.

5:36Maybe you could film during nap time or put a class up on out school or something like that. We've seen some examples of guests on the show doing pretty well there with a more unique type of class. And maybe there's something like that. I'm a little bit reminded of my friend Jen, who started her custom cookie business. She is at SoHereIsTheDough. She started this when her twins were really little. And so it was a lot of local word of mouth with other moms. Instagram was big. Custom orders for parties. She would do big cookie batches for holidays and decorate them really nicely. I think those were mostly pre-sold, so she didn't end up with a bunch of wasted inventory.

6:17Oh, shoot, I've made hundreds and hundreds of cookies and nobody wanted them. She's like, no, I'm going to reduce my risk. I'm only going to make what I've already sold. And because they were so cute and unique, she commanded premium prices for them, like$50 a dozen, I want to say. So she was on episode 403, if you want to go way back in the archives to find that one. Or I could be way off base and you actually hate cooking, in which case a pivot to something purely online might make sense where your small townness doesn't really matter at all. Data annotation, prolific freelancing, some remote virtual assistant service, you know, remote agency type of model, something like that, flexible, limited hours for nap time or after bedtime.

7:00the good news is you're already making sales and that's the hardest part proving demand so now it's just kind of a matter of systemizing or finding something that that you want to scale and again seasons of life it's totally okay to just be present with these two little kids and not worry about a side hustle at this point if you have the financial breathing room the flexibility to do just that question three was from glenn who says for privacy reasons and workplace relationships I'd like to set up a website, LLC, and email newsletter, but I want to do it anonymously. Do you have any experience with virtual addresses or would you recommend any alternative solutions?

7:38Glenn, on the website side of things, what you can do is use domain privacy protection or domain privacy registration, something it's called. A lot of registrars are going to charge you 10 or 15 bucks extra for this. most of my domains are now registered at pork bun which i want to say includes this free who is registration privacy in their registration fee so that is one way to do that on the website side then all you got to do is be professionally vague when it comes to your about page or create nowadays an ai avatar to represent the brand like hey jen even if you want to do video hey jen is looking really realistic these days uh on the virtual address side of things yes i've used these this is like my local neighborhood ups store mailbox which is around 20 bucks a month but it saves me from having to put my home address in the footer of my emails so on the email side yes you can use a virtual address like that i use a p.o box for years and years it just has to be a real address where you can receive mail and i believe that's the canned spam requirement and you've seen this at the bottom like the footer of every email will have some kind of mailing address and then you just got to put the brand name or the persona that you create in the from field, which is really common.

8:55I get emails from brands and not individuals all the time. So I don't see any issues there. Now, depending on the type of content or service, at some point, it does get a little weird. Like, am I going to sign up for a high ticket service without talking to a real person? Probably not. So you're gonna have to build that trust and maybe one on one with clients. It's okay to be you. You just don't want to broadcast it to the world. I get that. And then on the LLC side, most states are going to allow you to use what's called a registered agent service, like Northwest Registered Agent or even LegalZoom probably, which keeps your home address off the public record.

9:33Delaware and Wyoming, they're popular choices for privacy reasons, but I've always just gone with my home state for the sake of simplicity there. Now, marketing anonymously can be challenging, but maybe less so than it has been in the past, because it seems like it's becoming more and more common, especially on platforms like Reddit, especially on platforms like Twitter or X, where you see anonymous accounts can do pretty well. Car dealership guy, I want to say it was one. There was another one talking about watches. So there's some precedence for that. Maybe a little bit harder on the SEO side, since I think still Google is valuing the source, trying to triangulate author information with broader trust and credibility signals that this person has the expertise and authority to be writing about what they're writing about.

10:20But maybe we can put our heads together for an episode on anonymous or faceless side hustles. I think that would be really interesting, though maybe hard to find a guest for. Question four was from Mark, who says, how do I even get started with AI? Well, Mark, it depends on what you want to do. It's a pretty broad question here, but I would challenge you to start integrating it into your day-to-day life and work just to get a sense of what's capable. For example, I signed up for Function this year. This is like the health blood testing service, functionhealth.com, I think is the site. So generally looking good.

10:53It gave me a biological age, a decade younger than my actual self. So I felt really good about that. But my LDL cholesterol numbers were higher than the normal range. And so I talked to my doctor about that and got kind of this unsatisfactory kind of hand wavy response. Well, yeah, everybody's this high. It's like, well, the average person is also unhealthy and obese. Like there's no desire to be average here. And it just felt like he was kind of dismissing it. And so what I did was punch that in. I said, hey, chat GPT, I'm going to upload some blood work results. You know, what questions do you need to know to help me come up with an action plan here.

