The Side Hustle Show - Full Episodes - Multi 6-Figure Creator: Audience Growth Hacks

I've tried for many years to experiment with different platforms and it totally totally failed. So I love deals, I love optimizing life, money, travel, and that's been my brand amongst friends. So I've written a blog and there were two posts. I signed up for every social media platform and thought, oh, I'll share deals here and it just never stuck.

And so I was trying to figure out, gosh, people are interested in what I talk about in person, but I just can't seem to be consistent on any of these platforms. When I was running my last startup, I did a bunch of podcasts interviews as a guest talking about financial planning and I was like, wow, I really love that medium. And over the pandemic, I had all these people emailing me, hey, we haven't had dinner. What's the latest?

What are the cool deals? What do I need to do? What's happening? And I thought maybe, maybe audio could be the platform.

I'm so used to telling stories at the dinner table and I've been a good guest on podcast. Maybe that would work. And so I thought maybe that platform will work I did something that I'd never done on the other platforms. So maybe this was the real secret was I just said, I am committing to release an episode every Wednesday and I just committed to it and I haven't missed one since.

And in the last times, I was like, I'm going to write a blog and then I wrote two posts. I was like, I'm done with this. This wasn't for me. But the format just felt so natural for me.

So it took me a decade of experimenting with other things before I kind of came back to being a creator, which in some ways is crazy that I was like, I had this idea and then a decade later it actually worked. But podcasting just felt like the right medium for me. Well, that's helpful to hear a couple things. First, leaning into what your perceived authority and expertise already was amongst your network of friends and peers and co-workers.

Like, what are people already asking you for help with? I think that's really good. And then this idea of committing to it. I'm going to do this.

I'm going to take it seriously. I'm going to do it every week. And like, did you give yourself? I'm going to do it every week for three months.

I'm going to do it every week for a year. I'm going to see what kind of traction it gets. Like, did you give yourself? I'm not even going to think about quitting until, you know, X amount of time has gone by and we'll see what kind of results we got.

Yeah, I mean, podcasting is interesting because some people have seasons. So they might have an 8, 10 episode season. Anyone that listened to cereal back in the day, like, oh, you're going to get a season. No, I told myself I'm going to make 8 episodes.

And if those 8 episodes don't like, if by the end of 8 episodes, I don't like this, then I'm going to call that season one and there won't be a season two. Didn't get renewed. So that was the idea was make 8 episodes. Before I got the 8th episode out, I was like, this is my jam.

Like, so it never even, I never even put the season label on it. I kind of hit the ground running and knew that this was going to be my thing and kept going. But that was the commitment to myself was I'm going to do 8 episodes over 8 weeks. And if it doesn't work, it'll be season one.

Okay. Yeah, that's that's a new addition. The seasons didn't exist when I started podcasting. It's like, oh, should I just, I guess I just do this thing every Thursday?

And that's just, that's what we do. It's become a part of the, be part of the weekly routine at this point. Now, here's the weird thing from an outsider's perspective is all the hacks is still we're going to optimize every aspect of your life from travel to health to finance and all this stuff. And that's number one is counter to the advice of niching down, niched down until it hurts, right?

And it's a concept. And second thing is it's a concept that I'm sure has been attempted by dozens, probably hundreds of other podcasters at this point. So we're like, why do you think it worked where there's didn't? The idea was the niche is that people who liked to optimize their lives, which you could argue is a lot of people.

But I think when you kind of break it down, some people are just really content not optimizing their lives. My mother is one of these people. She's like, I would love to, you know, be more fit. And I'm like, well, you need to figure out how to do that.

She's like, I'm okay not doing it actually. Yeah. It's not an important part of her life. So for me, if you like optimizing things and improving and leveling up, you probably have different areas of your life.

You could apply that. And if you look at like the Pareto 8020 principle, it's like, it actually doesn't make sense to go all the way deep on one as much as it does to go a little bit deep on one and then move to the next one. And so I think part of why it worked was that, you know, I was trying to not to go niche on a type of personality, but not a type of topic. Another is that I am that person.

There are a lot of people out there who probably are like, ooh, I want to talk about optimizing your life. But they're not as insane of an optimizer as me. So like, yeah, it's just so natural for me to go deep on all these topics and very authentic and genuine, which I think people connect with. That's all good.

That's all. It's everything is a test. Everything is an experiment. And we're going to try it out.

See what happens. You know, if you like the results, keep doing it. If you don't, okay, chuck it up and go on to the next thing. If you are listening to this, if you're interested in starting a podcast of your own, I want to invite you to download my podcast starter kit.

It's got resources on the equipment and software that you need, my production process, marketing your show, and of course, all the different ways that podcasts can make money. That's at sidehustlelation.com slash all the hacks, or you can just follow the link in, you know, just follow the show notes link in the description of this episode, sidehustlelation.com slash all the hacks will get you over there. Of course, when you launch the show, you started, you tested out a bunch of different things. And I'm curious, what drove the biggest spikes on the download chart for you?

Or, you know, how do you kind of punch above your weight class as a new podcast or trying to get people to pay attention to you? I mean, podcasting is incredibly hard. If you're listening to this and thinking, YouTube channel or podcast newsletter or podcast, every other platform has some easy way for people to share things or to be discovered. Right?

If you write a post on SubSack and it's popular, well, guess what? SubSack features that to lots of people. If you make a YouTube video and people like it, then if YouTube's going to show it to more people, nothing like that happens on podcasting. And so it is very hard.

