The Side Hustle Show - Full Episodes - Start as a Side Hustle: Building a 6-Figure Online Business

a six-figure online business starting as a side hustle. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here.

Welcome to the side hustle show. Now a proud member of the entrepreneur podcast network. It's the business podcast you can actually apply and you're going to want to take some notes today because we're covering how to turn what you already know into an online income stream and perhaps better yet a recurring online income stream. Stephen Faust is here.

He's a long time listener, a retired army chief warrant officer and non-commissioned officer. He recently left his corporate executive position to take his online side hustles full time. The primary of those is nco on fire.com where he helps army soldiers get promoted faster and earns 14 grand a month in the process. Stephen, welcome to the side hustle show.

Hey Nick, glad to be here. You're right. I'm a long time listener. Love the show.

I just can't wait to talk with you today about what I'm doing. You met me as well. Stick around in this one to learn how Stephen came up with the idea, the marketing and sales tactics that are working today and how to give yourself a raise each and every month. But first, if you're new to the show, you might be intimidated by the 550 plus episodes in the archives.

Well, fear not because I've got you covered. All you got to do is go to hustle.show, answer a few short multiple choice questions and I'll build you a custom curated playlist of the episodes. I think are going to be most relevant to you. Once again, that's it.

Hustle.show. So, Stephen, 18 months ago, you decided to pull the trigger and quit the full time corporate job, which is called the golden handcuffs, so to speak, and say, I'm going to go all in on this business. Can you talk to me about what the business was doing revenue-wise? What it was like to take that leap?

Yeah, Nick. I was making about $5,000 a month, which, you know, it's not a lot of money in the big picture, but it was enough to tell me I had a chance to do something different and special. And one of the things I did is I knew there was a day that was going to come where I was going to make a pivot. I just didn't know when that day was going to be.

And for those of you out there who have these corporate jobs, I was a vice president for an aerospace manufacturing company. And every day, 12 hours a day, six, seven days a week, the frustration had really boiled up with me. And I just knew that I was destined to stay in this probably long-term and forever if I wasn't willing to make that decision to pivot. And as painful as it was, I woke up one day after a particularly bad day at work.

And I'm like, I've got to make a change because I'm not making a ton of money now, but I had been smart and saved and kind of put some acorns away in the bank. And it was thinking about when this day might come. That day came January 31st of 2022. And I left that job.

I didn't look back because I knew if I looked back that I might go back. And that is something I didn't want to do. So I really re-focused and doubled down on my efforts to really make this online business thing work. And it's been the best decision of my life.

And I have no regrets, Nick. No regrets at all. It's harder. I mean, it was hard for me.

And I was only 25 when I quit my corporate job. Forget it. Just like this. You're almost looking for someone else's permission.

Like, is this allowed? Is this okay? And in the higher you climb on that corporate ladder, the harder it gets. It's like, I'm walking away from salary and benefits.

And my whole career up into this point, it's difficult to go. But now you did about, you went about it the right way in that you had built yourself a nest egg or built yourself some runway. And you built yourself up some side income that was, you know, hopefully covering a decent chunk of your monthly expenses. Now take me back to the decision to say, well, I know I'm going to build an online business.

And specifically, I'm going to build it around helping soldiers get promoted faster. He's been out of the army for years and years at this point. Yeah, a lot, a long time. I got out of the active duty in the army in 1998.

So we're talking to the last century. Yeah. It's been a while, right? And I retired from the Army Reserve in 2005.

So, but one thing I knew and as I look back and think about things that I know that I can help people with, one of the things that I kind of stood that stood out was I was always good in the military getting promoted fast, right? And I wasn't the best. I wasn't the smartest. I wasn't, you know, the top person and anything that I did.

But one thing I did do is I studied the system and the process of how to get promoted fast in the military. And I realized, and this is not a spoiler alert for anyone. You don't have to be the sharpest tool in the drawer to get promoted fast. You've got to know the system.

You've got to know how the army promotes people and what it does. And for me, that was a point system. And I knew that if I could get a certain number of points, I could get promoted faster. So I spent a lot of time studying, figuring out how to get promoted faster.

And as a matter of fact, in 1995, I, I, I know people can't see this. I wrote a little book at 1995 that I had published. It was, it was a guide. It's called PowerPoints.

And it's about helping soldiers get promoted faster to NCO. And that's what I did. And I said, you know what? I have this skill.

I have this knowledge. I'm a little outdated. I'll be 56 here in about a month. So I'm not to spring chicken.

But I know some things about getting promoted faster. I wonder what it would look like if I could help other people who are struggling get promoted faster too. And that's kind of how I started doing this. It's really interesting to, you know, take, go through the exercise of taking inventory of your skills and knowledge.

And what am I better at than the average person? What do you, you know, where have I seen some level of success in my own life? What problems, challenges, hurdles have I overcome in my own life? What do people ask me for help with?

And, and even, you know, not just recent history, sometimes going back, like you said, to the last century. All right. Saying, okay, there might be something here after, and you'd already written the book on it, even, you know, a decade plus earlier or two decades earlier. That's like, well, that's a long time ago.

Yeah. It really is. You're like, well, is this still relevant? Yeah, there's still soldiers out there.

This, you know, and then is this, this system still exists. So let me start to put some of this stuff online. Talk me through some of those first steps in, you know, reviving that, that interest or dusting off some of the material in that book to turn it into an online business. Yeah.

What the first thing I did, Nick, was I did the classic things that, that we tell people not to do once you kind of figure some of this stuff out. I went out and just started building stuff, right? Obviously, if I go build stuff, people are obviously going to come and buy it, even though I don't have any traffic. So that didn't work out too well for me.

