In short
The Side Hustle Show - Episode 708: How I Turned Public Domain Radio into a 6-Figure Business
Episode Overview In this episode, host Nick Loper interviews Cheyenne Bulloch, the founder of Domestic Daydreams, who shares her innovative journey of transforming public domain radio shows into a lucrative cleaning business. Her unique model allows customers to participate in cleaning routines while enjoying nostalgic audio content.
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Key Points and Insights
Introduction to Cheyenne Bulloch
- Cheyenne is a longtime listener of The Side Hustle Show, having built a successful online cleaning business called Domestic Daydreams.
- Her business model centers around providing audio cleaning routines that utilize public domain radio shows from the 1950s.
Business Concept
- Offer Structure: Customers pay $25 per month or $45 per quarter to receive six private podcast episodes a week, which feature cleaning routines interspersed with vintage radio shows.
- Customer Engagement: Cheyenne reports having over 500 paying members, who often express a sense of familiarity and connection through her audio routines.
Origin Story
- Cheyenne's interest in public domain content began with a previous project where she published public domain children's books.
- Inspired by a Side Hustle Show episode, she sought to combine her love for vintage radio with a solution for cleaning challenges faced by busy parents.
Marketing Strategies
- Audience Targeting: Leveraged her existing audience on Instagram (60,000+ followers) to promote her cleaning audio content directly to moms and homemakers.
- Social Media Growth: Through organic Instagram content, she rapidly grew her membership base, gaining initial traction with engaging posts and reels that resonated with her target audience.
- Utilized POV (Point of View) reels to connect with struggling homemakers.
Sales Funnel and Customer Journey
- Lead Magnets: Cheyenne effectively captures email leads by offering free sample episodes, directing traffic from Instagram posts to her membership site.
- Email Marketing: Maintains a robust email list (30,000+ subscribers) to nurture leads and convert them into paying members.
- Retargeting Ads: Focuses on retargeting ads for those who have engaged with her brand to reinforce her membership offer.
Content Creation Process
- Cheyenne maintains a high output of content, creating multiple posts daily across platforms.
- Her workflow includes:
- Posting three reels daily.
- Compiling blog posts from Instagram content.
- Recording podcasts based on her blog topics.
Time Management and Productivity
- Daily operations generally require about three hours, with an emphasis on batching content creation to streamline workflow.
- Incorporates family time and personal cleaning routines into her schedule, highlighting the balance between work and life.
Customer Retention and Feedback
- Retention rate is approximately 5%, with most cancellations occurring within the first 30-45 days.
- Customers often return once they feel they’ve gained control of their cleaning routines.
Future Plans
- Cheyenne is considering writing a book to share her cleaning tips and further expand her reach.
- Plans to enhance her presence on YouTube, tapping into the cleaning and homemaking niche.
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Key Takeaways
- Innovative Business Models: Combining public domain content with a common household challenge provides a unique market offering.
- Engagement and Community: Building a strong connection with customers through audio content fosters engagement.
- Content Strategy: Consistency and quality are crucial in content marketing—Cheyenne emphasizes the importance of posting frequently to gather data and improve engagement.
- Retargeting Strategies: Utilizing retargeting ads effectively increases conversion rates by reminding potential customers of offers.
- Balance and Workflow: Efficient time management and batching tasks can help sustain productivity while maintaining personal well-being.
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Closing Thoughts Cheyenne's journey exemplifies how creativity and strategic marketing can lead to successful entrepreneurship, highlighting the importance of understanding your audience and the power of community in building a business. Her insights into content creation, social media engagement, and customer retention provide valuable lessons for aspiring side hustlers.
For more information, visit [Domestic Daydreams](https://domesticdaydreams.com) and explore the resources available through [Cheyenne's links](https://radio.domesticdaydreams.com/links).
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Final Note If you're inspired by Cheyenne's story and want to dive deeper into entrepreneurship, consider checking out past episodes of The Side Hustle Show for actionable insights from various successful side hustlers.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
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1:15It's her customers that are doing the cleaning. Today's guest is a longtime listener who's built a super creative recurring revenue business combining free public domain content with a near universal problem. And that's keeping your house clean. From DomesticDaydreams.com, Cheyenne Bullock. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thank you so much. I'm so hyped to be here. I am excited. Stick around in this one. We're covering how she came up with this unique offer, how she connects with customers, and some of the marketing and growth strategies that you can probably apply in your own business. So there's a lot going on at Domestic Daydreams.
1:52But the core offer is this. for 25 bucks a month or$45 a quarter, Cheyenne will send you six private podcast episodes a week, basically, that are mostly old public domain radio shows, dragnet, true crime shows, but they're interspersed with cleaning routines and instructions. Like instead of a commercial break in the program, it's like, now go fold some laundry. And there are over 500 members. Am I understanding this correctly? Yes. Yeah. We've got over 500 members in there and they will pop on. I get emails all of the time where they're like, oh, I feel like I know you because I listen to your voice every single morning while I do my cleaning.
2:31And it's just it's a fun time in there. So you sourced this stuff and you had some previous public domain experience or maybe you're still running this public domain publishing business inspired by a previous Side Hustle Show episode. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I was working at a grocery store in a town of 900 people, and I heard a Side Hustle Nation episode where a gentleman was publishing public domain books onto KDP. And I thought, you know what? I should take some public domain children's books, annotate them, and publish them for homeschool families. So that was my first business, and that's what inspired me to really look into public domain works, especially combined with, I know in the four-hour work week, Tim Ferriss recommends finding ways to jump off of public domain works with your businesses.