So I'd say the only way to have a huge successful launch on podcasting is to have some other place be talking about you or already have an audience. I was fortunate that I got, you know, I called in every favor. I told everyone I know, can you share this thing? I knew one day I would want to launch something that I asked for people to help with.

So I took every email subscriber on my email list. I took every friend that had an audience and asked for them to share it. I did a little bit of press around myself. So I went on a couple interesting shows to talk about points and miles to try to, you know, promote it and to drive everyone to effectively launch, which was I put three episodes up because I didn't want someone to assume that, you know, it's only about whatever the topic from episode one was.

And that built up the early momentum. The thing I didn't do that I wish I did and, you know, maybe you could present the other side is the downside of that strategy is if your content isn't good, then you've totally, you lost it all on one cut. And so I do think there is an argument to putting some stuff out there for a little bit to try to hone your craft. I think maybe because I was starting later in my career and I'd already bid on a few podcasts, I probably got a little bit of an edge there.

But if you're listening to this and like, oh, let's start a podcast. I wouldn't say like record your first episode ever you've ever been behind a microphone and then put everything into that. Maybe, you know, test it out a little bit, get your bearings, you know, improve your skill, hone your craft, and then kind of try to really do a push later. But if you have a huge audience, use it all at once because that's the only way you're going to get someone into a podcast.

Yeah, not necessarily a huge audience of your own, but tapping into other audiences that already exist. And hopefully other podcast audiences in this case, if you can, you have a relevant topic to guest on on somebody else's show and drive them back to your show. That's funny your point about like, well, it's also like, tread carefully because it's got to be good. You don't want to lose up all your use up all your lighter fluid if you, your content sucks.

And I feel like that's what I'd, you know, flexed whatever little marketing muscle I had back in 2013 trying to launch a show and they go to, you know, every download helps me in the algorithm, like go download this thing. And it's like, you know, they're, they're okay. And, and, you know, no discredit to the early guests on the show, they're awesome. But it's just like, you're not super comfortable behind the mic and just, you know, any number of different audio issues.

And you almost have to get in your reps a little bit. And yeah, so that's, that's the tradeoff on that side where it's like, well, you know, what if, what if people come and check it out and they think that it sucks? They're like, well, that was, that was great. Thanks.

Never again. Yeah. So I, I would say get your reps in and the, the podcasting is interesting because some people don't like podcasts. I meet a lot of people who I tell what I do and they're like, oh, I love that.

And they're like, but I just don't like podcasts. And so the number one way to find a person who likes a podcast is on a podcast. Right? Like if they're listening to podcasts now, everyone listening here, you probably like podcasts.

If you want to optimize your life, this is a great opportunity for me to try to get you to come listen to my podcast. Like that is a strategy that works. Yeah. So I think the most valuable thing you can do to grow your podcast is try to find an area of expertise you have and really hone it to be relevant to other people.

And pitch yourself as a guest on their show. But don't just email them because I get a lot of these emails. Don't just email them and say, hey, can I be on your show? I know this thing.

Take the time, especially when you have it early on to listen to their show, understand the way they operate, understand the kinds of questions they ask, the kinds of shows they want to do, and send them a very tailored pitch that says, hey, I, I've listened to your show. I understand it. This is what would make for a great episode. Here's some bullet points like make it very easy for them to say yes.

I get people that email me all the time and they're like, hey, would love to come on your show and tell my story about growing up poor and building a company and making millions of dollars. And I write back, I say, I don't have a show that talks about stories like that. So I would encourage you to find one that does. But sometimes people reach out and I don't know them at all.

And they're like, hey, I've figured out every little nuance of how to be more confident. I understand confidence. I've researched it. I've coached it.

I want to help people understand everything they need to know about how to have confidence and be more confident and get more done in life because of it. And I think it would make a great episode. And I'm like, I've never even heard of you. So first, I want to validate that yes, you do in fact, no, and can speak to the thing you're talking about.

But yeah, let's do a show. And that show is coming out to like we recorded that episode about confidence. Yeah. And that was a person I'd never heard of.

And so I don't actually, and maybe this is not true for every podcaster, but I care less about who you are and how big your brand is and everything. I care more about are you an expert on a thing that can improve people's lives that is relevant to the average person and not just a business owner. But really the point to highlight here is the idea of tapping into other people's audiences. And even if podcasting isn't your platform, we've seen examples of people using that tactic to really shortcut their growth and a couple of examples come to mind.

One was Dickey Bush. We talked about his zero to 50,000 followers on Twitter. And some of his early threads that he created were summaries of popular podcasts where the host would you know, you tag the host and the host would say, dang, that's a pretty good summary. You know, retweet.

And so now he's got exposure to this other person's much larger following. And the other example comes to mind was Dustin Lean, who was doing these kind of like educational webinars. So he's not an audience-based business really at all in traditional sense, just running a digital marketing agency, but partnering with these different software companies that his ideal client was already using. I'm going to come on, give this educational talk on, you know, email deliverability or you know, whatever it was, you know, the seven, you know, how to have a good abandoned cart sequence.

It's something super niche, but you know, by establishing his credibility authority expertise, all of a sudden, if people were like, yeah, I could do it myself or we could just, oh, we just hire this guy. He seems to know what he's talking about. So built a lot of business that way. I think that's an interesting way to kind of shortcut the audience growth.

And the same thing, like I've seen the biggest bikes that, you know, I've seen on the download charts here come after, you know, guessing on, you know, entrepreneurs on fire and madfientists, bigger pockets of money, you know, some of these related and relevant shows. Anything else that went into the, you know, the early days, the launch phase of this thing? Yes, but you just said something that's really important. I think if the purpose of your podcast is to get so big that you can make money off of advertising dollars, you need a certain audience size.

