The Side Hustle Show

May Najafabadi earned $12,000 in 8 weeks -- working just 1 hour a day.

Her side hustle?

After school enrichment classes teaching crafts and jewelry making.

As a long-time entrepreneur in the e-commerce space, May was used to enrolling her son in these classes to buy herself an extra hour in the afternoons.

Over the last couple years though, she wanted to diversify her income away from Amazon and wondered if she could be the one selling those classes instead.

May chose arts and crafts, a subject her son enjoyed in first grade but didn’t see available for second grade and above.

With no experience working with crafts or teaching children May jumped right in with a lunchtime demonstration and handing out flyers to the kids.

“The kids went crazy, they just loved the crafts. It was a big hit,” May said.

With her hopes set on 6 or more kids for that first class, May had 18 sign up at $120 each.

She soon expanded to larger schools, with larger groups of kids, and hired helpers. She's released a book, a training course, and hosts birthday parties and summer camps, and has hopes of franchising her model.

Tune in to hear how May has grown her after school class business and how you may be able to borrow this creative side hustle idea.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Make $200 an Hour Playing with Kids: An Intro to After School Programs

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 5 years and 5.5 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 #1 tips I heard were:

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

What action can you take today to apply those tips?

My #1 Tip this time? Make progress every day.

Full Show Notes: What I've Learned and Applied for 49 Awesome Entrepreneurs - Part 5

10 months!

Just 10 months after starting his side hustle, Jonathan Mendonsa was ready to quit his 6-figure job and take the business full-time.

What's the hustle?

A podcast called Jonathan co-hosts with this partner Brad Barrett ChooseFI.

“You need to either be first or be different. We couldn’t be first, so we wanted to pivot and be a little different,” Jonathan said.

When the project started, he was working full-time as a pharmacist, living a frugal lifestyle, and was an avid consumer of financial independence content.

From the offset, he knew that, “If we can create a show that’s information, accurate, good, entertaining, and also inspirational, that’ll be addictive.”

In this episode Jonathan shares some of the unique tactics and tips he and Brad used to grow their audience, community, and business so fast.

Tune in to hear how ChooseFI earned 2 million downloads in its first year, and how they monetize the show to support two families.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Choose Financial Independence: A Case Study in Audience Building

“It’s the best-kept secret in the real estate industry,” Mark said, talking about becoming a loan signing agent.

You can make $100 an hour as a part-time, and the only real requirements are that you know what you’re doing, and you have a notary license.

(A loan signing agent is the person who walks you through the giant stack of forms and contracts you have to sign when you close on a new home loan.)

I was first introduced to this side hustle early last year, when I first sat down with Mark Wills and his business partner Roman Rosario.

That conversation turned into episode 215 of the Side Hustle Show, where the pair walked me through how they built and sold an online course starting with no audience.

At that time, the Loan Signing System course, which he teaches people how to become loan signing agents, was doing around $4k a month.

A year and half later, and they're doing around $30k a month and hosting a national conference!

But what we didn’t really cover in that episode was how to become a loan signing agent and what that business is actually like -- to the frustration of many listeners. So in response to audience feedback and several listener testimonials, I invited Mark back on the show, along with one of his successful students, to dive into the loan signing side hustle.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Become a Loan Signing Agent and Earn $100 an Hour Part-Time

“I set up a big business just selling somebody else’s stuff,” Wes said.

Wes runs TheSalesWhisperer.com and is the host of The Sales Podcast which started around the same time as The Side Hustle Show back in 2013.

He’s an Air Force vet, a father of 7, and has built up an interesting side hustle that on the surface looks like a typical consulting business but is done in such a way that it’s set up to generate recurring passive income.

Wes has been side hustling since the 90’s and started his online business around a decade ago.

He saw an opportunity to become one of the first Infusionsoft resellers, a piece of software that not only streamlined his own business but offered attractive recurring affiliate commissions.

Wes became one of the top earners in the world and was netting $15k a month in mostly passive income, all on the side from his primary consulting, speaking, and sales training practice.

He’s adapted his strategies over the years and diversified his income streams but his business model stays similar to this day – scalable affiliate marketing with recurring passive income.

Tune in to hear how Wes started generating passive income through affiliate marketing and how you may be able to use a similar strategy in your service business.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Passive Income Service Business

When Abbey made $8000 from her 1000-person email list, she knew she was on to something.

Over the last several years, Abbey Ashley has gone from earning $25 as a virtual assistant, to coordinating monster 6-figure launches of her own product.