So what I did is I built a, I went on to Kajabi. I built a, a one page website. It was called back in the day. It was called army promotion point dot com.

Doesn't exist anymore. You can go back to the way back machine and check it out. But I built this page and I said, okay, I'm going to use a story brand method, Donald Mueller. I kind of looked at that, took some courses on that, did a website on how can I help people get promoted in the army using what I've written about in the past and studying up on it.

So I built this site, didn't get much traction and I was struggling to figure out a way to get traffic, right? And I knew I could help people, but I also didn't have a mechanism to draw traffic in. And that's where I made a pivot and started to get a little more creative with how I can put my, my offer, my product, which I shouldn't have built as soon as I did, but I had it. So how do I put it in front of somebody and start to get traction?

So that, that was kind of the next thing I did, which was I partnered with someone that I ran across their websites that they were getting a lot of traffic. And I just found out who they were. I reached out to them, connected with email, they responded. And I said, hey, I'd love to give you, you know, 40 or 50% of every sale, if you'll just put my stuff on your website.

And that's exactly what he did. And that created kind of the wheel beginning to turn of where I ended up. And I'd love to go into that with you too. Yeah, that's interesting.

So what you're saying, don't, don't necessarily do what I did build the product first. And then like, well, see you now, who has to find an audience to sell this to. But the shortcut, and this is a really interesting one, is why go find people who already have relevant traffic, I can go find and go recruit relevant affiliate partners for this. And that's an interesting shortcut.

Yeah, it's expensive. Yeah, it's going to cost you 50% of your margin up front. But you know, 50% of something is better than, you know, 100% enough of that. You got that right.

So so starting this affiliate partnership path, you want to expand on that a little bit? Yeah, sure. So I built this course. I had found, I just was doing Google, not like a lot of people are going to do Google searches on checking things out.

I'm trying to figure out where people are hanging out. So I ran across these two sites. It was called cutoffscores.com and NCO support.com. And these two sites were ranking first page of Google for so many of the keywords I was targeting around army promotions and NCOs getting promoted and leadership support and things like that.

So I said, hey, if you can't beat them, join them. So I did like most people like like scroll around looking at the footer, trying to figure out how to find this person. So I found this person. His name is Fernando.

He lives in Panama. He was an ex ex army guy. He got out. He was a medic.

And he had these two sites he had had for about 10 years. And he was getting all of this organic traffic. And I said, hey, Fernando, you don't know me, but I have this product I built and I shouldn't have built. Right.

But I did. Could you just put it on your website? I'll give you 40% or 50% and he said, yeah, whatever, because he wasn't monetizing anything except through display ads on Google Ad Sense. It's the only way he was monetizing his two sites, right?

And he was getting about $15 dollars a month for both of his sites. And he put my stuff out there. I sold five copies of my course that I probably spent two months building thinking it was going to be the next kind of huge thing out there. I sold five copies and he got us 50% and and then that created a relationship.

And that was what was so important here is that relationship turned into more of a of a partnership. And then I got a magical phone call one day that I'll tell you about if you want to go deeper on to what happened next. Yeah, let's hear it. Yep.

So what happened next? He called me up. This was back in the fall of 2020. I had had my website out there trying to get some organic traffic.

I didn't run ads. Made this product. Couldn't sell, but five copies. So he called me up one day and said, Hey, Steven.

Yeah, I'm really not into these websites anymore. Yeah, he was going to medical school to be a doctor and he's on a, doing his, all of his residency stuff and just didn't have time kind of fell out of love with it. And he says, you know what, I could really use some money for this. Would you be interested in buying my websites?

I said, wait a minute. I have a way now to rank first on Google for all the keywords I want to rank and get there through the credit. You got it. And I'm like, it wouldn't happen without me reaching out to him and trying to get up an affiliate arrangement.

He decided he didn't want to do it anymore. He had my number. He called me up. I decided I wanted to do it.

And when somebody wants to get in, there's probably somebody that wants to get out somewhere, right? So I bought both of his sites for $15,000 each, right? So I was in a fortunate position to be able to do that because I stocked, I was stocking away money, thinking about how my pivot and transition would go at that point. This is before I left my job.

And he sold me these two sites for 15 grand each. I took them. I didn't know what I was going to do with them. Other than they were ranking, they were good lead generation.

He was making $1500 a month. If nothing else, I could continue to do that. He didn't have an email list. Didn't have any products.

Only just ad revenue. And that's kind of where it began with, okay, now I have these assets. Now what's my next step here? Yeah, these under monetized, underutilized assets that had been around for a while, like aged domains, ranking in Google.

And now it's almost a blank canvas. We're like, okay, now I can figure out how to, you know, and that's just like the really fun part of the game. Like what are the little tweaks and optimizations? Like, oh, shoot, I could put an ad up here.

I could put a link to the product over here. I could add an email, opt in, you know, all these different things. So that's really interesting. It makes me think of what other niches might this be a viable strategy in.

Yeah. It's, you know, these guys, we're very prolific in the case that we're already ranking in Google. But like, could you find that site that's on page two that just, you know, it's like, not to say the 30 grand is nothing, but it's not, it's not 300,000. Like, it's right.

You know, it's an interesting way to shortcut. So what were some of the first actions that you took after acquiring those? Yeah, it's funny. This was, I don't know if you remember this Nick, but Yahoo site builder.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. These two sites were built. I can't even say they were WordPress sites, right?