But if the purpose of your podcast is to build up clients for a business, you might not need a huge audience size, depending on what, you know, what kind of business you're running. If you were a designer and you have a design agency and you would be completely full with a client a quarter, then like your audience could be 500 people. And that could be enough people to generate a client a quarter. And so when you think about audience size, that's important.

The other thing, I think they could agree, especially since you've been doing it's a decade. Like if you don't like, and I'm not even like, if you don't love doing podcasting, it's not going to work. And this is true of all mediums. For a long period of time, you will not make money.

It will not feel like you have traction. Like things will be stressful and hard. And so don't get into it as a opportunity. Get into it because you love doing it.

And if you don't love doing it, it'll feel like work. And it'll be infinitely harder to get to any point than it becomes a business. So you have to really enjoy it. Otherwise, I think creating can just be so hard and gruesome and tiring.

And it's just, I mean, people that are trying to spin up a creator business and they don't actually like creating the content. They're not talking about a topic they love. They're talking about a topic they saw opportunity in. And like, you can't, that just doesn't work.

And the same thing. Sure for starting probably side hustles of business. Like if you don't actually want to do the thing, it's going to feel like so much work. It's not going to spark the creativity you need to unlock all that growth.

Yeah, this is me with almost every short form platform. It's like, you know, and I admire the people who can, you know, really tell a compelling story in a 45 second clip. And it's like, I don't know, my sweet spot is that 2000 word blog post that 45 minute podcast episode. I don't know.

It takes, takes a little time to get things rolling over here. So what else? So there's the, there's the email list component. There's the podcast component and trying to grow that like through guesting and through kind of a PR approach through, you know, really trying to get the word out in the early days.

And then what else? You know, maybe you're six months into the show now. Okay, this is, I found this is something I really enjoy doing. Now I'm starting to study the, the growth hacks a little bit more and figure out how to drive listenership.

You know, one thing I forgot to say was, you know, for a podcast, you need a new trailer or something that someone could listen to that's short and understand what you're doing. And I'll just expand that beyond because I don't want to make this just about podcasting. Like hopefully if you're listening to this and you want to do YouTube or you want to do a newsletter, you know, a decent portion of the things we'll talk about are here. So YouTube, you want a video that play, you know, the main video that you play on your channel so people can get to know you.

And that's usually not a full-length episode. It's a quick introduction. So someone understands you on the newsletter. You might want a featured post that explains what's going on or you want to welcome page.

For all of these things, you probably want a place that if someone searches for whatever you're doing, they can find it. So like a website. I'm sure you've covered plenty of topics about how to build a website and how to create a website. So I won't go into that detail.

Now I think, I think you need a place that someone can read about what you're doing, which inherently really, really needs a concise and easy way that you can explain what you're doing. And that, I think, strings through it all. So how can you explain what your content is, in this case, podcast? How do you explain what it is and why it's different, very concisely?

So someone understands why they should keep going. On YouTube, someone told me, like, your intros need to be five to ten seconds. Like, you have seconds to convince someone that they should keep going. I assume for a new podcast listener, you similarly have seconds.

You're not going to listen for ten minutes to decide if they like it. And so at the beginning, I try to tell people why is this interesting? Either the episode, the show, or both. And so I've come with the moniker, you know, all the hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

It used to be about upgrading your life, money, and travel all while spending less and saving more. I think I just cut even that because I was like, we're taking too long to talk about what's going on in the show. I want to jump into what we're talking about in the episode. I mean, listeners, the side hustle show can watch this evolution happening over 550 episodes.

You know, the intros, much, much shorter, big, 42nd, you know, the intro music, the voiceover guy, or getting everybody pumped up early on. Like, look, here's what's about. Here's why it's worth your time to listen in. Because yeah, there's that fall off.

And it's just a specifically in podcasting. You know, somebody has to hear about your show, you know, maybe through this marketing effort on guessing on another show or through word about anything. They have to find their podcast app. They have to find your show.

They have to scroll somehow find the specific episode that the person was referencing. And then they have to find a 45 minute gap in their day to listen to your thing. It's like, there's a lot of hurdles to overcome to get that in. Now, once you, once they've come to, I like, once they get into the habit of listening to you, especially like, that's a really, really powerful relationship.

And that's something that a newsletter doesn't have, that's something that Twitter doesn't have, that's something that, you know, YouTube has to a certain extent, like you're building that one-on-one relationship. It's something that blogging, you know, maybe used to have, but definitely doesn't have today. It's like a really, really powerful relationship that you can build with listeners. And in my mind, that makes it worthwhile, like, from the effort and energy in this, you know, long, slow ramp up period of putting out great stuff and kind of waiting to see the results.

But I like this call to have a trailer or have something the equivalent of that and whatever platform that you choose. Your intro video, your pinned tweet, your, you know, header image, or whatever it is. Like, what are you about? You know, who do you help?

And how do you help them? And who do you serve? I think that's really important to have that nailed down. I know something that we've talked about in the past are doing, like, you know, promo swaps or newsletter swaps with other, I guess, other hosts.

Is there, any strategy around that or did that move the needle for you? Yeah, this can work both within the same platform or across different platforms. If you have a newsletter and you're trying to get a podcast off the ground, can you promote someone else's podcast or newsletter in your newsletter so that they will promote your podcast? Networks often do this.

They'll say, hey, we'll run some impressions for your show. If you run some impressions for this new show in our network, because we've already tapped our network to promote that show. So I think that's a great opportunity. I've seen anecdotally, maybe we can test this if you, I can send you a chartable link, that if I go on a show as a guest and it works a lot better if I'm talking about money and optimization.