11:31And it, you know, asked me about height, weight, exercise, diet, family history, all that stuff. So I punched that back in and said, okay, here's the test results. And it said, and it was just an image. It read the image. It was really cool. And it kind of created this own little table summary of the results that these are good. This is higher than normal, yes, but in the context of everything else, here's why it's actually looking good. And it gave such a more in-depth response than the doctor did. You know, he's pressed for time and all that jazz. But it was a much more satisfying experience that I could do kind of asynchronously as I was able to collect the data and not have to wait six months for an appointment.

12:09And it said, you know, look, I wouldn't stress about this. You know, I don't think you're a cardio risk. And here's why. If you really want to do something like here, you could try this, this and this. It was like such a cool experience. Now, on the work side, what I'm doing is having having the ai fill in content gaps like here's you know i'll take the first crack at it still like you know i'm going to come up with my listicle or you know 10 best whatever's and but then i'll ask the same question like oh and inevitably it comes up with one or two like oh that was good i didn't think about that and so you could add that into the content ai takes the first crack at editing transcripts for a lot of episodes where i will upload the transcript and it's done enough of these now where it's kind of knows the side hustle show style and sometimes it's more aggressive than i would like it to be like no no no don't don't cut that but it is suggesting kind of natural ad breaks and giving me teaser scripts for those so it is improving my workflow or saving me some time on the post-production side of things before i hand it off to the editor it is helping summarize episodes for show notes which has sped up the work for the summarizer writer person that creates those detailed show notes for the website.

13:22And there's really a lot of different use cases. I know I'm just scratching the surface and plan to try and build out a few more projects or agents to automate even more workflows. It sounds kind of daunting, but it's also really exciting to do because if it works, it frees me up to do, you know, frees me up from these, you know, tedious nuts and bolts, you know, weekly recurring type of tasks to do more of what I like, you know, creating content, brainstorming new ideas, new projects, or just taking time off with the family, like been grateful to do a lot of over the summer. So Mark, I would start with what you're already interested in or curious about without the pressure of, well, how do I use AI to make money today?

14:04I think that puts a lot of pressure on the situation. And instead, look for ways to integrate it into what you're already doing. And you might find as you get into it, you stumble onto something useful that maybe you can turn around and offer as a product or service to other people specifically on the vibe coding side using ai to generate digital products and and software specifically i recommend our episode with pete mcpherson number 659 and just to get the juices flowing on what's possible we've done a couple crowdsourced roundup style episodes featuring dozens of side hustle show listeners on how they're using AI, those are 566 and 677 in your podcast feed.

14:47And of course, I'm going to link up all of these episodes that we're referencing in the show notes for this episode. Or rather, maybe I can have the AI do that. But in any case, I'm going to be right back with more Q &A right after this. Are you still overpaying for wireless? It's time to say yes to saying no. At our partner Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS. And here's why I said yes to making the switch over five years ago and yes to getting premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. I really liked being able to keep my existing phone and my existing phone number when I switched over.

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15:59Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. 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 faced 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. What if I can't design a website?

16:36Shopify's got you with ready-made templates to match your brand style. What if people haven't heard about my brand? Shopify helps you find customers with easy-to-run email and social media campaigns. And what if I get stuck? You can tap in to Shopify's award-winning 24-7 customer support. Let's turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. Shopify.com slash side hustle. Question five came in from Helen who asked, in your podcast episode, you often discuss using Google or other platforms trending search data so you can sell what people are searching for.

17:21However, I don't know how to get that information. So Helen, my apologies for not taking a pause and talking about these different tools in the moment there. But there are a lot of different resources in this space. Some of them are free. Some of them are paid. Like I have an Ahrefs subscription, A-H-R-E-F-S. Other guests have mentioned SEMrush, another paid tool to help out with keyword research. But on the free side, a few ones I think are worth checking out just for broad level, you know, market research type of stuff. Google Trends, it's trends.google.com. they'll you know you can punch in any keyword and you can see is this increasing or decreasing or did it already peak am i on the downhill slope of this thing and it's hard to predict what the future holds but you know i'll let's be an equal i want to catch a rising tide here if you create a google ads account which i think you can do for free yeah they have uh internally built a tool called keyword planner if you just google you know google keyword planner it should come up and it'll give you the approximate search volume of different terms in there as well.

