The Side Hustle Show

I was able to catch up with Kathryn, one of my public coaching volunteers who’s starting a gluten free baked-goods company in Portland, Oregon. Where we left off, things were going pretty well. She’s been pounding the pavement doing some good old fashioned cold calling to land her first clients, focusing on coffee shops in the local area. She had 2 recurring clients and around $250 a month in profit, but had just started a new job and was pressed for time.

One podcast I've been following for a really long time is the Empire Flippers show with Justin Cooke and Joe Magnotti. It's been fun to watch their evolution from building tiny Adsense sites, running an outsourcing company in the Philippines, selling WordPress themes, and now really focusing in on their website brokerage business. Consider this: it's MUCH easier to buy an existing cash flow than to create one entirely from scratch. In this episode we get into the business model of investing in sites, where to look for these "digital real estate" opportunities, some pitfalls to avoid, and even some creative financing options.

Travis Marziani is the co-founder of BDancewear.com, an ecommerce store specializing in dance-clothing handmade in the US. On this week's show, Travis joins me to talk about why ecommerce is such an awesome business model, especially for side hustlers, and the story behind the dance site -- since he is clearly not the target demographic. He's got some innovative content marketing ideas for online stores as well as how people can get started in ecommerce without massive overhead or investment.

Ankur Nagpal is the founder of Fedora, an online course-hosting platform with more than 4000 instructors. From his unique vantage-point, he's got some insight into what separates top-selling courses from the rest of the pack. Ankur gives some innovative ideas on how to use free distribution platforms like YouTube and even Udemy to build an interested audience and drive them to your premium course. We get into how to come up with your course topic, the tools to create your course quickly, and some pricing strategies as well.

Last year, Lise "came out of nowhere" as they say, and published 13 books in 6 months, and now earns between $3000 and $4000 a month in author royalties. Of course the truth is she didn't come out of nowhere at all; she came out of New Zealand and had already built a successful freelance writing business. However, the hustle of delivering work for clients all day had her seeking a more time-leveraged use of her skills. Since she already knew how to write well and write quickly, she figured book publishing was a natural next step.

Freelancing or selling some useful service is one of the fastest ways to earn more money. It may not be as sexy as "passive income" but it does come with instant gratification. Make deals, deliver awesome work, and get paid. In today's show, I'm excited to welcome back Daniel DiPiazza from Rich20Something.com. You may remember Daniel from Episode 35, where he talked about how his "marsupial method" took his tutoring business from $18 an hour to $1000 an hour.