3:19And I found old vintage radio shows. I've always been a fan of the 50s. I've always been fascinated by the 50s housewife. And as someone who had really struggled with keeping her house clean, especially when I was working full time or I was commuting, then I had developed my own system, put it to the radio shows and was like, hey, this could actually be a great way to help people clean on autopilot and help them stay on task with the cleaning routine. Yeah. What a fun combination there. So what happens first? So you kind of get this idea in your head. I could combine these two things. Does it start with a YouTube channel?
3:53Does it start with a website? How do you even start to spread the word about this? Yeah. So since I had my other business that I had built up, I'd been running that one for about a year. I'd built it up to around 60 ,000 followers on Instagram. I had a tiny little email list. The first thing that I did is I created a few episodes and I sent it out to my audience because I knew they were moms. I knew that a lot of them were homemakers or stay-at-home moms and would be interested in a cleaning routine. So I threw up an Instagram post, told them I'd send them some free episodes if they wanted to try it, and people loved it.
4:28The post did really, really well. Lots of people requesting it. And then soon the feedback rolled in and everyone was like, oh my gosh, this is an absolute game changer. This is what I've needed the whole time. I've tried every cleaning routine out there and none of them worked. This did. And so that's when I knew that I really had something for sure, for sure. You got some early validation there. That was under the children's publishing brand. At what point does it become domestic daydreams? You're like, okay, I think there's something here as a spinoff. Yeah. So later that weekend, And I was like, okay, I'm really passionate about this.
4:58This could really help moms. I need to go all in. So within a weekend, I set up a website on Kajabi because I knew I wanted to do it as a membership. I got the sales pages done and the pricing. I made a logo and I started its own Instagram. And I started just posting up till then and up until just recently. Everything's grown completely from organic Instagram content. And so I just posted every single day, at least once a day. And I would sometimes invite my old account as a collaborator if I felt like it still meshed with my audience there. And that made it grow really fast. I think we grew to like 25 ,000 followers within a month.
5:39Wow. Oh my gosh. Not a 25 ,000 followers is even today. So very cool. Then did that following translate into revenue on the membership or was there like a lag? Yes. So it translated really fast. It was kind of an interesting time period where I needed to transition slightly out of that first business because I had met my husband and we're going to get married and I wasn't going to have the basically the things and resources I needed and used at the time to run my first business. So I need to make it work quick. and within the first, I think, three weeks to a month, it had replaced a good chunk of my income.
6:17It was matching all my expenses. I had a mortgage to pay, all that jazz. So it was in business within the first month I had quite a few members. Okay, that's really exciting to hear. What type of content did you see perform well on Instagram? At the time, and honestly still now, it was reels. It was during the time period in Instagram where posting static posts and posting carousels wasn't really gonna do anything for you. It was, they were really pushing reels. So I would post a reel every single day. I really had developed with my first business a full strategy. It took me a year to really pop off on Instagram with my first business because there was so much trial and error and learning.
7:00And so luckily I'd already been through that trial and error and I could just jump off and go full throttle into this. So I found focusing on reels. And at the time, it was focusing on calling out basically your ideal audience. So a lot of like point of view reels, like POV, you've been struggling to keep up with your house. You want to rip your hair out, but then you find my account, you know, or something like that. Those were really simple videos at the time that did it really, really well. Okay. And then combining that with cleaning routines or here's how I do things. It's hard to feel like that's what's, I guess it's not really what's behind the paywall.
7:35Behind the paywall is the recurring content, the system, the familiarity in your earbuds every day. And it's, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink or you can, you can give it away and people are going to pay kind of for the implementation of it. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. And the thing that I learned with my first business, I would just direct people directly to my products. And I lost a lot of people in that middle ground of them getting distracted or whatever. So the thing I learned this time is every single post on Instagram needs to go to the lead magnet, which captures their email.
8:07And that has grown my email list to around 30 ,000 subscribers in two years. And like in the last month, 8 ,000 of those. And I've cleaned out my email list. So it's been more than that. But I I make sure that every single Instagram post, it says, you know, comment, homemaker, and I will send you some free episodes of the cleaning routine to try so that you can get started tackling that mess. You know, I make a pain point oriented Instagram caption that calls out their pain, tells how these episodes are the solution. You can try some free episodes. It takes them to the opt-in. they put in their email address and information and it redirects them to a page with the free episodes on top and then tell them hey if you want new episodes six days a week then join the membership and has like a sales pitch below that okay so it's really really tightly aligned with the core offer it's like in fact in fact it's like it's a free sample of the core offer like i'm going to send you some sample episodes if you like this hey there's more where that came from come on in so that makes a lot of sense i think that's really smart and this is a many chat automation to reply to the homemaker comments.
9:14Yes, exactly. And ManyChat was such an incredible game changer because when I was doing my first business, I started doing the comment, if you want, the link thing before there was anything like ManyChat out there. And I would sit there and I would have reels go viral and I would manually be sending these and I'd get blocked by Instagram, have to wait a little while. You send 100 messages. Yeah, you're blocked. Yes, exactly. And so ManyChat has been amazing to be able to use that over the last couple of years. And luckily, that was in place by the time that I started this business. So it just directs them through ManyChat.