18:22And it gives a range, or at least it used to like, oh, one to 5 ,000 searches a month or 10 to 50 ,000, you know, something like that. But it gives you a sense to compare and contrast different options there. Another one that I have used off and on for years is a Chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere, which is kind of cool. An overlay in your browser, whereas you're messing around with Google, it'll show you how many people search for that a month and may even give you an estimate of the difficulty around that term and then neil patel bought uh the uber suggest tool so if you look up uber suggest like uber like the ride sharing service suggest it'll um he's got i think a free tier on that plan as well i think all those have a free tier or free plan on etsy related sales e-rank is the tool that has come up over and over again with etsy sellers as their keyword research tool of choice looking for the green light of something with low competition and a high enough search volume to make it worthwhile to try and build a product there and then on youtube i'm using a tool browser extension called tube buddy t-u-b-e and what this does is or how i use it anyway is it allows me to punch in a bunch of different title variations for a video and it'll come back with a score which is based on the search volume and competitiveness of that keyword where and you can if what's mind-blowing is you can type in really similar variations and one score is a 23 and one score is a 77 and like well i'm not married to one title over the other so all it's being well i'm going to pick the one with the higher number which theoretically is you know more volume or easier to rank for so hope that helps on the keyword research side of things question six was from mary who asks what are the apps that are going to pay me for just watching videos so mary this was kind of an interesting question we actually wrote this article last year there are surprisingly several different apps that will pay you to watch videos but in most cases those videos are just a code word for advertisements and the pay is really low now it would be one thing if you just stick it in another room and let it play all day and rack up some passive income i don't care if it pays pennies it's just running running into the background at a low volume but of course the advertisers are on to that they make you click on things they make sure you're really there they make you answer a few questions to earn your pennies one that we tested was called slice the pie it's been around forever and you can get paid to rate songs commercials movie trailers it's pretty tedious work but they did pay it was still probably less than 10 bucks an hour even if even if you're fast.

20:55Another interesting one that I came across last year was called Media Probe, which is a market research company. And so how it works is you apply to be a Media Probe panelist. And if they approve you, they send you this like electronic sensor that you wear, and it measures your emotional response signals to what you're watching. Really, really kind of interesting stuff. I could picture this like for political debates or something. So it doesn't sound like you get to pick what you watch but according to media probe the common use cases are for live sports for entertainment programs radio broadcast and you just want to get a sense of what get what gets a rise out of you essentially now according to the site and users online you can typically earn the equivalent of five to ten dollars an hour depending how long the thing is that you're watching paid through amazon gift cards those are all fine options those different apps and tools.

21:52They're probably not scalable. They're probably not going to make much of a dent in your budget. So to really get paid to watch videos, you got to think one level higher. For example, could you do video captioning? Although AI is probably eating that. Could you learn video editing and offer that as a service? Could you learn an AI editing tool and use that in your workflow? Could you build a content business around movie reviews? For years, some of the most popular podcasts, I swear, were built around reacting to popular TV series. This is definitely a thing. We came across this YouTube channel last year called Cat Watches Horror Movies, which the caption is something like, I'm terrified of horror movies.

22:35Let's watch them together. And it's her reacting to scary movies on this YouTube channel. She's over 100 ,000 subscribers now, probably earning at least a couple grand a month from this little, I assume, aside project, cat watches horror movies. So different ways to turn video watching into an extra income stream. Question seven is related to newsletter sponsorships from Ryan. He says, I run a newsletter. I noticed you're a part of the paved sponsor platform and wondering how it is. How many sponsorships do you get from there a month? Do you do any other form of outreach to get sponsors? What do you do?

23:08Draw in sponsors for your newsletter. So Ryan, no real risk in joining paved or other newsletter sponsor networks so to speak i've run 30 campaigns with them since 2022 so around one a month maybe a little bit less if my math is correct so other sources of sponsorships are direct relationships with advertisers usually inbound actually i don't think i've done any outbound marketing trying to sell that sponsorship spot kit has sourced a few deals lately like my email service provider Kit. So if you're on Kit, it might make sense to plug yourself into their ads network. A lot of the placements lately are pretty committed to podcast sponsors right now as part of their package.

23:52But all in all, paved, specifically in newsletter sponsorships more broadly, have been kind of a nice little incremental income stream. Now, when I talked to Ryan Sneddon from Naptown Scoop, this was a local newsletter focused on Annapolis, Maryland, He was selling five ad spots a day at a$70 estimated CPM, cost per thousand impressions. And he was selling these long-term packages and he was selling out. And so this was worth a listen because he had this proactive outreach approach and he was landing. What stood out to me, he landed what he called an anchor tenant, this well-known local realtor that lended a lot of credibility and social proof that allowed him to improve his conversion rate with other advertisers.