They were built on Yahoo site builder clunky. I don't even think they had a HTTPS kind of security. Yeah. It was just old site builder strictly for ad revenue.

That's all he did with it. So I got these sites and I started to play with them trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And then about three months later, Yahoo announced that they were retiring their site builder that I had until like, I think it was April 1st of 2021 to get these sites off of there. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, the cutoff scores was getting three to 400,000 page views a month organically, organically and ranking higher than the army itself on all these keywords, right?

It was crazy. So if you just go army promotion points, you're going to see those sites ranking above the army on everything. It's crazy. And then I said, okay, I got to get these sites off here.

I have no choice. So I moved them all to WordPress. I did it myself, did it slowly. I kept, I did all of the 301 redirects.

I did a lot of study on how to do that. And I protected. That makes me so nervous. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. So I had about a half a million page views per month organically between the two sites. And I was like, oh my gosh, I bought these sites. And if nothing else, I was going to monetize through display ads if nothing else, right?

So I was able to protect that. Got him moved to WordPress. And then I took a step back and said, okay, he was doing nothing. What can I do with all this traffic?

So I started to build a couple products. I built three products. I built some templates for helping NCOs in the army counsel their soldiers better. This is kind of a template package of PDFs that I wrote and had some examples from my past.

I wrote a, I created a digital package around writing. They're called NCOERs, which is a performance evaluation for soldiers and NCOs in the military. And then I created another one about how to write army awards, which NCOs have to write a lot of army awards for their soldiers to recognize them. And these are three pain points that I discovered through just talking to my audience and beginning to do Google research and things like that that I knew that there were struggles with.

So I created over a few months these three products and began to sell those while monetizing with the display ads. I got rejected a few times, but I finally got approved for cut-off scores and NCO support for Monumentric. And then I would say about a year ago I took NCO support and I moved it to Mediavine. And I'm on Mediavine for NCO support today, Monumentric for cut-off scores.

And I just keep those ads going because that has always been there and I'm not creating any new drama for that traffic. Yeah, and I imagine the RPMs for Mediavine, especially, it's got to be way better than ads and sources. It is. Oh, it is.

But I think the whole niche is probably depressed from an RPM standpoint. Compared to a campaign or something like that where you can get really favorable RPMs. What's typical for you? Mine are really low.

It's like six to ten dollars. It's like six to ten dollars per thousand. And it's just really low. So I'm predominantly not looking at ad revenue as a huge future strategy for myself.

I think ultimately what I'd love to do is just get the ads. I have a lot of people telling me that I talk to that I trust. Like get all that junk off your site. And the only reason I haven't done it is because it's always been there and whatever.

I'm making passive income from it. But I'd love to get it off of there and replace it with maybe more strategic affiliate revenue and things like that. So I haven't done it yet. Haven't pulled the trigger, but that's something I'm definitely thinking about doing.

Yeah, well, always feel free to give me a call anytime. We'll talk about affiliate strategy. Or something. You gouged on affiliate stuff.

Yeah, I'm happy to do that. And some of some articles just aren't well positioned for that. Just based on search intent and everything else. But yeah, always happy to get out on that.

So yeah, it's making passive income from ads. It's always been there. People expect ads on the internet. I don't think that's a huge detractor.

I think the only people who are self-conscious about it are people who are not. Yeah, that's right. Clotters up my site. I don't know.

People expect it. They're ad blindness. They just scroll right by them. They just, I wouldn't stress too much about that.

So you'll down these three products. I see parallels to you finding that landlord who's tired, maybe had a problem, tenant, maybe the house needs some work. It's the same idea with these website acquisitions. You find something that's probably a little bit undervalued and the guy just, his heart isn't in it anymore.

And you could see these either proactive outreach through the Google search results. Or you could look on marketplaces like flip a, see what you could find. But I got lucky. There's no doubt about it.

I walked into a good situation. But it was all created with the relationship in the beginning. And you just never know where those things are going to lead. And when they do pop up and you get those opportunities, I knew it was too good to pass up because I'd always look back and go, man, I wonder what would have happened if I would have just got those websites?

Yeah. And by being, you know, first name on the Rolex there, you know, you prevented an auction situation where it went up on a brokerage or something. Yeah, these sites were horrible though. These are bad sites.

I mean, great, great domains, great rankings, but really poor quality site. He could have sold them if you had been patient and figured it out. It would have been no problem. But the thing I realized in the beginning, though, is that he doesn't have an email list.

All I got to do is start using these two sites to drive leads to drive lead generation to my products. And I've been able to do that. I've just crossed 20,000 people on my email list. And it's crazy that that people out there today, you know, if you don't do anything else, you got to get an email list going because that's where your customers are.

Yeah, totally. Well, what did you put up as an opt in? I put up as an opt in. My main opt in today is a calculator.

So like in CO on fire.com, Ford slash calculator is my main opt in. My two WordPress sites today, cut off scores and in CO support, they have a lot of a call to action calls to action to drive people back to my kajabi site where my opt in is on the NCO on fire site. They go into my calculator, which helps them. It's a really clear thing, a problem that they need to solve that my customers will need, which is in going to position them for the products that I have.

They're going to get this calculator. It's going to help them figure out how many points they have, how many points they can go plan to get and position themselves to get promoted faster. And then what they do is they then go into a funnel. The funnel goes into a through a trip wire, which they get offered one of my digital products for a discount.

They go into a three day membership funnel. I know we haven't talked about membership yet, but they go into a three day deadline funnel driven membership opportunity to get in there at a lower cost. And then I put them in after that, if they don't buy, I affectionately refer to it as my funnel of death, right? But it's really the D is not death, it's decision.