This one's a little different. But, you know, the conversion rate is like somewhere around three or four percent. Three or four percent of the people that hear that episode go and check out my show. If I do a promo swap, which involves them reading like a 60 second promo for my show, that usually converts around half to one percent.

So being a guest is somewhere on the order of like five to ten times better in terms of conversion. But it's a lot harder to be a guest. Like it's just you have to stay like it's a lot of work. But promo swaps are a lot easier.

You say, hey, I'm going to read an imprint, you know, I'm going to read an ad for your show. You read an ad for my show. And that's still converts pretty well. Like if you can get one percent of someone's audience, that's awesome.

The catch is that you need to offer something in return. So if your show has a thousand downloads, you can only offer a thousand promotions for something. So it's a little bit tough. The hack here, and it hasn't worked a lot, but it has worked a little is to say, hey, I'll have you on as a guest and maybe in return, you can promote my show on your podcast.

And when that happens, people aren't thinking, oh, impression count comparison. They're just thinking, oh, yeah, that's cool. So I have had an example where I had a guest on my show and then they promoted my show in the form of like a 60 second promo. But their audience was like four five times bigger.

And there was no discussion about the size of the audiences. So that's maybe an option if you can land a guest that has a podcast. You know, they might be able to willing to talk about you. They might also be willing to swap guests.

You can go on their show. You go on they go on your show. And for some reason when you're talking about guests, it's not about the numbers. But when you're talking about swapping ad impressions, it's just like, okay, it should be swapped 30,000 or 5,000 or 25,000.

So they can get a little trick here. You can also just pay. Like you could also just pay for someone to read ads for your show. You can pay for someone to per per subscriber, you know, on platforms like Spark Loop to pay for subscribers.

You can pay for ads on, you know, podcast platforms. And in general, I think it's not a good thing to do until you're confident the ROI works. And so early on, you probably aren't monetizing your audience that well. So to spend on growth can be just money out and no money in.

Right. However, I am a fan of very small budget advertising on platforms that give you metrics as a way to test your show. So for example, Overcast is a podcast player app. It's not the biggest, it's not Apple, it's not Spotify, but that works to your benefit.

You can buy ads on Overcast for as little, depending on your category, as a few hundred dollars. And when you do, and I'm looking at example here that I ran, I bought an ad in the leisure category for $270. And what they said was we expect $350 to 500 people to tap on this ad. And from that, I expect you to get 20 to 30 subscriptions.

So I pay the $270. And I got 615 taps, which is above their range. But I got 61 subscribers, which is almost 2x there actually is more than 2x their range. So what that told me is compared to the average show, the title, the description, the cover art is probably about average.

You got about the number of clicks they expected. Maybe on the high end of average, maybe it's a little good. Maybe I've been good about the way I described the show. But there are people that subscribed as 2x what they saw, which made me feel like, wow, I have content people like.

They checked it out, they clicked on it, and they subscribed. If you did that experiment, and yours was, you know, you didn't get 20 to 30, you got five. Then I would say, go back to the drawing board on the content before you do anything else. There's something isn't working.

Now, maybe you picked the health and fitness category and your show is true crime and it didn't make any sense. Okay, that's fine. But I like doing a little bit of paid experimentation because it allows you to get in front of an audience that's completely, you know, not bought into you. If you go guest on a show, people are like, oh, I like this guy.

I kind of want to give him a shot. But when you're just seeing an ad, you're not like, oh, let me click on this ad just to be nice. Like, you actually have to have something people are interested in. So that was a little bit of a detour from what you asked, which was about, you know, cross promotion and community stuff.

But I do think that paid growth at small scale is a good way to test your show. And then once you're monetizing, I think it's a good way to actually grow if the ROI is there. However, a few other things. Current events, one of the few things that people search for in podcasts is is topical thing.

So when inflation was happening, they'll go in, oh, inflation, if your show covers current events, make sure that the title kind of really hits home on it because there are people searching for topics. It's not going to be the easiest way to grow. But I just, you know, to the extent you're thinking about a couple topics and one of them is in the news a lot could be a good thing to post about that week. Easy one.

I put in my signature on my email for the first year of the show. You know, and I can't remember exactly how I said, if you want to upgrade your life, money, or travel, check out this podcast. I can't remember the exact way I worded it. I probably should go back and look at it.

I think I have it in this slide deck I gave. But the funniest thing was I actually got a few people respond. And they're like, thanks so much for suggesting I checked it. Like, they didn't actually realize it was even an email signature.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I said, want to upgrade your life, money, and travel, check out my podcast. And they thought it was just like me telling them, like, oh, this is a cool way to do a thing. And they didn't realize it was like me putting an ad in my email signature.

But, you know, just everywhere you are. And by the way, the person that said that was the response from a live support, like chat request that turned on the email for floor mats for our car that were the wrong size. So I got a listener by responding to customer support for another product. That's funny.

My podcast. So like never I'm just everywhere I can look how can I make sure that people know I'm doing this thing, have an opportunity to do it. You know, if you like to write, maybe offer to guest post on someone's site, offer to guest write a newsletter. You know, all these things can I think help?

Yeah, there's I think the email signature is underused marketing real estate. I like that one. I remember I wore, I think I had like a hashtag podcast or shirt or something from a podcast movement conference or a fincon conference or something. And wore that to Trader Joe's and the guys like, are you a podcast dude?