9:50I know people build out their ManyChat with like follow ups and stuff. I haven't done that. And I've still seen great results just keeping it simple. Okay. So they get the sample episodes and then there's a follow-up sequence that goes out a week later. It says, if you like that, there's more once you join the membership. Talk to me about the sales cycle or the sales funnel, so to speak, after that. I follow up via email because I want to train them to really connect with my brand on the email side. Going through Instagram or any social media platform, you're building your business on rented land.
10:25So I learned the hard way through my first business that you need to make sure that you have them somewhere you kind of control, like an email list, but also that you make sure that you train them and teach them that there's value there so that they will actually look for you in their inbox. So I have an automatic email flow that will send them an email like every four days or so. Originally, I followed a book that said, okay, this is what your welcome sequence should have in your email flow. And then over time, as I was sending out consistent weekly newsletters to my audience as well that were outside of that welcome email flow, I was able to get data on which ones converted highest for sales.
11:06And I turned those into my welcome sequence. Okay. So it basically just it's heavy on the email side following up with people. I give them some more free episodes via a one week challenge. Usually by then people are pretty warmed up. But now I do run ads as well, retargeting ads. And that's been what the huge game changer is. Retargeting people on the email list or people who have clicked. I mean, I guess it's all through the meta ecosystem. You could target followers on Instagram or people who've seen your post probably and saying, hey, remember me? Do you still have this problem of the dirty house?
11:40And I'm still here to help you. Yes, exactly. And so when I first got into ads, because I did pay a coach to teach me, they always recommend you do what they call top of funnel ads. And those are the ones that go out to strangers. And then you do retargeting ads. And those are ones that go out to basically the people that found you through those top ads. But what was different with my business that actually kind of blew their minds a little bit and we had to adjust that strategy is I get so much at the top, so much attention, so many new people knowing about my brand through my Instagram, through my Facebook.
12:15I get millions of views every single month through my blog. I basically do organic content marketing at the top and that's what gets new people in and I only do retargeting ads and I retarget anyone who has interacted with my website at all, my blog at all, my Facebook at all, and my Instagram at all. And it retargets them with the membership offer. Okay, straight to the offer at that point. Yes. Yep. And it's a special offer page that I made sure still had a sample episode in case they maybe hadn't gotten a chance to try it when they'd signed up or if maybe they never did sign up for my opt-in.
12:55I do have that like just one on that page so that they can try it with a button, give it a try, see if you like it. And then I also made sure to load that page with comparison videos. I read the book, They Ask You Answer, incredible book that I highly recommend to everybody. And one of the things they talked about is making sure that you have honest comparisons between your product and your business and your competitors, and even suggests when the competitors would be a better option than your product. And I made sure to embed those on my sales pages so that they could know, okay, well, how does this compare to the cleaning routines I've already tried?
13:34Or maybe there could be another routine out there that would work better so that they know that I'm trying to help them. Oh, okay. Maybe the instinct would be, I don't want to introduce that potential competitor thought in their head, but the book says they already know. They already know your competition. Your customer is smarter than that. Give them some credit and just be open and honest about it. Exactly. Exactly. And it really helps them to be able to see the differences. And a lot of times people tell me that they have tried those other ones already and mine's the only one that worked for them.
14:02And other times, you know, maybe there are people that have found my competitors through one of my videos and they decided that would be a better fit. And that's totally okay with me because I want the longevity of people in my membership that are going to stay and be able to build a community with. More with Cheyenne in just a moment, including her retention rate for her membership and how offering too much content to members might actually be hurting your business. When you're growing your business and your team, you need a hiring partner that can help you rise to the challenge. You need Indeed.
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16:30See Mint Mobile for details. You've been doing it for two or three years. Do you have a sense of customer lifetime value after a certain percentage churn out? I've noticed if people are going to cancel, they'll usually cancel within the first 30 to 45 days. It's not as big of a percentage as you would think. I struggled at first with the retention rate because I tried to load so much content into my membership, so many freebies, so many bonuses, and it actually really overwhelmed people. And so I dialed it back, focused just on the routines, the things that would help them. And my retention rate is actually really good.
17:09I think I have about a 5 % retention rate. So most people I've noticed will stay for at least a year. Sometimes it's more of a three months thing, which is why I introduced the quarterly. And then they might leave because they'll be like, oh, yeah, well, my house is under control now. I don't think I need this anymore. I can just keep going with the written routine and it'll be fine. And then they usually come back and join and say, yeah, I actually needed those radio shows. Yeah, they self-graduate out of it and then maybe this was actually helpful. Okay. So we say that like every month, 5 % of the people drop off.
17:44And so it's just on you to kind of fill the bucket with more than that on the top and you give yourself a raise every month. Like this is the kind of cool membership model recurring revenue business where if you can kind of master that and it's somewhat predictable and start stacking on and then you can pull different levers to keep people in longer and it's a really cool business. There was a question, like what advice would you give to somebody? You've mastered the organic marketing side, you've mastered the retargeting side. What advice would you have for somebody who is posting consistently, yeah, I'm doing what they say one to two times a day.