It's the funnel of decision. I want them to clearly decide if I'm their cup of tea, I can help them solve the problems that they have or not. And if they unsubscribe, that's great. That means they're not my ideal customer.

So I'm get I'm forcing them to make a decision as quickly as possible. They're in or they're out or they're not sure and they'll stick around. I'll keep nurture them. So I put them through this funnel of death or decision for a period of about 20 to 25 days in a row to really get them uncomfortable with figuring out if they have a problem.

They really want to get solved or go on, you know, you're not my thing. I'm out. And that's okay too. Okay.

So we're you're emailing every day for that. Correct. Three, four weeks and to say and the call to action is joined the membership. The call to action is it's interesting.

So the first the first funnel is a three day membership deadline driven funnel. Then they go into a funnel that is begins to take things out of the membership. So I have these counseling things in the membership. I begin like a 10 day sequence where I take one little nugget out and give it to them each day for 10 days and then say, Hey, if you like that, you can have more.

Come here. Come join this or I'll sell them the the package. Let's say for 30, 40, 50 bucks and then I'll upsell them back into the membership. So everything I do, every email I send is designed for them to have a way to give me money, right?

They go to a place that they can put their credit card in and make a decision if they want help or not. And if they do, I can help them. So I I I dangle these things in front of them trying to find out what their problem is at that point that they really want to get solved. So I they don't want that.

Oh, you don't want this. Okay, how about this? You don't want that? Oh, you don't want that.

How about this? And I'll find where they're struggling and then get them to buy maybe a lower ticket product, upsell them back into the membership so I can help them in a deeper way. Do you have a sense of the the metrics or maybe the metrics that you're shooting for every person I plug in or every 100 people I plug in at the top of this funnel. How many dollars shakes out at the other end?

I look at it a little bit differently. My goal is to get 50 new members per month, right? Now that's 50 new members per month. Now you have churn in there, right?

So I have a pretty high churn rate and I used to really struggle with churn rate churn being the number of people that leave your membership every month. And I used to struggle with that and hear a lot of the experts and gurus like if you have a higher than a 5% churn rate, you don't have a business. Well, I have like a 10 to 15% churn rate and I think it's just a nature of my niche maybe a little bit differently. At least that's the way I've kind of viewed it analytically.

But what I'll do is if I lose one, I'll try to figure out a way to go get two, right? And I'll try to just replace and I have a higher churn rate because people are coming in and now the membership because they get promoted and they move on in their career and they kind of outgrow. They outgrow some of the things that I offer because I really narrowly focus to a certain specific set of ranks in the military. Right.

Yeah. Once you've solved their problem or they've got that promotion, maybe they'll come back to you when it's time to revisit that. They're like, I'm probably good for a while. I could see why people would jump out of there after they achieve their goal.

Yeah. But go back to the dollars and cents. Do you have a sense for what a new email subscriber is worth? I always have heard that every email subscriber should give you what a dollar a month or something like that.

So that's kind of, you know, I'm making about 20 a month now in total. So that kind of works out in a weird sense of math. Yeah. But I don't know.

That's what you describe it for a month. It's like the Russell Brunson clickfunnels metric. That's like, gosh, I'm nowhere near that. Yeah.

I mean, aggressively undermonitized it's a way. But a lot of people say that's too low. You should be getting five or $10 per month. I'm like, well, that would be fantastic.

Right. But but I don't have a sense exactly of what each email subscriber is worth. I do, I do can let's say people come into the top of the funnel for the calculator. I get about a 30% conversion of people landing on the landing on the page that convert into an email address.

And I'm getting about 1500 to 1800 new organic email addresses a month, which is phenomenal. That's why I think I need to be really tweaking how I monetizing this and optimizing my funnel because I think there's a lot more meat on the bone out there for sure. So I get about a 30% conversion. They drop in through I get a very low take rate on the trip wire, which is like a $29 digital product.

But I have it out there for those. You got to remember, these are really cold traffic. They've never heard or seen me before. So they're probably not going to buy much right away.

But yeah, I offer them the trip wire. I get a I get maybe one or two a day that I'll sell of those. Then I put them into the membership funnel and I'll get I'll usually get a couple of members, one to two members a day on average, which I'm really happy with that that level. And then they'll then if they don't join the membership, they go through the funnel of decision that I'm trying to sell them other things such as, oh, you didn't want the membership because some people are just subscription kind of worn out, right?

Because we all have it. I have every Netflix and Paramount Plus and Disney. I have every subscription known to mankind. I know everything.

What was the latest one I saw? It was something really random. I think it was like underwear as a subscription. And it was like, no, no, why do I need to get subscription?

I do want to buy a membership for this. You can get Burger King, you can get Starbucks, you can get McDonald's, you can get all these places now. The car wash is actually pretty smart. Like, oh, buy it, you know, 25 bucks a month unlimited car washes.

Like, okay, that's actually pretty creative. I never actually have two of those. I have two of those subscriptions. Yeah, the death by a thousand paper cuts.

So yeah, it is. But for the people who don't want subscriptions, I try to, I try to offer them other things that I believe they could be struggling with. And because as entrepreneurs, we'd never know when our ideal customer is going to, going to be at that point of a struggle that they're ready to take action. So the only way to mitigate that from my point of view is to be in their inbox a lot.

Okay. So when they have that moment of like, I've hit the end of my rope kind of like I did with my corporate job when I left. It's like, you want to be in their inbox up top where it's like they said, wow, Stephen could read my mind. How did you know I was struggling with this today?

