The Side Hustle Show

Busy doesn’t always mean effective!

It's not just about getting more stuff done; it's about getting more of the right stuff done.

So how can we be more intentional, proactive, and destination-driven with our days, instead of just reacting to everything life throws at us?

Today I want to share 5 ways -- 5 key habits -- I’ve found that will help you be more effective, excited, satisfied every day.

And because I've seen their power firsthand, these are the 5 habits I've baked into my brand new Progress Journal. (Official subtitle: A Simple Daily Planner to Make Meaningful Progress on Your Most Important Work.)

Click here to order yours on Amazon today!

Now let's dive into those 5 ways to be more effective every day.

Every house in the country is a potential repeat customer...

Matt Rowell set himself the goal of generating an extra $5k over 5 years to fund some passion projects, and he’s well on his way.

Matt runs AmericanEdgeSharpening.com on the side from his day job as captain of a research vessel. It’s a knife sharpening business, which was up to $250-500 a month when we spoke and is earning him $30-60 per hour.

He saw an ad while posted abroad with the Navy that gave him the idea for his business. 

And then he took action. Matt:

The best thing about the knife sharpening business?

“If you drive down the road, every house that you pass has a bunch of knives in it,” Matt said. That means an almost limitless number of potential customers.

Tune in to hear how Matt got started with this idea while he was deployed in Djibouti, Africa, including his equipment, how he learned how to do it, and how he’s marketed and priced his service.

Full Show Notes: How to Start a Knife Sharpening Business

Can you find Amazon FBA profit from the comfort of your couch?

Amit Desai of CreditCard101.us has built a business doing exactly that, and now he’s on track to sell $250k worth of stuff this year – all on the side from his day job.

We’ve covered Amazon FBA and retail arbitrage before on the Side Hustle Show, but Amit has a unique angle in that he sources most of his inventory online.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Finding Amazon FBA Profit from Home

Amit’s side hustle background is actually as a travel hacker. He’s one of those guys that racks up a bunch of points and frequent flier miles, so he can go on awesome trips for free.

It was at a travel hacking conference where one of the speakers presented about his Amazon business, and how he was racking up tones of credit card points by buying inventory for his business that a light bulb went off for Amit.

Flipping Items for Profit on Amazon

Amit realized that if he could figure out a way to flip items on Amazon and breakeven he could step up his travel game. However, he soon found out there was real profit out there, not just from credit card cashback offers and free flights.

He shares some interesting examples of how he's stacked cashback and other discounts on the items he's flipping to effectively increase the ROI on his products while being able to sell them at a competitive price.

You'll hear where you should be spending your time if you’re starting out in the FBA space, loads of cool apps, websites, and tools that have helped automate most of his business, and the criteria he uses when sourcing goods.

Tune in to hear Amit’s favorite tools for sourcing profitable inventory, his buying criteria, and how you can stack different discounts and rewards offers to improve your margins and get a leg up on the competition.

From no business ideas and no money, to making your first sales in 2 weeks.

It’s not a far-fetched goal according to this week’s guest.

Alan Donegan from PopUpBusinessSchool.co.uk specializes in guiding people through this transformation, and he says that everyone has a profitable business idea in their heads – and he knows how to find it.

He does this through in-person workshops that are free to attend by forming partnerships with government bodies in cities across the UK, and he’s bringing his workshops to the US soon.

Alan is adamant about bootstrapping and not taking on a load of debt to start a business because he saw his family go through a multi-million dollar bankruptcy and doesn’t want anyone else to have to experience the same fate.

He preaches starting a business around a passion or something that excites you. Because running a business you’re passionate about sets you apart from the competition and makes the process so much easier.

He shares how he teaches his students to pre-sell and validate their ideas before putting down cash for stock that might end up collecting dust in the garage, and he outlines what makes a successful pitch.

Alan also shares how he practiced what he preaches when he sold his first PopUpBusiness workshop to a housing authority in the UK selling his highest priced package right out of the gate, and his business has been gaining momentum ever since.

Tune in to hear how Alan pulls business ideas out of people who don’t think they have any, how he has his students quickly and cheaply validate those ideas, and what makes for a successful pitch.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Start a Business You Care About — With No Business Ideas and No Money

Could ethically “hack” the minds of your customers and prospects to persuade them to take action?

It’s not some kind of magic or marketing trick. I’m talking about triggering a response in someone by triggering a response in their primal or reptilian brain.

Patrick Renvoise of Salesbrain.com is a neuromarketing specialist, he’s the author of his recently released book - The Persuasion Code, and his TEDx talk has more than 140,000 views.

Patrick argues that we basically have two systems competing in our head. Our 500 million year old primal brain, and our more modern rational brain.

And however rational we think we are, it’s that ancient, self-centered, emotional, visual, primal brain that really drives decision making.

In this episode, you’ll learn how, as entrepreneurs, marketers, and side hustlers, we can tap into that ancient “buy button” to be more persuasive.

Tune in to hear how to more clearly explain the value proposition, and ultimately make more sales and grow your business.

Patrick breaks down the 6 stimuli that matter to the primal brain, and how you can work your marketing techniques around these “triggers”, which are:

1. Personal – Patrick explains how certain words in your sales copy can trigger a person’s “Buy button” and stimulate the response you’re aiming for.
2. Contrast – He explains why it’s important to show customers a contract between you and your competitors, and how you can do this in your industry.
3. Tangible – He explains why you should be using marketing information that a 4-year old would understand, and how using a story can impact our reptilian brains.
4. Visual – “Around 90-95% of all brain activity it about processing images,” Patrick said. He explains how you can use images to make a more powerful impact than the written or spoken word.
5. Beginning and End – By design, we remember more about the beginning and end of a conversation, film, book, and so on, so understanding the importance of writing a compelling hook and call-to-action can make a difference in sales conversions.
6. Emotional – We make decisions based on our emotions, then rationalize them later. He explains how to tap into your customer's emotional responses.