18:19It's like I'm racking my creative mind trying to come up with reels that are going to hit and they're just not. What do you tell that person? Yes. Okay. They're not going to like this answer because I haven't liked this answer when I've gotten it, but quantity leads to quality. And I know that's so frustrating when you're first starting out and it takes a lot of time to create. Also, be personable and be observant. When you're scrolling through your Instagram feed, study it because Instagram has changed so much. I've gone through waves personally where my content's doing great. I still do where some content does great and some content does terrible because Instagram, people will blame it on the algorithm.
19:02I used to make that mistake too when stuff doesn't do well. And the fact of the matter is, is that it's a people-based platform. The people are training the algorithm and what they like changes over time. And you can't predict quality. There's posts that I have thrown up thinking this is probably going to do terrible, but I just have to post today. And it goes viral and really connects with people. And I've had posts that I work really, really hard on, spend maybe a week on that do terrible. So frustrating. You're like, I have hours into this thing and it's a dud. Yes. And it's got like two likes and it's just, oh, it's so annoying, you know, but what I've learned and what I've done recently is I've started posting three times a day.
19:43And I'm not saying you have to do that to succeed at all, but I'm doing that because Instagram, what people like has shifted. What I did in 2020 with my first business that worked so well does not work at all now. So I post three times a day simply to one, it gets me the views overall combined between those three posts that I would have needed before. And every one of those has the lead magnet call to action, grab some sample episodes. Yes, every single one. Now I do switch it up every once in a while where it might be like comment for the link to my YouTube video or my blog post and I'll send them to my blog post with the YouTube video embedded, but it still has a sales pitch for that free opt-in in that post.
20:28So ultimately, all roads direct that lead magnet. But I'll just post those three. I get lots of data from that that I can see what works, what doesn't work, create more content. And I also have learned that every like 15 or so posts, I'll have a hit. It's always been that way for me. So when I was posting one a day, it took 15 days to have a hit. When I'm posting three times a day, that happens a lot sooner. Got it. So it really is worth it. I used to fight that advice so hard, but it really helps. And my content's improved. I'm going to run out of ideas. Yeah. Talk to me about the creative or ideation process for having to consistently come up with that volume of content.
21:08Yeah. So I'm from OG Cheyenne is from the blogging background where when I was like 12 or 13, I started a blog. So what I do with any business is I do a ton of keyword research first. So I'll go to Answer the Public, I think, is the website, or I'll go to and Pinterest and YouTube search, and I'll type in keywords and see what people are searching for related to my niche and keep that in a master list. And that gives me something that I can always go back to for more ideas. So that's one side of the ideation phase. The other side is when I'm scrolling on Instagram, I try to look in niches outside of my own because you don't want to look the same as the people in your niche you want to stand out.
21:50So I'll look in niches outside of my own and I will save the link in like a little notes document on my phone if I see something interesting or see something in a format that I like and I'll write a little idea on how I can apply that to my business. And between those two, I never really run out of ideas of what to post. And then since I do create long form content based off of those keywords that I researched, usually those are listicles, which give me a bunch of little ideas that I can also take and make into short form content for like a video for each little bullet point in a blog post or in a YouTube video.
22:29So across all of those, the ideation is simple. The creation of content has become really simple for me because I just do two formats usually. Well, three. I'll do either a talking head format where I am talking directly to the camera. Or like long form YouTube. So I'll do this for my short form Instagram content. I will just talk directly to the camera with an idea and that's like one option or I will record a B-roll and just put text on top real quick. And that's another option. And then the third one is like a voiceover where it's footage of me doing other things. And then I will record a voiceover with the idea.
23:11With YouTube, I do almost entirely just voiceovers. I record a talk to camera intro and outro, but I just do a voiceover. I'll put my podcast to footage of me cleaning or cooking. Okay. Are you still doing the long form listicles for the website? Or is it like, I'm not going to bother with the blog anymore? Yes. So my whole flow right now is that I will create, it kind of bounces back and forth, but I'll usually create three reels a day. And then I'll turn those three reels into blog posts by expanding on them. Like I will use the little notes app and the voice to text feature. And I will plug in the transcript of what I actually said in the short form piece of content into my voice notes.
23:58And then I will also just spitball any other ideas that I think if I were going to turn this into a long form content, if I was going to turn this into a podcast or a blog post, what are some ideas that play off of this? How could I expand that? And then I'll take that over to chat GPT and I will have it turn it into a blog post for me. Basically just polish what I said so that it's still me. It's still my ideas. I might have it add in any relevant statistics. If that short form piece of content was like speaking to pain points of my audience, I might add in statistics that back those pain points up.
24:31And then I'll turn that into that blog post goes on the blog. If it does well, like if I see it kind of get some views, I will turn it into a podcast episode. And then I'll just, I always have b-roll whenever I need to clean or cook and I have time to get ready I will record it And then I just have this log of long-form b-roll that I will put to the podcast episode that I recorded from the blog post So i'm putting out three blog posts a day as well as the short-form ones and then i'll like send an email out with a roundup You're a content machine. That's Intimidating the volume of stuff that you're producing, but it's always kind of starting from this point of audience, pain point, research, answer the public, the Pinterest.
25:15Is there a tool for Pinterest or is it just like typing stuff in and looking what the auto suggest populates? There is a tool now. It's called PinClicks, I believe. And it wasn't around when I first started doing the research, but it is so, I used it recently and it is so nice. So you can use that instead. I believe it's called PinClicks. And that makes it so much easier because now you did used to have to just go into the search bar and find everything. And it was actually really labor intensive. So the thing that I learned, you know, with content, because I am a content machine now, I used to be a lot more simple about my content.