Well, I didn't. I just sent you 25 emails and finally you're struggling. Finally, this one happened to be the one that resonated. That's exactly right.

And then after the fun love decision, just kind of a lot like a long term newsletter sequence or you like, if they didn't buy anything, I'm kicking them off. I'm really bad about that, what I do is I'd love to say that I'm the perfect email nurtureer. And once that we, you know, I wish I could say that. I send stuff for people to buy.

Maybe this is more of like a frank current approach, right? Which is, hey, I send them all these emails up front to try to get them to make a decision. They don't make a decision or they buy in their off of that or they don't buy and they just stay around or they unsubscribe. So I'm just assuming that they're on my list because they want to hear about what I can help them with.

So instead of nurture them with a bunch of stories and things at that point, that deep into the funnel, I'm like, hey, it's Friday. It's a national Friday. It's a holiday. It's Friday.

It's time to buy stuff. Do you want to buy my stuff? And I just, I send them offers. I send them invitations.

I like to use the word invitation. It sounds better than a picture and offer. It's like I want to invite you to get some help here. And if you don't want it, we're still friends.

I'm not mad at you. Yeah. But I want to know if today's the day that you've hit the wall. It's today the day.

Yeah. All right. I want to get into these different traffic strategies. But real quick, what's the price point on the membership?

$39 right now. It's $39. And I'm a serial tester. Okay.

Right? I've tested from 19 to 67. And I'm just kind of set right now on 39 doing trials. No trials.

I'm not doing any trials right now. But that's kind of where I'm at 39 for a month and 78 for a quarter. You get three months for the price of two if you opt in and take the quarterly offer. Okay.

So that's that three day discounted sequence. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

You can get into that. And then what's what's included in that? What's what's behind the paywall? So to speak.

Yeah. So interestingly enough, what I've learned about memberships from from flip lifestyle and shame. My buddy, because I joined their membership in like 2020. And I just learned about memberships.

And I realized that it recurring. What's better than just selling stuff one off is getting people to pay you every month. And I leaned into that. And my membership includes a lot of the stuff I sell one off, which is kind of maybe a faux pawn in some ways.

But like my digital products that I sell are inside the membership, right? Because what I realize is not everybody wants a membership, right? They sometimes they want to buy stuff. And sometimes they just want to get more help and support in the membership.

So I have all of the things that I sell one off inside the membership. Plus I have some additional things, some different additional workshops. I'll usually add a new workshop once a month, a topic, a leadership topic. I also do.

And this is maybe a little unorthodox. I stop doing member calls because mainly I didn't like doing them. I didn't like having to be to show up. I'm more of a passive income guy, which doesn't really fit memberships.

But that's kind of what I desire. So I stop doing member calls because I didn't like them. And people didn't really attend them that that regular leads. So what I do now is I do, and I sell it this way, including in the membership is unlimited one on one mentoring, unlimited mentoring for $39 a month.

Plus all the stuff that they get in there as well. So that's the stickiness of my membership is the once a month workshop and the unlimited one on one mentorship. How do you deliver that? Exactly.

Great question. Great question. And I know you're familiar with this. I'm sure video ask.

I don't know video ask. What's that? I don't know video ask. Okay video ask.

It's a great tool. It's kind of like a bond Euro on steroids or a bomb bomb on steroids. Where so video ask.com I use that. And what that does is it creates an asynchronous funnel that I have in my membership where it has a video of me giving an instruction going, Hey, you know, if you have any questions, you need help or support.

If your boss won't help you, I'm here for you. I got all this experience. Let me help ask me anything you want. So they click a button.

They can leave a video. They can leave an audio or they can leave a text. They can choose their own adventure on how they want to communicate with me. They hit the button.

It goes into the funnel. Video ask sends me a notification that says, Hey, Suzy left you a message in this funnel, this mentoring funnel. That's for my members. I go in on my phone and I click a button and then I will watch, listen, or read what she says.

And I push I've done this in traffic at a light. I've done it at the supermarket. I just push a button. So hey, Suzy.

Great question. Here's what I would do. Step one, two, three, if you have anything else, let me know. I click a button.

It sends her the response. It literally takes a few seconds. It's very low friction for me because people don't overuse it and abuse it. If they did, I probably stopped doing it.

Okay. But they don't. And it's really personal and confidential. And it's it creates a lot of stickiness in the membership because they can get that support when their boss won't help them or they're just scared or they don't want to reveal their problems to people around them.

And that's how I helped them. That's really interesting. Because on the surface, I would say unlimited one on one mentoring sounds unscathed. That sounds unscathed.

That sounds way worse than a monthly group call. Like, okay, I know when I have to show up, like I'm not. But you know, as but what you're saying is like high perceived value. Oh, I can ask you question anytime I want.

But realistically, you know, they're not pinging you at all hours of the day and night. That's correct. 200 members. Okay.

I might get one or two a week. I don't get many at all. Okay. Just don't get it.

Because I think people see that is, oh, this is a pretty, pretty high value important thing. I want to make sure I use it the right way. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I believe it's a case.

And it's never been a problem. I have a hundred minute plan with video ask. I've never it's 30 bucks a month. I've never run out of it.

I embedded into Kajabi into a lesson. And it's it's a beautiful workflow and funnel that is so easy to deliver and fulfill. All right. Well, thanks for sharing that tool.

That's a new one for me. Okay. That's cool. And so you mentioned Kajabi.

Either way, I have set up like these kind of limited time trip wire offers after an email opt in is just with lead pages. And it integrates with stripes. So lots of different ways to do it. But you know, those are at least lead pages of paid tool as as Kajabi as well.