Like, you know, look down. Yeah, he's like, hey, what's your show all about? So I tell him, he's like, dang man, I'm gonna check that out. So you never know what people are.

So try to think of other examples. We've we've had stories of people like going out, you know, at local affairs and festivals and you know, handing out, you know, some little trinket or something that, you know, encourages people to download. Just like, you got to get creative with this stuff. And I think that's really the maybe the main takeaway is like everywhere you are, you know, you got to be kind of pushing your thing a little bit.

But in a way that's like, hey, if this is a fit for you, let's make it out. And that's kind of how I approached my initial email outreach to, you know, I didn't have any audience to speak of, but I had, you know, 10 years of Gmail history or whatever it was. And just, you know, email, hey, have it's been a minute. What are you up to these days?

I just started this new project. If you know anybody interested in making extra money, like, perfect, like send them my way. You see, why don't I plant that seed that this is this is what you're talking about? Like, you know, if you want to become the go-to person for whatever niche it is.

And so you want to be top of mind for those, those referrals. So I think that is a helpful one. I want to switch gears to the monetization side. And especially as it relates to the paid advertising math.

So if you're buying subscribers from overcast in this case for, you know, three to $10 per subscriber. And then turning around and selling ads at a, even a $50 CPM, like you're going backwards in a hurry there. Talk to me about how the show is monetized or how the business, you know, in a broader sense, is monetized. And what's what's ringing the cash register?

Well, it's like you were reading my mind because I was just doing the math to answer this question, not knowing you would ask. So I was looking and said, okay, well, let's say, you said 50. So the industry average 20, 25 dollars CPM. But let's say you're, you know, you got a really cool niche and you could charge a little extra and you got $50 CPM, which means for every thousand downloads, an advertiser pay $50.

And let's say you can do one episode a week. And so you're doing 52 episodes a year. And let's say you can, you're doing it for an hour and you can put five ads in an episode. So for every thousand listeners, you're getting $50 times 52 weeks times five ads, you're getting $13,000.

Now if you have 50,000 listeners, you know, you can get a lot more than that. But so that would say you're getting $13,000, per thousand listeners a year divided by a thousand. You're getting $13 per listener per year. Most listeners aren't listening to every episode.

So let's say they listen to a third of the episodes, you know, you're probably getting about $4 a listener per year. If they listen to a third, I don't actually have great data. And one of the worst things about podcasts is with the analytic. But if you assume someone listens to one third of your episodes and they stop after 12 months and they never listen again, I think you could probably expect that listener to be worth somewhere between, let's call it two to four dollars.

So if you could buy them for a dollar, great. If you can monetize outside of just ads, so we talk a lot about credit cards and, you know, we have a credit card affiliate partner. If people want to sign up for credit card links, they can go to the, you know, the cards page on our website, all the x.com slash cards. And some people click those links, sign up for credit cards and support the show.

And that, you know, increases the revenue we make per year. Sometimes we have affiliate deals with certain partners. We launched a membership. I sell a spreadsheet that I made to optimize credit cards.

And so if you add all that up, maybe you can get that number up closer to $10. And if all the sudden, you've got it to $10 and it costs you $4 to acquire a listener and you think you can make $10 per listener. Well, then it's just a matter of how quickly can you make that $10 so you can recycle the cash. And for me, it's not that fast.

So I haven't spent a lot of money on paid growth. But if you had a course and that course allowed you to monetize and you said on average, we can sell a $500 course in the first few weeks and we sell it to, you know, one in a hundred people. Well, then that means you can make $5 for every new listener. So if you can buy listeners for two bucks and you can sell a course within a week, you should spend on unlimited money on growth until those economics stop working.

And so I think ads is a path to monetization. It is definitely not the only path. I have met people that monetize their podcast through coaching, who monetize their podcast through masterminds, who monetize their podcast by planning trips, by consulting. There's just lots of selling products, selling service.

There's just so many ways advertising is one, but typically it's probably the hardest one to get going only because most advertisers don't want to spend $50 to advertise. So in that example I gave, you know, to advertise on an episode of the thousand downloads, it would be $50 an episode. Most advertisers just not worth their time. So I typically think that you cross a threshold where the advertiser is spending $1000 per episode to advertise and it starts to become interesting.

But to get to $1000 an episode at even a $20 CPM means you need almost 50,000 downloads. And so not to say you couldn't get there with a smaller number of downloads with a more niche show, but I would say, you know, when you're not at 10 to 20,000 downloads in episode, the advertising conversations are just much, much harder. But yeah, that's helpful to know. But to your point, advertising, I'm going to have a longer term plagues.

It takes a while to reach that kind of audience size, the affiliate side, you know, much easier to do after you're collecting emails. So is there a coherent or consistent, like, called action to join the all the hacks newsletter that you found effective in your case? So the best way I found to grow the newsletter is to, you know, do swaps with other newsletters because the newsletter readers are actually listening to that or so. So convert kit has this creator network where they've made it easy for you to partner and share things, share newsletters with each other with other creators.

But I have found it pretty hard to get people to convert cross channel. The one way I did it was I did a survey and I did a giveaway and I said, hey, if you want extra entries to the giveaway, you can go follow me on social or follow the YouTube. And then I realized, now I'm just getting people to subscribe and follow, but they're not actually engaged on those platforms. So that was probably a terrible idea.

Maybe it juiced the numbers, but it didn't actually result in like a passionate listener base. Yeah. I think what's really important is getting the kinds of people who really want to engage in your content, really want to like be, you know, those thousand true fans, which is an article that if someone hasn't read, I'm sure you have annual link to in the show notes, which is fantastic. But there are a few other things we haven't talked about that you can do to build that.