Read the full transcript
25:51My husband was a wildland firefighter, and so he would be gone two weeks at a time. And I had a baby and trying to post content was difficult. But I heard a thing from Alex Hormozzi recently where he's talking about how you just need to do more. That's usually the answer. And I went and I calculated how many new subscribers I got from how many pieces of content I had posted up to a certain point. I think it was like over a six month period. I realized I'd only posted 50 posts and that's between Instagram and the website. I realized I'd only posted 50 posts in that time period and I'd gotten like 122 new subscribers or something like that.
26:32I'm like, okay, I'm going to do that in a month. I want to get 122 in a month. I posted more than that, I think, because I was posting three times a day, but I got like 174 new subscribers in a month doing that. So it really was simple math and a simple experiment to realize, okay, I need to just be putting out a ton of content because that's really what's driving the sales on the top end. Yeah. And it's almost a, you know, increase your luck surface area or your algorithm surface area, your chances of discoverability. It's like if I take more swings at this, you know, even if like you said one out of 15 hits, you know If I put more batches of 15 out there, you know, it's just a kind of a law of large numbers And there's some compound effect you improve you put in the reps you get better at making this stuff And you start to figure out what what works and what doesn't exactly a mistake I made that really hurt my business was being perfectionist about my content So I wouldn't post as much content and I wouldn't make as many sales It really is as simple as success really is predictable with enough consistency and effort.
27:35And I used to think it was luck and maybe there's a small factor of that, but luck never really did it for me. It was just consistency and a ton of doing the output, doing the reps. Yeah. Is Pinterest a source of traffic for you as well in terms of like static image to the website or even posting the video reels? up. I don't know. Can you repurpose that kind of stuff there? So, yeah. So what I'm doing right now is the video reels, since I'm turning them into blog posts, those will be my first Pinterest pins for that post. And then the rest are going to be static pins. Pinterest has been like the little poor side, you know, thing of my business, but it still gets me sales.
28:17I'll post like five pins a day and I get, you know, a hundred and something thousand views a month on Pinterest, which isn't actually a ton, but I still get sales consistently from that every single month. And it does compound. That's the thing that I love about content marketing is that the more that you put out, the more places you're making sales from at any given point where it's almost like you look at your business and you're like, I have no idea where all these are coming from because they're just flowing in constantly. So I do make sales from Pinterest and I really would love to scale that up more because it's steady where Instagram goes and Facebook go in like peaks and valleys.
28:54Pinterest tends to be a little bit more steady. It can have dips here and there, but they're smaller dips than Instagram and Facebook. Yeah. It's more of like a search, I mean, combination social platform and search platform where it's not necessarily completely algorithm driven viral spike. It's more, hey, people are typing this in and they're finding your stuff. It seems like a perfect fit for cleaning routines, homemaking tips. Do they do a retargeting platform where you could get even more exposure there, similar to the Facebook or Meta platform? I surely probably do. I know you can run Pinterest ads.
29:29I've heard people have a lot of success with them. But since I can retarget anyone who does click over from Pinterest to my blog with my Facebook and my Instagram ads, I don't stress about it too much. That's a warmer lead. Is there a target cost of acquisition that you like to be at on that ad spend? Yeah. So this is the other reason why it's a good idea to go hard on creating content and learning how to create short form content like for Instagram and Facebook, because it really comes in handy with your ads. I will repurpose what I post on my Instagram or I will create with the ads in mind that that'll be an end goal.
30:07So I probably come out to lately I've been coming out to like 17 to 20 dollars per purchase on my ads. And since it is a recurring thing, even if they only sign up for the monthly, I almost always keep them the next month. So that will make a profit. But I sell a lot of quarterly and annual. So annual is$150, quarterly is$45. So I usually have like at least a three for what is called my ROAS, my return on ad spend. That means I made three times what I spent or I generated three times in sales what the ad spend was. Yeah. And then it just becomes a question of timing of cash flows. If somebody opts for monthly, I'm not going to collect that 3x immediately.
30:50So I just got to maybe there's a little bit of a float. But anytime I can train a dollar for three dollars, I would do that all day long. Exactly. And the interesting thing I mentioned being consistent and really like zoning in. I did feel like at one point in time with my Instagram and my Facebook, because I was relying completely on sales from the organic only, you know, no ads, no other platforms, no YouTube, no podcast, no blog, any of that. It's easy to get squirrely when things don't work out on a platform and be like, OK, I need to try all this stuff. And I will say if you are going to go hard on Instagram or Facebook or the short form, my next steps for people would be one to have a long form platform that you're doing, whether it's a blog or a podcast or YouTube, you don't have to do all three like I'm doing.
31:34and to also look into learning ads so that you can recapture and retarget those people that have interacted with your content because then you're not as reliant on going viral all the time because when you do have stuff do well every once in a while, that's great. But even when I'm posting three times a day and my posts are doing terrible, you can retarget those and recapture those and you can nurture them with your long form content because they really do need to spend more time with you than just your short form. Yeah, I'm learning a lot from you here. This is great. More with Cheyenne in just a moment, including how she keeps up with the content demands inside the membership, six new episodes a week, plus some of the tools and tech she swears by to help get it all done.