Anything else on the tools and tech side that that we might not know about or that help run this thing. Yeah. Yeah. I've tried to get out of Kajabi.

I've been on Kajabi for four years. And I've tried just about everything on the market that's pretty mainstream as a competitor to Kajabi. I'm going to find a cheaper, better solution. I just haven't.

Yeah. You know, I, you know, with a big email list and at least when I consider big email list and all the things that Kajabi does well, maybe not perfectly. They don't do everything perfectly, but they do things well enough that it really dials in my workflow. And I spend probably 10 hours or less a week on all of my business ventures that I do.

So I really like that flexibility. So tool wise, I use deadline funnel. I love the urgency that's created with deadline funnel. And that integrates really, they have now a native integration with Kajabi deadline funnel, which is really the last, I'd say, 60 days.

It's really cool, really simple. It gets you out of all the Zapier Zaps and kind of having the bigger plan in Zapier. So Zapier is a big one for me. I use to do a few things.

So deadline funnel, just real quick. My understanding is somebody opts in and then they have kind of like their personalized clock starts. Like, okay, you're going to have three days to complete this offer. And if not, that's going away for you.

Unless, unless you opt in with a different email address or different IP address, I don't know how it tracks that. But it kind of, it lets you kind of constantly be in launch mode versus, you know, open cart, close cart and like having to do a big concerted effort around that. Yeah, and that's the key to passive income for me is I don't want to get into this launch model. But deadline funnel is exactly right.

Nick, it's it, when everybody opts in as soon as they opt in, it creates a unique deadline for that person based on IP address and email address that goes from device to device, whether they're on their phone or their computer or their iPad. It works really well. And they have that unique three day deadline to make a decision whether they're going to be in or out of the membership at that point. So I love deadline funnel.

And I use that in different promotions that I do because I think when I've tested it, the urgency that's legitimate, real urgency, not fake urgency that you just have a deadline that you could still buy it. My offers go away. You cannot buy it after that. So you can still get into workstrap goes away.

Yeah, you can always join at, you know, yeah, 39 or the full price. But if you want to get something in the funnel, like a $39 product that I offer as a tripwire, I have a, I have a 30 minute deadline funnel clock on it that when you hit that thank you page tripwire page, after you come in for my calculator, you have 30 minutes to get something for 20, 30% off, I believe instead of 39, you get it for 27 or 49, you get it for 27, you have 30 minutes. I'm just wants you to decide do you want it or not. And you, that's okay if you don't buy it.

I'm just trying to see if your pain point is at the, at the tipping point where this is going to put you really in a position to go get help or not. Yeah, was the calculator something that you had custom coded that you built yourself. Was this like a drag and drop inside Kajavi? Tell me about that.

Yeah, the first iteration I, I had made, which I updated back in April. First iteration was custom coded. I did it through Fiverr over a period of a couple of weeks. It worked okay.

It wasn't the greatest. The Army updated a lot of their, their processes for the first time in a few years and the, so the points and the calculations all changed. So I, I tried to get one coded again, but I couldn't find a taker that could do it in the time that I wanted to do it. So I just went into Excel, Nick, and I made a macro Mac, Dow, Mac, Daddy, macro Excel sheet and put, V lookups and I, I did all this crazy stuff.

I spent like a week on it and I sent it to some people to test and it worked great. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to do, I'm going to do this. So what I did is I delivered it through Dropbox because you can't deliver a macro enabled Excel sheet through Kajavi.

It's one of the file types you can upload, which I found out. So I delivered through Dropbox. I made a video of how to do it. I made a video of how to use the calculator, have a download the calculator, screenshots, and it, you know, it, it works really well and it's been downloaded now thousands of times since I put it into place.

Very cool. Now for what it's worth, I saw, I want to say a thread about people using chat GPT now to help, you know, help build these custom calculators for their site. And you're thinking, hey, I could use a calculator for my site as a lead gen or even just as a tool to attract backlinks or to attract traffic. Like, okay, here's the side hustle calculator.

You know, how much do you need to earn from your site hustle? You'll fill in these variables like, okay, maybe we could build that in chat GPT or at least, you know, build the groundwork for it. So I'll throw that out there as potential. Yeah.

I've used chat GPT a lot. I haven't used it for calculator stuff, but you know, one thing I use chat GPT for or just quick emails, I just go, hey, write me an email that wishes everyone all in CO's a happy, you know, not a happy, but a safe memorial day, right? And it wrote a beautiful email. No call.

I didn't have any calls to action or anything in that. It's unusual for me, but, you know, I'm always in by my stuff mode because what I've realized is people need help and sometimes you got to be there when they when they don't know they need it and you got to help them. But I sent this email and it was a beautiful email that chat GPT put together. I couldn't have written that better.

Having sat at a coffee shop for eight hours. There's just no way. Yeah. So it was a beautiful thing.

It's a cure for writers block in a lot of ways. I really will just straight copy and paste something, but you're like, okay, let me let me work with that. Let me tweak that. I'm using four too.

I'm using, I pay the 20 bucks a month. I'm on the chat GPT for. I'm a junkie for stuff like that. Another tool you got to have, I guess.

It's all good. I will share one email sales framework that I that I kind of like. So this is from Daniel Throssel on the show a couple of years ago. A copywriter out of Australia.

And it was story lesson offer. You know, you would like start off the email with some sort of compelling story, often like involving his kids or his wife, like something unique that happened. Okay, what's the lesson or what's the business takeaway from that? Oh, by the way, if you want to buy my thing, you know, to help with this problem, here it is at the bottom.