Tune in to hear Patrick explain the 6 stimuli of the reptilian brain you need to be aware of, his Pain/Claim/Gain/Brain framework for crafting effective emails, marketing materials, sales copy, etc, and how you can apply these techniques in your business to ethically make more sales.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Sell More by Finding the “Buy Button” in Customers’ Heads

Jodi Carlson has been running her blog LeaderConnectingLeaders.com part-time since 2014 and has slowly built it up to $5-6k a month in revenue.

The earnings come from a combination of mostly digital product sales, as well as advertising, and affiliate relationships.

The surprising thing – to me at least – is that she’s done this in a niche that theoretically doesn’t have any money.

Her readers and customers are almost all volunteers and they’re donating their time to local non-profit groups – in this case, Girl Scout groups.

On the surface that makes it seem like it’s as tough a niche as any to tackle, which makes Jodi’s results even more impressive.

She brings more than two decades of experience in Girl Scouts to the table, as a scout, then as a troop leader, and even though the blog didn’t start out with dollar signs in mind she’s turned it into a substantial income stream.

“I actually started it to help myself, and to then help troop leaders in my community,” Jodi said.

Jodi started documenting the activities she was doing with her Scout Troops in her blog and making PDF books so she could refer to them again in the future, and shared her articles with a small circle of other leaders in her community.

It wasn’t long before Troop leaders further afield started asking for her activity books. This sparked the idea to start selling her books and growing her blog.

Tune in to hear how Jodi comes up with product ideas and prices those, how she made her first sales, how she’s grown her traffic to more than 100k pageviews a month, and income to $5k + a month – all while working full-time and raising a family.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The $5k a Month Part-Time Girl Scout Blog

Related: Check out my free video series on how to start a blog.

Could you live for free?

That's what The Side Hustle Snowball framework proposes: to erase your expenses with new income streams.

Start out with your smallest monthly expenses and work your way up:

We all want our business to cover our costs of living and then some, but the "Snowball" framework (apologies to Dave Ramsey) allows you to work your way up to that ultimate goal of financial independence.

Celebrate the small wins along the way.

In this post / podcast episode, I'll break down the 15 income streams I'm working on right now. Which ones can you start or add to your existing business?

Full Show Notes: The 15 Income Streams I'm Working on Right Now

Things were going great; he had a bunch of happy customers, he’d quit his engineering job to focus on it full-time, and he was doing what he loves.

You might remember Jacques Hopkins from episode 223, where he broke down how he turned his hobby of playing piano into a solid $20k a month online business at Pianoin21days.com.

BUT….

Between customer support, email, social media, phone sales, and all the other day-to-day tasks, it was taking a full 40 hours a week to run.

Since then, Jacques set out to automate, optimize, and outsource different elements of the business. Those initiatives cut back his time commitment to maintain the biz to just 10 minutes a day — and still grew revenue to $30k a month.

Jacques isn’t one to sit still, he’s using his newfound time freedom to work on more strategic growth projects and his other project; TheOnlineCourseGuy.com.

He’s launched a podcast interviewing other people who have successfully launched online courses, and sells his own course giving customers a behind the scenes look at how he built and sold his courses on Pianoin21days.com.

Tune in to hear how Jacques “plugged holes” in his course, outsourced time-consuming repetitive tasks to a virtual assistant, and successfully increased his revenue while reducing the time spent on his business.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Catching Up with the $30k a Month Piano Teacher — How He Grew His Business While Cutting Back His Hours 97%

At a certain point, you reach the ceiling of your own capabilities, of your own capacities, and no amount of productivity hacks are going to get you to the next level.

So what do you do?

You hire some help!

That’s exactly what Bonnie Fahy started doing when she needed help with the day-to-day tasks running her real estate consulting business.

Soon after she put a virtual team in place -- headed up by a US-based project manager -- she was able to free up more of her time to focus on sales, marketing, and other areas of her business.

Those shifts ended up quadrupling her income in just a few months.

With more than 300 hires behind her, Bonnie now runs LiveMoreFormula.com where she teaches other entrepreneurs the skills of “Hybridsourcing” she’s learned over the years.

This means finding a balance between hiring domestic and international virtual assistants with the right skills to take some of your workload off your hands – at a cost-effective price.

She uses some interesting techniques too. Preferring to put candidates through “Interview dates” over traditional interviews, she explains the types of questions you should be asking potential hires, and what you should expect to pay for skilled international workers.

Tune in to hear the simple 4-step process Bonnie has refined over the years to make finding hires quick, identify top performers, and start adding virtual assistants to your team.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel:  Accelerate Your Business with Outsourcing: Best Practices from Hiring Over 300 Freelancers

300!

In this special 300th edition of The Side Hustle Show, I’m excited to feature 5 listeners who took action on specific ideas they heard on the show or read on the Side Hustle Nation blog -- and turned that action into concrete results.

Those results range from their first $1000 on the side, up to a $700k e-commerce empire, but the point is they made something happen.

Tune in to hear how they got it done, and check the text summary below.

Full Show Notes: 5 Listeners Who Took Action and Are Seeing Awesome Results