24:38That was episode 615. And what Ryan had done, he kind of reached this golden milestone of a dollar per subscriber per month in a town of 40 ,000 people. You know, he had 18 ,000 of them on his newsletter. He had like half the town on his newsletter earning a dollar per subscriber per month but he was sending five days a week instead of uh in my case like five to six times a month so different ways to get sponsors and definitely a cool monetization angle especially you can see similar to podcast advertising it's like amplitude how many people can you reach and frequency you know how often can you reach them so if you have a big list and you can send every day like you can really really turn any of multiple spots in the newsletter and readers have come to expect that, like it can turn into a really viable business.

25:24Question eight was from Valentina in the Side Hustle Nation Facebook group. She asks, I've been learning drawing and painting lately. What do you think are some good simple ways to earn money drawing? I don't want to do portraits or caricatures at markets because I don't think I'm good at that and I wouldn't enjoy that, but I saw someone in a touristy city selling handmade paintings and cards of the city views that sold quite well. Pet portraits used to be a goldmine, but now everyone and their dog does them with AI, can you think of something else that would get me some quick bucks without spending time doing marketing?

25:56I don't know if there's any quick bucks without doing any marketing. She says, also no YouTube channels either. I'm not that good. And there's like a million of them made by highly trained professionals. Well, Valentina, I think this is awesome that you are learning a new skill and looking for ways to monetize that. We've got some several examples. I'll get to that in a minute. One way that you might have taken a page out of this selling handmade paintings of the city views and stuff like that would be approaching local coffee shops, restaurants, businesses. Pesifet is a local institution, a local landmark.

26:29I think you could probably give the painting away to the owner of the business free, and then maybe they could sell prints, and then you could make a commission split on something like that as a way to market yourself. You mentioned not wanting to do live portraits, but if you'd be open to selling pre-made work maybe the craft fair or farm at farmers market circuit would be would be worthwhile like those city view paintings could be really cool especially if you have five or ten different prints of local landmarks cute neighborhood scenes i think that would be really a viable way to do it because like i'm looking at my parents house whenever i go over there almost it seems like on every trip there at least for a while like on every trip they would you know get a little get a little painting of where they went to commemorate the trip.

27:16In the book 1K100 Ways, we profiled Wade from a business called googenius.com, who was making around$500 a week teaching, drawing, and cartooning classes for kids. And he mentioned finding clients through Facebook and with partnerships with local schools and art teachers, where it sounds like I'll come in and do a demo class and pass out flyers and the kids would take it back home and eventually want to sign up with with him and so that that was a really cool business and it's like it sounds like you're still learning but you're probably a few steps ahead of these kids and so maybe like the after school class thing could be uh could be a thing and also in that book again 1k100ways.com is where to find it we highlighted jesse spencer smith who specializes in these really cool pen and ink architectural drawings of buildings.

28:09So he's got over 100 ,000 followers on Instagram now, which I imagine is generating quite a few commission requests from people who want him to draw their house or their building next. And on the content creation side, I know you mentioned I don't want to do YouTube, but there might be something to doing a daily drawing series, a daily drawing challenge, especially if you can position it as like, look, I'm not the best artist in the world. I'm learning right alongside with you. We talked about this recently with Pat Flynn, the power of a daily series. It gets people following along, especially I want to hit follow because I don't like, okay, it's interesting.

28:48This video I saw was interesting, but I want to learn what comes next. I'm kind of committed. Now I'm on this journey with you. And I think that can work really well with this learn with me style of content. We've seen people do this in fitness, in dancing. I'm on a journey to become a better dancer over the course of the year. We've seen people do it with side hustles. I think it can work really well in art as well. Ryan Trahan's 50 States in 50 Days series comes to mind, right? Every day I'm going to tune in. It's like now it feels like there's a hole in our morning now that it's over. So the other example, this is an interesting one we profiled a few years ago.

29:24It was Priscilla Molina, and she was making money redesigning people's signatures. And I was like, well, when was the last time my autograph change, like probably middle school. She is Planet of Names on TikTok and her website is Planet of Names, where she charges$25 to$120 at least the time of this profile per custom signature. Each order included three different unique signature concepts tailored to the customer's desired style. You do simple, you do professional, we do dramatic. And Priscilla says, look, people are unhappy with their current signatures. It doesn't match their personality. It doesn't convey their desired image.