This is like, you know, get people hooked in and you go there versus straight up offer at the very top. And there's just one copywriting framework that he shared. Now you're get generating these half a million monthly page views, lots of organic traffic. My question is, how do you decide, well, what do I put out there for free as blog content versus what do I keep behind the membership or inside these paid digital products?

I only put a few things on them per month. I've created some core content on my two WordPress sites that I use to drive leads. Some things to help people with leadership and get promoted faster and tools and those are pretty evergreen. Those don't go bad.

They just don't have a shelf life. And then what I do is I post a couple times a month on my on my WordPress sites. Usually the promotion list, that's why people come to my site mainly is to get promotion data. Did they get promoted?

They come to my site more than they go to the army site to get the information because the army regulates them with passwords and all these things to get in and firewalls. And they're like, I can just get it from cutoff scores or NCO support because they do it. Where do I get it? I get it after putting my passwords in, going through the firewalls.

And I just post it on my sites. And I don't really produce more content than that. What I do, my strategy is because I get so many leads in from my websites, from that evergreen content and from those promotion lists that I put in there once or twice a month, I give people the content through the email funnel. I give people, they come in, they get the value, they get the calculator, they get a couple other lead mangas depending on how they come in.

The calculator is probably 90% of my traffic from a lead standpoint. They'll come in, they'll see a tripwire, they'll go through the funnel. And through the funnel, they will begin to get free, free stuff, kind of a template here, a set of example statements there, ways to help their soldiers do this, ways to get promoted faster by that. I give them resources out of my products and I give them bits and pieces with the goal and the desire to pull them back into the broader relationship, which is the membership or into one of my lower ticket products with an upsell back into my membership.

So that's how I serve them is once they're in my funnel, I start giving them a lot of stuff for free over a period of time that they will see is like, wow, this is so valuable that I get this for free. Let me go check out this paid stuff and see how great that might be. Yeah, I'm, so I just looked up Army promotion points where cutoffscores.com is the first result. NCO support.com is that number five.

And NCO on fire is number six or seven. It's like you dominating the first page here. It's crazy. Yeah, it's like, well, you know, you just got to buy up three other three other sites and you have totally monopolized this thing.

You know, another thing I did is I just started testing, you know, I've never been a Facebook ads guy either, right? I've tried it in the past like, ah, it doesn't work. Doesn't work. Can't work.

I don't know. But I just, I said, you know what? I'm going to test this again because I updated one of my digital products like this counseling package and it's 162 PDF templates and I sell it for like $39. And it's just, it's just great stuff.

So the Army updated their, their, ah, form. So they, they went from a 2014 form updated it in 2023. Now I had to move all my templates over to this new form. I paid a guy $600 to do that.

It blessed him. He was happy to do it. Got it back in a week. So I said, let me try this on Facebook ads because let's strike while the iron's hot.

So I started doing $50 a day and I've, I've now, I've put in about $1,700 over the last six weeks or so in ads. And I've gotten back about 5,000 on the, on those sales. And then I have an order bump into another, another digital product for $20. And I get a 60% take rate on the order bump.

So I'm, I'm getting about a $60 cart value. Um, I'm getting a, a $40 cart value. But then 60% of the time I'm getting a $60 cart value. And I've taken $1,700 in ad money, which I've, I've just kind of threw it out there and just trying to figure it out.

Yeah. And I've converted like $60 something hundred dollars. I'm like, that's pretty good ROI. Yeah, no question.

I'm just scared to keep him out of cost. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, and I send people straight to a checkout page.

I don't send them to a sales page. I don't send anything. And I, I've only narrowed it to one small audience, which is the Army Reserve and National Guard. Because I figured that they have full-time jobs.

They weaken people and they probably need this help probably more than anyone. Interesting. So I, yeah. I just, it's interesting to test things like that.

I'm a little nervous to start dumping more money into it because I don't want to disrupt what's working well. It's like, I just hope nobody notices it. And it just kind of lives out there forever. And I just keep quiet about it.

Yeah. The, uh, the Facebook money machine. So there you have it. Facebook ads are, are still alive at kicking.

All right. Well, uh, speaking of Facebook, tell me about the page and the group and how those fit into the traffic and sales picture. Yeah. And that's, um, so my Facebook page, I got, he, he kind of threw Fernando, the guy I bought the two websites from, kind of threw that in as like a cherry on top bonus.

He wasn't really, he would just go in there and post one thing a month. Here's the, the scores, the promotion points to see if you got promoted. Okay. So what I, what I did was is I, I really leaned into that Facebook page and just started posting, uh, more memes.

And just things to get engagement up, right? So that's what I, that's what I do. I just throw memes in there. And then I just throw offers in there.

I just throw lead magnets. I say, hey, come get 10 free templates to counsel your soldiers, right? Here, come check it out. They'll come in.

They'll get, get those. And then I'll say, Oh, by the way, do you want 160 of them for $39? You can get that too. And I'll, I'll lead people through that funnel.

And then sometimes I'll just throw, hey, join the membership for this price right now. Join get this digital product. I'll put offers in there. And that's how I, that's how I use that, um, that page, I wouldn't say the page is probably chock full of, uh, the perfect people because it's a very, it's like a 12 year old page.

And people go onto that page and it probably got out of the military and have aged way beyond my ideal customer. But there's still a ton of people. There's still enough of the, the needles in that big haystack for me to, to get a lot of leads. And that's how I use that.