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34:07If you want to give your customers the best shopping experience this holiday season, you need Shopify. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle and make this Black Friday one to remember. All right, so in addition to all of this public facing content, there's also the content demands of the membership where we got to come up with a new episode for them six days a week. And the bulk of that is at least free to you.
34:44But you still got to come in and do your voiceover. You still got to add the cleaning routine part of it. How are you keeping up with all of that stuff or how far ahead can you can you really batch that? So what helps a lot is that once I created a ton, like when I first started it, I created as many as I could. I just sat there for a few days and edited these podcast episodes, basically radio show episodes with the cleaning routine. And then I set them to drip on Kajabi. That allowed me to time the release for a certain amount of time after someone joins. So when they join, you know, they'll get the first month is already loaded in there.
35:18And then a week later, it'll release another week and a week later, it'll release another week. And those are usually ones that I've edited forever ago now. So I still obviously for the people that have been with me for the from the beginning, I need to be putting out new episodes to keep up with it. So it'll usually just take me like an hour and a half to two hours to edit the episodes and load them into the membership for the week. So I just will sit there, get comfy, turn on a TV show. Now, because the business has done well, I have an iPad, which makes it so much easier. And I'll just sit there, edit them real quick, upload them.
35:51The thing with the old radio shows, I do kind of have to try and scrub through them real quick and like listen because they can be really offensive on some things that are just very outdated. So I have to catch things every now and then that I'm like, oh, my goodness, that almost went live and that would have been terrible. Yeah, we're not going to air that part anymore. OK. Yeah. It was a different time. Interesting. And so mechanically, does this show up like in the Apple podcasts or in Spotify? Like, how do you, okay, I'm going to upload it into Kajabi, but how, as a customer of yours, how am I listening to it?
36:21So they have a membership platform where they basically just log in just like a course and they listen to it. It is in the Kajabi app too. I've considered making my own private branded app with Kajabi, but I had the hardest time figuring it. I think I hit a wall with Google's developer account or something like that. And I was just like, I'm not going to worry about it. Okay. But what I'm doing now, and this is going to be a new thing that I start doing this month, is I'm going to send out a QR code magnet. It'll be a cute little branded magnet. I actually already have them made that they can just put on their fridge and they can scan it with their phone and it'll take them directly to their radio dashboard and they can press play.
37:00Got it. Got it. Now, if I want to do this with a different public domain radio show, where do you go to find this stuff and see what is freely available? How do you download it? Yeah, like all of this stuff. So you just go to National Archive. Some stuff that's on there is actually still not in the public domain, but not usually with radio shows because radio shows had different domain laws. Okay. So you may want to research it just a little bit. Usually a quick Google search will tell you for sure if it's in public domain or not. But if you search old time radio shows on the National Archive website, then you can just find tons.
37:34There are so many and they are so good. They're so fun to listen to. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. There's a whole world of public domain stuff that is out there, whether it be books, whether it be radio, whether it be print material for the military. You know, there's like some really interesting stuff that you can kind of dig into and use as source material to then, you know, layer on your value add, in this case, the cleaning routines. But what else is going on on the tools and tech side? You've been really gracious in sharing ManyChat and Kajabi and ChatGPT and PinClick or whatever the other thing was.
38:11Anything else that we should know about on the tools and tech side? What I do use a ton of is Descript. I will use that for my podcast episodes. What I love about it is that it has all of the transcripts generated for me. So for example, if I decide to record a podcast episode first instead of a blog post or something, maybe I just come up with an idea and record a podcast real quick. I can take that transcript and have it put it into AI, have it format it into a blog post for me. I can also have it come up with a YouTube video title and thumbnails and chat GBT from that transcript that Descript generated.
38:47It will come up with when I put in a YouTube video and edit it in there. It'll come up with the chapters for me. It's just made things a lot simpler and faster since I am putting out so much content. I've really, really loved Descript for that. Yeah, Descript is really cool. some of their tools and it's getting better all the time. So that's definitely one that we use as well. What's running the email list? I do that within Kajabi as well. I had to upgrade what I pay in order to account for all of my contacts that I have because I'll have a real go viral and I'll gain, you know, 8 ,000 subscribers in a week or something like that.
39:24I know that the tracking is not as great with Kajabi as far as metrics and stuff go for email list, but email platforms are so expensive. I realized that it was still just most cost effective and honestly most easy for me to be able to just do it all in one platform and not have to stress too hard about bouncing between different platforms. No, that makes sense. Any other cool tools that you're using? I am using the edits app that Instagram put out to edit my short form content. And they said that they were giving people a little bit of a boost at first if it was made with edits. I think that's probably gone away by now.
40:02They fully admitted that they were giving people just a little help in the algorithm if they used that. And honestly, it's not been as glitchy. The native Instagram app editing in that is terrible. It's not fun. But the edits app has been really nice because I can just download it natively really easily. And so when I share it to other things, I embed all of my Instagram reels into my blog posts to make them just easier for people to read, give more value and bounce off of. Or I'll share them to YouTube too every once in a while. It just makes it easy to be able to download it right from that app, to be able to share it to Instagram, re-edit it a few times.