I actually met Abbey at the bar during Traffic and Conversion Summit. Her “Virtual Assistance Is My Jam,” t-shirt caught my attention and I had to know more.

Eight months pregnant with her first daughter, she couldn't imagine putting her child in day care just to go back to work at a job she hated.

So she started devouring everything she could find online about working from home and virtual assisting. Before long, she'd landed her first clients and booked enough work not to have to go back to her old job when her leave was up.

Eventually she started subcontracting out some of the work, which was her first taste of passive income. As some of her clients were doing really well selling online courses, Abbey tried to enter that world as well.

Her first course launches were major flops.

Then she did what all good entrepreneurs do when a first attempt doesn’t go as planned. She looked at what went wrong, made the necessary changes, and tried again.

She pre-sold her next course idea to the tune of $8000 from a 1000-person list.

Her second launch generated $40k in sales, and 6 months later her next launch generated $160k in sales.

Tune in to how Abbey walked The Side Hustle Path, her actionable hacks and strategies along the way, and how she built and sold her online course even without a huge audience starting out.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: From Active to Passive Income: From $25 an Hour to 6-Figure Launches

You've got less than 3 seconds to make a first impression online.

Is your website turning would-be customers away without you even knowing it?

Your site and the words you use -- your copy -- could either be making you money or costing you big time.

I invited copywriting pro Laura Belgray on the show to do some live "copy audits" of listeners' sites.

Laura is a professional copywriter with nearly 20 years of experience. During this time, she has written everything from TV promos, launch campaigns, online content, and tons more.

She is also the co-creator of The Copy Cure, an online copywriting course with Marie Forleo to help you "write like you talk and make people love and buy what you sell."

In this episode, we check out the sites from our brave volunteers and critique their language and structure. We looked at sites in e-commerce, service businesses, and blogs.

Listen in for some common mistakes that could be killing your conversion rates along with Laura's copywriting tips for compelling lead magnet offers and taglines.

I'm confident you'll get a ton of value from listening in on these website reviews and have some homework to go home and implement on your own site right away.

Full Show Notes: Your Copy Sucks! Website Reviews from a Professional Copywriter

FoodTruckEmpire.com generates $60k a year on the side from Brett Lindenberg's marketing consulting job.

Why'd he start a blog about the food truck industry?

“I started the blog at a time in my life when I was looking at just a whole bunch of different business ideas,” Brett said.

Originally, Brett wanted to start his own food truck. While researching how to start a food truck business he discovered there wasn’t enough quality information online.

So, he did what all good entrepreneurs do – capitalized on this gap in the market and started his own blog.

Brett creates the bulk of his content interviewing food truck owners and influencers in the industry.

He’s grown his blog to $60k a year in just 4 years through building an academy course, securing paid advertising, running AdSense, and selling ebooks.

And spoiler alert: he never ended up starting that food truck!

Tune in to hear Brett's content strategy, the different ways he monetizes his business, and how you can apply these methods to your own blog.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Build a $60k a Year Part-Time Blog

In his first 3 months, he'd booked more than $4000 worth of work.

“I’ve never been very good at working with people, so I wanted something that was flexible,” James said.

Sound familiar?

These are the words of someone who was not happy being a shoe salesman and wanted out.

James was looking for that location independent lifestyle, and when he was approached to ghostwrite a book for $300 he knew what he wanted to do from that point on.

Fast-forward a couple of years and James now charges $300 per 1000 words for his freelance writing, and most of his work is at least 2500 words ($750).

He’s also started up a cool business at FreelanceWritersSchool.com teaching others how to follow in his footsteps.

Tune in to hear how James landed his first clients, his strategies for growing a portfolio, and some of his favorite hacks to overcome writer's block.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Start a $1000/Month Freelance Writing Business in 60 Minutes a Day

Corey Jeffreys turned an $800 investment into $3k in the first year and has been growing his business and adding more automated processes each year.

His entrepreneurial adventure began by exploring the world of real estate investing, when he happened upon a slightly different rental business model: inflatable bounce houses.

Corey started out renting a bounce house to his aunt as his first customer and doing all the labor himself, to where he is now with a virtual assistant from Upwork taking bookings and a delivery guy from Craigslist handling the delivery.

This is a very different side hustle from the online businesses we see more often, but Corey managed it with a small up-front investment and it set the cogs turning with possibilities of other industries this can be applied to.

Tune in to hear how Corey found his first customers, grew his business through word-of-mouth and online marketing channels, and hired help to automate his business processes and remove himself from the day-to-day operations.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Start a Bounce House Rental Business (Investing in "Inflatable" Real Estate)