So show notes is an interesting one. I find that deep diehard fans get a lot of value of the fact that I'm putting links to everything we talk about in the show notes. I'm putting some chapters in there. So if you're listening on Spotify, for example, you can jump between the different sections.

So you want to make sure it's easy for people to find all this content. So I think that's one way to build that excited passionate loyal listener base who is going to recommend your show to their friends and you know, ask that as I hate could you leave a recommendation? Those are some things leaving reviews helps validate your show when people are searching the app store asking your listeners to share with their friends, helps grow the podcast. There's a lot of stuff you can do there when you build that diehard audience early on.

So so listen to the feedback. Give out your email address. Help people how to get into touch with you. Run a survey.

Try to understand that early audience so that you can do more. And one great question. I asked everyone, what other shows do you listen to? What blogs do you read?

What newsletters do you subscribe to? Because I was like, I want to find more people like these people. Now I'm like, oh, the biggest overlap of my show is let's say choose five financial independence podcast. I'm like, great.

And I don't know if it is, but I was giving you an example. I know you and I both know that show. That would be a great podcast for me to try to come up with a really tailored pitch to go on because clearly, you know, people that listen to my show like that show. Yeah.

So there are probably other people on that show because it's bigger than mine that haven't heard of my show. So I should go on that show. So yeah, that's a great thing to ask, you know, any user, certainly even if you have 25 people on your email list, you know, ask him individually like, hey, you know, where did you find out about this? Well, other shows do you listen to?

That's a question I don't know that I've considered on my audience surveys in recent years, but talk to me about this membership that you've launched because we talked to a handful of other podcasters who have membership products as kind of their primary monetization. And like, what's what's what's behind the paywall there? So when I launched a membership, I have this idea that I didn't want it to be a content gated membership, right? I didn't want to do two episodes a week and put one behind the paywall.

I like getting the content out there. I like impacting lives. So that was not what I want. I didn't want ad free because when I think about brands I partner with, they're only products I use.

If I get an email from a brand and they're like, here's our product. If I couldn't see myself using it, and then I actually will try it or use it already, I'm like, I don't want to advertise this brand. I want people to know that when I'm saying go check, you know, sleep on an eight sleep, you know, cover on your mattress. It's because I love my eight sleep.

Like I actually use it every single day. And I'm sad when I travel and don't have it. That's the kind of brands that I want to work with. So what I wanted to do was come up with something that would add more value.

And so what that started at was around the deal standpoint was me going to some brands and saying, Hey, can you come up with exclusive offers that you will give our members? And so, you know, that we have four or five brands that offer discounts you can't get anywhere else. So if you're doing a state planning for your family, trust and will has a 50% off promo for all the Hacks members. So I kind of envisioned what would what would like AARP look like if it was for our generation?

You know, it's like all these retired people join this club to get these deals and, you know, get, you know, information. But they're all focused on these like, you know, random deals that are not relevant to our audience. And so what would it look like to start to build that out? So there's a lot of stuff coming down the road.

We're working on a hotel upgrade program. We're working on discounted hotel rates. We have deals. And then the other is just like kind of freeform conversations with me and with the community about topics that are just maybe not polished enough to be an episode.

And so I'll do listener questions where I'll go in and I'll just demo me using a bunch of tools. So I did one where it's like, how do you search for flights? And I made an episode where I just or a member's call. We do once a month member call.

And I just walked through how I use these tools. You know, it doesn't suit itself well for a podcast. Maybe it does for YouTube, but my audience isn't really on YouTube. So we do monthly members calls.

But what it's evolved to be, and I haven't launched this yet, but it came from the last member's call. And if you do join the membership, you can immediately get access to a site that gives you all the past member calls, all the past member emails, all the deals, the directory of people, uh, was people wanted to have a forum to talk to other people that were like them, other optimizers. And so we're going to start doing like weekly debriefs of episodes. So episode comes out on Wednesday, maybe on a Friday, we have a call where you can dial in and talk about how am I going to, you know, for example, uh, in a couple weeks, we're doing an episode on meditation.

So it's like, how am I applying meditation? How has it worked for you? What didn't stick? What did stick?

How have you tried it? What do you think about the tactics that were in this episode? So it's kind of a little community element there. We have intentionally not built a community platform.

Um, our membership is $99 a year or $19 a month. And I just, it's not a high enough price point that I think people are willing to commit to a ton, a ton of work. And so I didn't want a platform where people are posting in a forum and responding because I just, I asked, I asked all these members, I said, how often do you really want to do this? And they're like once a month and you can't have an engaged, lively community online with hundreds of people participating once a month.

So we're probably going to do an annual summit, uh, where we can all get together and do something. How many people do you have signed up so far? I think we're, you know, close to 300. Okay.

300 people at a hundred bucks a year and it's like, yeah, adding on incremental revenue streams. It's pretty cool. Exactly. So it's interesting having a revenue stream that is not, is like recurring annually, but you don't know how many are going to sign up next month.

So like when you launch your membership, you might have your best, your best day is going to be like your, in your first week. Yeah. And then, you know, your next month, it's like, man, it's, you know, does it keep coming in regularly? Well, only as often as you talk about it.

And, you know, add features to it and all that good stuff. Yeah. I think that's, that's really cool. It kind of goes to show there's a lot of different ways to do it and to structure it.

This exclusive deals model, like that we're building a Rp for our generation. It's kind of like you, you buy the Costco membership so you get access to the deals and you still got to go to the warehouse. I guess you could shop online. We had Jack Spirko on the show years ago who hosts the survival podcast.

