The Side Hustle Show

Jaime Masters has interviewed more than 500 millionaires. On top of that, she runs some premium mastermind programs and is a sought-after business coach.

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to get on the podcast for years, and I think we came up with something unique and hopefully compelling.

Jaime agreed to actually coach me on a couple of areas of my business.

In preparation, she:

So, if you want to hear what a millionaire coach thinks of my operations and what I could or should be doing differently, or just want hear the kinds of questions that come up, tune in.

I think you’ll find the insights applicable to your own business, no matter what level you’re at.

Full Show Notes: A Millionaire Business Coach Takes a Look Inside My Day-to-Day

A location-independent consulting business that replaces your day job income in a matter of months?

That's exactly what Paul Minors accomplished with his virtual software consulting business.

You might recognize Paul’s name. Paul is a productivity blogger and consultant from New Zealand. He was part of a fun productivity roundtable episode we did towards the end of 2016 -- that was episode 197 if you want to go back and check it out.

What I now know, is that at that time Paul was putting the wheels in motion on his consulting business centered around specific software tools.

Which as a side hustle tactic, is fantastic. If you can hitch your cart to a rising tide of interest in a particular tool, and become the go-to expert in that space, you can do really well.

And, that’s exactly what Paul has done.

Paul was able to leave his day job within a couple of months of starting his business. He was then able to go traveling with his wife for 6-months while working 15-20 hours a week from his laptop.

After arriving back home, he started working full-time on his consulting business. “I noticed the impact of that straight away, within a couple of months I had doubled my income,” Paul told me.

It's clear Paul has figured out this business model.

This one’s packed with ideas you might be able to apply to your own areas of expertise. Maybe you’ll even uncover some areas of expertise you never really considered that special before.

Tune in to hear how Paul came across the idea of offering his first consulting services “by accident”. As well as how he’s used several different marketing channels to drive targeted traffic to his website, and how he’s been adding more products and services to his portfolio and seen his revenue increase as a result.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Virtual Consulting: How to set up your location-independent Consulting Business

We all have a limit to our capacity. For some entrepreneurs and small business owners, that’s a tough pill to swallow .

But when you’re up against that ceiling you have to decide between two options. You can:

This episode is about growing your team in such a way that you have some breathing room in your schedule and in your mental bandwidth to do the work that’s required of a business owner.

Even though I’ve been hiring virtual help in my businesses since 2005, I’ve still got a lot to learn! This is something that’s been on my mind this year as I think about where I want to my current operations to go and who can help get me there.

To help dive into this topic, I’m excited to welcome John Jonas and Nate Hirsch to the show.

Between them, they’ve got more than 60 virtual team members and have been practicing remote management for more than a decade.

They both run platforms to help you make your first virtual hire as well:

Tune in to hear John and Nate’s take on when it’s time to hire, how to find the best talent for your budget, and some common mistakes to avoid.

Full Show Notes: Hiring Your First Virtual Assistant: When, Where, and How to Do it Right

Is options trading legit? Is it a viable side hustle?

In this episode, we’re tackling trading options -- a topic that’s been frequently requested by listeners, but is somewhat foreign to me.

To help school me on this, I’m excited to welcome my friend Kirk DuPlessis to the show. Kirk runs the super popular site OptionAlpha.com, where you can get all sorts of free options trading training. He’s been at this for over 10 years and the site has over 150,000 members.

Options trading (when done right) is a high probability form of investing, but as with all investments it’s based on risk.

Kirk explained options contracts are like insurance. As a trader, you can either be a buyer of insurance or a seller of that insurance.

On the buying side, it’s a way to kind of amplify your trading power through leverage. Instead of buying 100 shares of a certain stock and hoping it goes up, for example, you could buy contracts for a fraction of the share price that give you the option to buy the stock at today’s price should it go up by a defined amount in a certain amount of time -- the contract term.

If it does, you exercise your option and make a big gain on a small initial investment. If it doesn’t, you just lose your initial option contract purchase price, kind of like your car insurance premium if you don’t get into a wreck.

On the seller side, you’re the person selling that insurance. You collect the cash upfront, and as long as the trigger event doesn’t happen, you keep it. Kirk argues that just like insurance companies are some of the most profitable in the world, option sellers are most often the winners in the options trading game.

In this post and podcast episode, Kirk explains in more detail about how this all works in practice and shares his 8 rules for success in options trading.

Full Show Notes: Options Trading 101: 8 Rules for Success for Total Newbies

Amy Feierman and Kristin Ostrander of MommyIncome.com have generated over $2 million in sales on Amazon over the last 12 months with a unique strategy that has high margins and lower costs per sale.

What are they selling on Amazon?

Bundles -- Think shampoo and conditioner, peanut and butter, or any 2-6 products that compliment each other and provide some added value and convenience to the buyer.

Amy and Kristin have both been selling online for over 10 years, but recently they have shifted their focus onto this specific strategy of wholesale bundles – and it’s working really well for a number of reasons.

These bundles make life easier for the 1-click ordering, free Prime shipping Amazon customer, and they make life better for you as a seller because you face less competition and can earn better profit margins.

Tune in to hear how Amy and Kristin go about their product research that leaves them confident their bundles are going to sell without any paid ads, product reviews, or marketing efforts.