40:42I'll go back and since I have that file and edits, so this is like a practical tip if you're going to be doing short form content and then also doing ads, I will record a different ending. So in a lot of my talking heads, I'll say, comment Homemaker and I'll send you some free episodes to try. Well, that's not what I want them to do with my ads. I want them to click the link. So I'll record a different ending where it's like, click learn more if you want to have a clean house on autopilot. And then I will be able to go back to that original video that did well on my Instagram, and I can edit it and add that little clip at the end, save it and upload it for my ads.
41:17So it is nice to use the edits app for that. Got it. Got it. Now, in addition to the membership, it looks like there's also some digital products, some printables for sale. Is that a decent chunk of the business? Is that only on your website? Is that on Etsy as well? What's going on on the digital product side? It's only on my website and it does make a big difference because every once in a while I just do have people that really only want the written routine. That was something that was important to me is that my cleaning routine be so good and so helpful that it can stand on its own. It doesn't need the radio shows.
41:50And that's definitely been the case for people. But it's nice because it's a great upsell. So whenever I'm running ads to the membership, when they buy the membership, it does upsell them. It has an option for either an order bump, and then it'll also redirect them if they purchase and they don't do the order bump to get more information about the printable bundle. It has a video of how I use all of the printables as a working mom to stay organized and like a little sales pitch. And that helps me get that great return on ad spend as well, because they might buy that printable bundle that's like really discounted.
42:25I think it's like$47 instead of 80 or something like that. That helps a lot. Oh, okay. Yeah. Are you ever promoting those directly to people who don't want the recurring thing, but they're like, I like Cheyenne. I want to support her. I'm into what she's saying, but I don't know if I'm really going to plug old-timey radio into my head. I still want something. Absolutely. So every once in a while, I will record a reel or do a post that just directly sells the printable bundle so that people know that it exists. I really use the pinned posts feature on Instagram to my advantage. And I make sure that on the pinned posts, I have a post that has reviews of my product.
43:06I have a post that kind of talks about a pain point and how my product solves it. And then I have one that also ties into my printable bundle somehow. And so that I can kind of hit across all of those in order to, when new people find me, kind of increase those conversions. Okay, so you'd have three pinned posts across the top and make sure you're hitting those high points. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and in my content in general, I've learned that you really need to hit every once in a while those four Ps, you know, pain, the pain points that your target audience is experiencing. Promise, like the transformation that you're promising them or that they desire.
43:44So from drowning in the mess to waking up to a clean house or something like that. Proof. So proof that you've gotten this result of that promise that you've solved that pain point for other people. So that's going to be your testimonials, telling stories and case studies. And then process where you're going to walk them through the actual process of either using your product or tips that you have and like hacks and how to's in general. And so I try to hit on one of those every day in my three posts that I post. Got it. That's cool. Those are different from the four P's of marketing that I was thinking you were going to go with.
44:21That's really good. What's a day in the life look like trying to keep up with the content demands both inside and outside of the membership and running a house and being a mom? And like, there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff going on where it's like, this is definitely not a side hustle anymore. Yeah, it is full time now. And I was able to bring my husband home to help me. And that's really been a big help with increasing that content, because when it was just me and no help, I didn't quite have the time. Yeah. Well, congrats on retiring him, so to speak. Oh, thank you. It's been a dream come true.
44:53That's what we've always dreamt of, because he would just we always missed each other so much. And it's nice to be able to spend time as a family now. Very cool. Do you have a guesstimate of the hours you're putting in on a daily basis? So I timed what my actual workflow takes. And it's about three hours of work. Sometimes there's days where I will get into a little bit of a creative rut. And it takes me a little bit longer or run into technical difficulties. But it takes me about 20 minutes to schedule the three reels. Yeah. Okay. I'll just give you like the typical everyday thing. Because I do batch content, batch record days that will take all day.
45:29Okay. Or I will batch edit like that footage that I recorded, which would take pretty much all day. But the average day that I do, I'll wake up, you know, we spend a little time as a family, maybe do breakfast. I'll either do a cleaning routine myself because I use my products or I'll turn one on for my husband or just give him the list, you know, if it's a crazy busy day. Yeah, put him to work. Exactly. Yep. He's a lot of help with that. So once that's all done, I will get to work and I will schedule and edit my three reels first. Usually I'm a few days ahead, so I'm actually scheduling a few days from now instead.
46:02And that takes me 20 minutes or so, some days less, some days more, because I keep all my footage in a folder and it's ready to go. And then after that, it takes me in about an hour and 10 minutes, hour and 15 minutes to turn three reels that have already been published into blog posts. That's probably one of the most time intensive things that I do. And then after that, I will record and edit a podcast, whether it's I pick one of those blog posts to turn into a podcast script real quick. Or I also have podcast scripts already loaded that I've kind of just generated whenever I feel like it or get an idea or have time.
46:37I'll just kind of add some into a folder. And it takes me from recording to posting. I kind of do shorter episodes. It usually takes me about 35, 40 minutes. This is for the public facing, the content marketing side, the public podcast. Okay. Yeah. So this is for the public podcast because I try to always start my workday with marketing because that's one of the most important things you do. I will do customer service too, but that can mess with my creativity a little bit. So I will handle the urgent stuff and then wait for customer service towards the end. But first things first, I put in the time on marketing because that's what keeps the business going.