And this is kind of how he structured his membership. I forgot what it was like the insider. He had a, he had a name for it. And it was, it was exactly this.

There's exclusive deals on a ton of products and services where if you're, you're trying to become more self reliant and you, you're going to want the stuff anyways. So kind of how he sold it. Like, look, you're going to buy this, you're going to be buying this stuff anyways. You might as well get a deal.

And that's how he sold it. So I think that's a creative way to monetize as well. You mentioned selling your card tracker as a digital product. So now we're up to four different revenue streams between advertising affiliates, the membership and this digital product sales, anything else on that front?

Yeah, let me look. I've got an entire notion page that like I track all my revenue in. So I've done a little bit of coaching for people who are trying to get a podcast off the ground and really just want like more than someone to just listen to this episode. They're like, can you help me for the next three months?

Get that off the ground. It's not cheap. I think one of the hardest things, especially when you have kids to value is your time. Yeah, I have one podcast coaching client.

There's one podcast that I met who had a big show, but it never monetized. And it was a similar audience. And they said, I really like all your advertisers. Can you just help me monetize my show?

And so I have a, like a little podcast agency with one client to help people do that. I have, I'm in the process of building out a course. So we talk a lot about credit card points and miles, but you've got to go back and listen to 20, 25 episodes and piece it all together. But if you want like a front start to finish like course on how to level up credit card points and miles, I'm going to take all the knowledge that you could go get free listening to the podcast, but make it really easy to follow and really actionable and put it together in a course.

That's not out, but that's something I am working on right now. And then I've given a couple talks. Like someone reached out to me and was like, can you come to our company and tell everyone how to optimize their credit cards and we'll pay you. And I was like, I will do.

Oh, okay. So we've got speaking. We've got a podcast agency. We've got coaching.

We've got memberships, advertisers, and then affiliates. Sure. I was going to ask, I think last week recorded was early 2022. And this was the 33 life hacks episode, great episode.

Encourage people to go back and listen to that. And I think you're still working the day job at that point. So at some point in between then and now you decided to call the quits. At what point were you comfortable saying, I guess this is a business now.

I'm going all in. Far later than I should have. I always tell people, if you're thinking about putting your job, ask yourself what advice you would give to someone in your position. Now taking that advice is a lot harder.

I probably would have given myself the advice to quit six months earlier. And you know, I think I was in a little bit of a unique situation because we just had a child. So I was on parental leave. So the difference between quitting while on parental leave and not was, you know, it's all like it was a lot more work.

But you know, the thing that really ultimately pushed me over was work just got busy enough that I couldn't focus on what I was doing with the podcast. And the podcast was making more than my day job. So I mean, that's a good place to be. It's a great place to be.

Now, when it was making more than my day job, I was getting both those salaries. So it was like, it was a hit to quit the day job because I had podcast salary plus day job salary. And then I transitioned to just podcast. But there's just, you know, at some point, you've got to ask yourself, where do you want to invest your time and your money?

And a really smart friend of mine yesterday told me, you know, if you, I was asking him how to think about investing money and spending on your own business. And he's like, look, you've got money saved up in a brokerage account. And you're expecting it to earn, I don't know, five, six, seven percent a year in your passive index funds. Like, what do you think it would earn if you bet on your podcast?

Like, if you're bet on your business. And I was like, wow, well, I think it would earn a lot more than five or six percent based on the growth I've seen in the last two years. So it kind of got me really comfortable with this idea of investing your own money and time in yourself because the upside is so big. And you always get another job.

You know, it might not be easy. It might be a hard time. But like, it's possible. So I just had to pull the trigger.

And then funny enough, I don't even know if you know this, but it got to be, there's so much happening now between memberships and trips and partnerships. My wife was like, I want to work on this too. So she, her last day is in two weeks. And she's coming full time to work on this.

Okay, okay. The little daunting because that means we have no more stable income and entire creator income life. But I don't know, we just felt like we had to do it. That's the next, the next chapter, the next stage.

Yes. So we just felt like we had to do it. So it felt right. And I try to think of these things not in an ongoing basis.

So don't think about I'm losing my salary per year. Think about I'm losing six months of my salary to test this out. And by the way, you pay taxes on that. So like, if you make a hundred grand a year, it's like, well, if I want to test doing this on my own, it's only going to cost me 50 K after tax, which might only be 35 K or something, you know, like, so how much is it going to cost you to bet on yourself for six months?

Don't think of it as I'm going to have to make up for a hundred thousand dollars a year for the rest of my life. That makes it seem very daunting. But maybe I have to make up for 35, $40,000, you know, to test it for six months and see what I can do. And that seems a lot more accessible to a lot more people.

Yeah, I mean, different ways to, you know, mitigate the risk in your own mind. But I think the key there was having built up the side hustle to the point where it had already surpassed the day job income, which I think is something that a lot of people will definitely aspire to. So what's next? You got a lot going on.

You mentioned why is it joining the team? Anything else coming down the pipeline for the remainder of this year? I realized that I'm creating all this amazing content, interviewing someone or researching a topic for a solo episode. And I'm only hitting people on podcasting.

And so I started saying, okay, what if I took that content and I wrote it as a newsletter, but not a transcript or a link to the podcast. But let's write a native newsletter about the topic that hopefully I'm not going to like hide the fact that I interviewed someone to get this content up. I'm going to give them all the credit. But to someone reading it doesn't think, wow, I'm reading a podcast.