You'll also learn how they're sourcing their inventory, the kinds of upfront investment needed, and the price points and margins they're working with.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Make Money with Wholesale Bundles on Amazon FBA

Over the last 10 years, the bulk of my energy and attention has been on building audience businesses. 

These types of businesses (usually) involve creating some helpful resource, and then figuring out a way to monetize the people who come by to use it. In my case, that's primarily been through affiliate marketing and more recently, advertising on this podcast.

But you also have the flexibility to sell products and services to your audience once you have their attention.

In this episode, I'll play a section from my latest book on Building an Audience Business of your own, and share why I'm giving it away for free on Amazon.

Robert Brandl is a German entrepreneur now living in Spain with his wife and twin 16-month olds, but 10 years ago he was working full-time, wanting to travel, and was just trying to figure out how to get a blog online.

He did what most aspiring bloggers would do--he turned to Google for answers.

But he was disappointed with what he found. Nobody was doing a great job answering his question and comparing all the different options.

With that, WebsiteToolTester.com was born.

This is Robert’s flagship affiliate site that now has in-depth reviews of all the top website building software.

I invited Robert on the show because this is a really common side hustle business model: the affiliate review site.

How it often works is you write product reviews, hopefully attract some organic search traffic, and then collect your commissions when someone buys through your links.

We saw this most recently in the physical product space with Kieran MacRae in episode 313, where he was reviewing mattresses and other sleep-related products.

But like most businesses, there’s an art and a science to doing this right and building a truly helpful resource as Robert has. And, he’s applied the same model to a number of different niches too, including email service providers, live chat tools, and more. You can check out his whole portfolio at ToolTester.net.

Tune in to hear how Robert structures his review content to make it easy to consume, how he optimizes it for SEO, and how you might apply the same strategies to an affiliate review site of your own. Or even just to review content on your existing blog.

Full Show Notes: Affiliate Review Sites Done Right: How to Market and Monetize Like a Pro

This week I’m excited to introduce one of the hottest side hustles of the moment, and that is low-content self-publishing.

What is low-content publishing?

Let me explain -- self-publishing has been around for a decade, and we’ve covered that quite a bit in both fiction and non-fiction -- it’s one of my favorite and perhaps most passive side hustles. Write the book, hit publish, collect royalties for years.

Cool, right?

Well, it’s the whole write the book part where a lot of people get stuck.

You might not know what to write about, and even if you do, it can be really time-consuming, and at the end of the day, it still might turn out to not be a huge seller on Amazon.

What low-content publishing aims to accomplish is to accelerate your product creation by focusing on a very specific sub-set of books:

With these types of books, the value doesn’t come from your years of experience and a 35,000-word brain dump. Instead it comes from how you’ve structured the mostly-blank internal pages and prompts, and who you’re targeting as your customer.

With Amazon’s print-on-demand KDP print service, you can upload these products as digital files, hold no physical inventory, and collect passive royalties whenever they sell. But there’s an art and a science to it, and that’s why I’ve assembled a panel of experts in today’s show.

I’m joined by three experts in the low-content publishing space with more than 1,000 titles between them:

Rob Cubbon from RobCubbon.com - Long-time listeners might remember Rob from episode 81, back in 2014. Rob’s been in the low-content game for the last year or so and in that time has published over 1,000 titles.

Flav Maderios from SideBusinessLaunch.com - Flav was a guest on episode 300 of The Side Hustle Show last summer, where we were talking about his merch business. Since then he’s expanded to the self-publishing space with around 300 titles so far.

Rachel Harrison-Sund from RachelHarrisonSund.com - Rachel built her low content business to 6-figures a year on a very part-time basis.

But as you’ll hear in this episode, there’s some seasonality that comes into play, there are some competitive factors that come into play, and there’s a little bit of a gold rush feel to all of this.

Tune in to hear how these low content publishers go about their product research (so they don’t waste their time), how they price and market their books to maximize sales and royalties, and how they manage such wide-ranging portfolios.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Low Content Publishing: Can You Make Money Selling Blank Books on Amazon?

At the end of nearly every episode of The Side Hustle Show, I ask my guests for their #1 tip for Side Hustle Nation. There’s always a great variety of responses, and I wanted to take some time today to go through some of my favorites from the past 50-ish interviews.

This has become an annual tradition on the show, and we just passed 6 years and 8.5 million downloads!

If you like this short-and-sweet meta-style show, be sure to check out the others in this series:

And even though my primary motivation is to extract helpful tactics for you, the listener, I can’t help but learn from my guests as well. You never know when inspiration will strike or where you’ll hear the one insight that has a huge impact.

These episodes are a lot of fun to put together, and give me an excuse to revisit some of my favorite moments and wise words from the show.

From the last 49 guests, the 3 most common theme I heard was to "Take action. Just start!"

While it might sound overly generic, don’t be quick to dismiss it. If all these really smart and successful people keep saying these episode after episode as their “#1 tip,” I think it's worth paying attention to.

My #1 tip this time? Surround yourself with people on the same trajectory.

Full Show Notes: What I've Learned and Applied from 49 Awesome Entrepreneurs - Part 6

Dr. Shirag Shemmassian decided to take action on a particular skill of his, and is seeing some impressive results -- all on the side from his day job as a research psychologist.

What do I mean by impressive?

How about $650k in revenue last year, which was more than double of 2017, which was more than triple of 2016.

He’s on a serious growth curve!

Full Show Notes: Multi Six-Figure Consulting on the Side