The Side Hustle Show

Navid had been blogging and podcasting about lifestyle business topics, but wrote one epic "round-up" post that went viral on the subject of personal branding. Sensing he was on to something, and noticing the success of virtual summits in other industries (like health and fitness), he decided to put together The Branding Summit. At the time, Navid had a modest list of 1000 email subscribers. The summit quadrupled that number and generated $20,000 in revenue the month it went live.

Should you quit your side hustle? My guest this week says you should, and argues that what you should do instead is find an apprenticeship. Taylor Pearson is the author of the bestselling The End of Jobs, and one of those super-smart individuals we should all pay attention to. The book is largely a historical perspective on where our economy is today and where we're going; and it's at once terrifying yet optimistic.

I met Steve Chou at New Media Expo this spring, and was fascinated by his story. He's built three different six-figure businesses, all while still working a day job in Silicon Valley. In fact, I was really surprised to find out he's still working TODAY, despite all this side hustle success. Those businesses are an ecommerce store at BumblebeeLinens.com, his blog and podcast at MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, and his online course teaching others how to get started in ecommerce.

John Logar is the king of pre-selling software. As one of The Foundation's top students, he's broken all their records and even broken the mold on some of the methods they teach. In fact, he sold $120k worth of software within his first 6 months of joining the program. Since he was already a consultant, doing idea extraction and finding pain points for businesses was second nature. He just knew nothing about software before so just added a new weapon to his arsenal. (Without learning how to program.)

I was really excited to sit down with Travis Scott from StuffParentsLike.com to share his success with the Amazon FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) clearance arbitrage business, and also to get his insight since I just started playing around with this side hustle myself. Travis has seen impressive results with Amazon, netting $25,000 so far this year through July, in addition to his full-time job and duties as a dad. You may remember Travis from a guest post he contributed on his FBA adventures last year.

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 interviews. (I first did this for episode 50, which was my first-ever solo podcast recording.) 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?

If you're looking for ways to squeeze more out of your limited side hustle hours, this is the episode for you. I'm excited to introduce Julie Sheranosher, host of the Time Hackers podcast. Julie and I met at World Domination Summit in 2013 -- she flew in all the way from Israel -- and she is one of my favorite people and true time management pro. I feel like my productivity has improved over the years, but I'm always learning about new systems and "hacks" to test out. One of those hacks was simply writing down my top 3 priorities for the next day the night before.

This week, I'm joined by fellow online entrepreneur and freedom-seeker, Natalie Sisson. Natalie is a masterful marketer, blogger, podcaster, and speaker, and on this call she breaks down how a blog post idea became a major turning point in her business, and was eventually re-purposed and repackaged more than a half-dozen ways -- all ringing the cash register in some unique fashion. The breakthrough moment was going from $0 to $15,000 in one month, with what I thought was a pretty savvy strategy.

Tim Johnson is a man of many hustles. In fact, when he applied for my Inner Circle Mastermind last year, I had a hard time keeping them all straight. Between his day job as a product engineer, his awesome self-publishing business, his Amazon FBA activities, and an upcoming brick-and-mortar project -- and twin 2 year old boys -- there's no doubt he's keeping busy! On this call, we focus on his book business, which has earned a consistent $1000-1500 a month in author royalties.

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.