47:16So I'll do that outward facing public podcast. I'll write out an email that takes like 15 minutes promoting that podcast episode and then also the links for those three blog posts or whatever, like in the PS field and send that out. Is there anybody else on your team? No, it's just me. Wow. Yeah, it's a lot. It's really a lot of focused work. And it's like and after that, I still have to do Pinterest pins, which also take about 30 minutes. Yeah. And oh, my goodness. Sometimes I'll alternate like I'll do a podcast episode one day, and then I'll do the YouTube video the next day. And that takes maybe an hour or an hour and a half instead of the, you know, 30 minutes that a podcast episode will take.
47:56So I alternate days on that. It's a lot of work. It sounds like it. I'm impressed, though. It's a really cool business. I was going to ask, what's been the biggest surprise over the last two or three years of running it? Oh, my goodness. You know, I've always been confident in my product, But I think it still humbles me every day when I get emails and comments from people saying how much it has changed their lives to use the cleaning routines, how much it has helped them, how much it has helped their relationships. I got an email from a girl once saying that she turns it on with her husband and they do it together and he loves the radio shows.
48:33So he's down and she feels so supportive and cared for. And it's like a bonding time for them. I've had moms who have kids with disabilities or lots of children that are struggling with health issues, but they still want to have a clean home and a clean space and how much it's helped them to be able to have a system that they don't even have to think about it. So I think that's the thing that surprised me the most. It's not a very technical, detailed thing, but it does always humble me to see how needed it is and what a big difference it's making. There's something really powerful about these audio clues or audio routines.
49:07And it's taken a page out of morning radio playbook where it's this segment and then leads to this segment. There's like a comfort and familiarity with that. I mean, the first time we put on like the cleaning song for the kids, they must have done this at their preschool. It was like, you could not get them to pick up anything. Right. But this song comes on and it's like their little automaton robots all of a sudden like, oh, I guess this is what we do now. I was like, this is magical. It only lasted for a week or two before I was like, what are you guys trying to pull at us? But it was really, really interesting there.
49:36And as a podcaster, you kind of understand, too, the power of an audio connection, spending time in people's earbuds. But really exciting. Domesticdaydreams.com, radio.domesticdaydreams.com slash links is a cool place to go to see some of the resources that Cheyenne has. What's next for you? Where do you want to take this thing? Oh, my goodness. I next would probably be to write a book. I have some interest in me writing a book that I've been getting lately. And I would love to do that to give some simple, easy tips to people and get a little bit of reach. Are you going to self-publish? You got publishers reaching out to you?
50:14I've got publishers reaching out. So I'm really excited about that. And then also going hard on YouTube. I really want to be able to reach people on there. Yeah, very good. I mean, the channel is at 5 ,000 subscribers. So it's not nothing, but there is definitely an ecosystem on YouTube for cleaning and cleaning routines and decluttering. So I'd see some opportunity over there as well. Cheyenne, this has been awesome. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Make sure marketing is your number one focus, like every day. And number two, quality. Quality, but quantity.
50:50go hard on getting yourself that data on doubling down on whatever it is that's already working for you in your business and just don't overthink it just if it's posting on instagram or facebook just press post put it out there because you need that data you need to just be able to reach people or whatever it is make sure that you're just focusing on getting out there on learning and on doubling down on whatever's working in your business, because the answer is simple yet hard. Usually, whatever the problem you feel like you're experiencing is, it's a simple answer. Do more of what's working, but doing more is hard.
51:33So make that happen. Yeah. Yeah. There's only so many hours in the day. Sure. Yeah. Make marketing your number one focus. You got to increase that surface area of potential attention for people to find you. I loved that angle of, well, if only one out of 10, one out of 15 is going to hit, why don't I do 15 more often? How could I increase the frequency of that? I love the retargeting angle to, yeah, people aren't going to buy on the first time, or some people are, but a lot of people aren't. So how do I get this in front of them again and again and just make it easy and obvious for them to take that next step?
52:06Well, it's kind of cool at the very beginning, we talked about this intersection of things that you were interested in, you know, the 1950s housewife style, the cleaning routines, a broad pain point, and then these old-time radio shows. Like, trying to find that intersection. What got me thinking was like, I wonder if there's like old-time, you know, baseball radio broadcasts. So, just like, it's background noise, you know? Okay, it's a 3-2 count. It lasts for three hours. So, like, there's probably a huge archive of stuff like that. Really cool creative way to get free raw materials and intersperse your own personality and stuff on top of that.
52:41If you are listening to this and you want more Side Hustle Show in your life. We'd love to have you binge on the archives, hundreds of episodes to choose from. If you want a more curated approach, I want to invite you to grab your own personalized playlist at hustle.show. Just answer a few short multiple choice questions, and it'll spit back out eight to 10 of our greatest hits episodes based on your answers that you can add to your device. Go learn what works and go make some more money. Big thanks to Cheyenne for sharing her insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
53:13You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is 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 fire off that text message to somebody who needs to hear this, and I know they will appreciate it as well. 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.
From the publisher
This is probably the most creative cleaning business I've ever seen, because for Cheyenne Bulloch, it's her customers that are doing the cleaning.
Today, more than 500 members pay $25 a month for her audio cleaning routines, set to free, public domain radio shows from the 1950s.
Tune in to learn how Domestic Daydreams became a 6-figure online business!
Full Show Notes: How I Turned Public Domain Radio into a 6-Figure Business
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