They think I'm reading a newsletter. Okay. There are a handful of other channels that I think I have not figured out or had the resources or time to tackle one of which is video. Yes, I upload the video on YouTube, but I don't spend the time and energy that I would like on the titles, the intros, the thumbnails, the editing that I think it deserves to actually do justice on that platform.

I similarly don't do the find the best moments and cut them and clip them and put graphic overlays and do all the things to make videos work on things like TikTok, Reels, and YouTube shorts. Yeah. Similarly, not doing the same thing on Twitter and LinkedIn and maybe Instagram posts where the value is more on text or images or infographics that could come from all the same content. And so if you go through, there's probably four or five platforms that you could, I'm not going to say repurpose, but like adapt the content for.

Right. That you could get a lot more ROI than just repurposing it. Like, if I just cut a video and put it on YouTube, it will be there. But if I cut it for YouTube and do it in a style that makes sense and put the right thumbnail there and do a different intro, it'll probably be a lot better.

So the next big thing I want to tackle aside from everything I already mentioned is how do I take the content that I have and figure out how to natively and kind of organically make it for other platforms. And so that will likely require me to hire some freelance people to help with that. So if anyone listening is like, I am a pro in that thing, feel free to reach out. Chris at all.

That's calm. Yeah. That could be your next side hustle. I think that's a huge opportunity.

And we've seen people build businesses around that. You know, they would call it repurposing. But a step above that, adapting it to be native on these platforms. I think that makes a lot of sense.

And it's, it feels like, you know, the Wild West or feels like, you know, new blue ocean to conquer. Like, I have no presence here. And so it's all, you know, incremental gains or incremental audience are tapping into a new set of people. I'm with you there.

It's definitely an exciting place to play. Chris is an awesome taking a ton of notes. As always, let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation 2020 23 edition. Follow your curiosity when it comes to what you're creating because it might not seem like there's opportunity in that area.

But the longevity and the creativity that will spawn from you being excited about the thing you're doing will trump any amount of audience size or opportunity in the long run. So whatever you're excited about, whatever you're interested in, even if it's, you know, saving the whales, there is probably a way that you can turn that into something that will have more opportunity for you than anything else. Yeah, I feel like this excitement and curiosity is being very underrated. And especially the curiosity in my case, and that's what has fueled the show for the last 10 years.

It took, it just took me, you know, probably nine of those years to really realize that and lean into it. Like, well, hold on. How does that work? Is you get feedback?

Oh, you asked the question. I thought you were going to ask. And it was, yeah, because I was curious about it too. I want to figure out how this stuff works.

So I appreciate sharing that. Yeah, lean into that curiosity and excitement. Because that's what keeps you going through, you know, the months of like, why is nobody paying attention to this? Like, is this really the right thing?

And it can keep you going through those, those hard times. I just have a few notes here before we wrap up things I wanted to kind of highlight or hammer home. The first was finding customers, clients, listeners, readers, subscribers in their natural habitat. You said it best.

Hey, where are you going to find podcasters? Listening to a podcast, you know, so go out, guessing, doing these promo swaps and same thing, newsletter swaps. You can apply this tactic, you know, in service businesses, in audience based or content based businesses. I think that one is super important.

We've called it the buy buttons theory in the past. Hey, let's go over the cash. It's already flowing. If I'm trying to sell something, makes a lot of sense.

The second thing was this idea of really digging your well before your thirsty, your crisis is very well networked guy. So he's able to call in these favors that, you know, if you're brand new and you don't have that built in network, and I might challenge that, you probably have at least, you know, a few dozen people who care about what you're doing. They may not have a huge audience, but they may be able to support your launch in some meaningful way. But, you know, you know, building that without any future ask, even necessarily in mind, just doing that to be a good person and then being able to call in those favors when it is time to launch a thing.

And then the third thing that stood out to me was this focus on the one thing. And you just mentioned it, the end, I want to, you know, start adapting this content to all these other platforms. But you didn't do it early on. Early on, it's like, I'm going to try and build the best podcast around optimizing your life.

I'm going to take it seriously. I'm going to publish it every week. I'm going to study and test the best practices. And I'm going to, you know, pay for advertising in this case and see if I outperform the, the, you know, supposed benchmarks.

And this, and the reason I bring it up is the early days of the side hustle show, it was probably priority four or five on the list. And looking back, it probably shows. I had a couple other websites that I was running. You know, I prioritize written content on the blog.

I thought of myself as a writer first and foremost. And most of those posts have long since been deleted. Like they just didn't get a ton of traction. So it's easy to see why the podcast growth was a little bit slower than it could have been.

Even though it was something that I found I loved doing, I wasn't giving it the love and attention that maybe I should have early on if I really wanted to be the thing. So those were my kind of wrap up notes in that case. If you missed our first episode with Chris, I encourage you to go check that one out. It is an hour of 33 rapid fire life hacks on productivity travel finances.

Lots more of that's episode 478 if you want to go check that one out in the archives. And if you're starting a podcast of your own, if you're thinking about that, make sure to download the podcast starter kit. It's got my resources on choosing the right software, the right equipment, my production process, you know, how the sausage gets made in a way, how to market your show, and all the different ways that podcasts can make money. Of course advertising be just being just one of those, one of those revenue channels.

So that's at side hustle nation.com slash all the hacks, or you just follow the show notes link in the episode description in your podcast player app. Big thanks to Chris for sharing his insight. Thanks to Hello fresh notion and a ladder for sponsoring this week. You can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.

And thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. It really does make a difference. Thank you. That is it for me.

Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, make sure to tell a friend. Until next time, let's go out there and mix up that happened. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show.

Hustle on.