And the group is far more engaged, far more intentional, uh, private group. And it's just super engaged. And I do the same thing. Um, people engage in my, my moderators that I've appointed and I just let them into the membership for free, all 10 of them, I'm giving them for free.

Just thanks for doing all this. They manage it. They keep the riff raff down. They kick people out that, that aren't playing nice.

And I go in there and I post, I post offers and I post leads, lead magnet stuff. And they do all the engagement. And it's a beautiful thing. And it's just really kind of just creates that funnel where I'm getting to that 1500, 1800 leads a month coming in and then selling stuff direct from the page and the group just through some lower ticket stuff as well.

I found the page army NCO support. What's the name of the group? Uh, it's, um, uh, Facebook.com slash group slash optimized NCO. Okay.

Just wanted to make sure we'll link those up for you in the show. I'm just in CEO. You mentioned, hey, I'm down to about 10 hours a week on this business answering the video asks, chats, where else does the time go? Time goes to funnels.

I'm a funnel geek. I get in. I'm tweaking funnels. I'm, I'm looking for my next promotion.

What, how can I position a product better? Kind of like I said, hey, I'm gonna go test these Facebook ads out. Let me go see if I can, you know, gin something up and figure something up, uh, to go get some ROI, uh, back, get some good, return on ad spend here. See if I can get two to three acts.

So testing. I'm a surreal tester. I like to test things. And that's what I'm helping people now as I coach an online business.

It's like, what do you want to do? What's your goal? What's, what's your why? What do you want to do this?

And then, uh, what are some of your, your objectives? You want to just take your family on a vacation once a year. Do you want to replace your income? What is it you want to do?

Now, let's go think about what that could look like for you. Let's go dial in a funnel, build a funnel that's going to support that objective. So I'm big into funnels. I'm big into automation.

I'm big into testing to see what is going to get traction. And then what doesn't, I toss aside and what does I do more of that. And that's kind of the way I, I spend my 10 hours a week is, is testing. And then I spend my other time working with flip lifestyle as their head coach and affiliate leader.

And I do their funnels for them as well. So with Shane Sam's and flip lifestyle, that's where I started my membership journey with them. And they taught me so much. And, and I just love being part of their team to do that.

Shout out to Shane. If you're listening, thanks for connecting me with Steve. It's been a fun conversation. So that's really kind of cool like playing, playing puppet master.

It's, you know, you know, tweaking different levers and I love it. I mean, I just, it's just my personality. I love, I get more excited about seeing a small win as a result of doing some things and knowing that that could just live on in perpetuity because you set it up the right way. Yes.

I love that. I love it. So outside of NCO on fire and outside of your work with flip lifestyle, you also have online income dot coach after a while, certain, you know, certain number of people start asking you, well, wait a minute, you quit your job. You do this online thing full time.

Could you help me out with that? So online income dot coach, if you want to get in touch with Steven over there. Yeah. Yeah.

It's been a relatively new venture. I've got the basic website up. I have a couple of clients right now that I'm helping and I'm doing a lot of one-on-one because I recognize I've done a lot of coaching with flip lifestyle and Shane of coach hundreds of people on with their online businesses and I've gained so much knowledge of how to help people, not only because of the way I've set up my businesses and my struggles and mistakes and how I've overcome them, but seeing seeing through the lens of that and helping people overcome their struggles is something I really geek out on and enjoy. So that's where my pivot is, Nick is I'm really, really driven on helping people start building grow online businesses.

I love it. Online income dot coach is the way that I'm introducing that to the world. I have a couple clients. I have a quiz there that people can take and kind of learn what type of entrepreneur and business could they be a good fit for?

Is it doing courses? Is it doing memberships? Is it doing coaching? And they can go through a little, it is a funnel because that's what we do, Nick.

We're funnel guys. We're going to sit you through a funnel. It's a funnel of decision. It's very pleasant.

You're going to go through this funnel. You're going to see what what your personality type is and then you're going to get into some idea training where I'm going to teach you in about eight minutes, about eight to nine minutes. I'm going to teach you some ways to come up with maybe your first business idea and then that could start the ball rolling. And if I can help people further with that, then certainly I can offer coaching and different things from that.

If that's the direction they want to go. Absolutely. So go check that out online income.coach. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation.

If you want to start an online business, you just have to sit back with a cup of tea or a coffee and you got to look at the mirror and you got to go, what do you know that nobody knows you know? Right? What do you know that nobody knows you know? Because for me, it was promotion points in the army.

I wrote a book and I had to reflect. So look around, see what's around you. See what you've done in your life. Think about what you know and you take for granted.

Be it skills, be it wisdom, be it, some other things that you've done in your life. Good and bad, right? Good and bad things that have happened to you that can help you help other people lean into that and that could very well be a business idea that could help you pivot in your life as well. It's 100% true and it's you know, it's been called the curse of knowledge where it's hard to remember what you know that nobody knows you know.

It's hard to imagine not knowing it and it sometimes takes an outside perspective. Like asking other people, what am I good at or what am I a relative expert in? And you could start with you know, taking in, you know, looking at your past resume history and saying, well, what have I been paid to do in the past? But even outside of that, okay, what, you know, what challenges you can even go like through year by year, you know, what was what was I doing at this point?

And you know, what were the things that I learned during that time? Like oh, it's painting houses in college. I could estimate a paint job still. I still had to like, okay, would that be tell I don't know if that's worth pursuing or not?

But the idea of, you know, constantly testing and tweaking and playing around with these different offers. Like I really like that stuff as well and trying to dial that in. You're know about using Facebook as a top of the funnel. Like I ask for people's email when they request to join the group.

And after that, pretty much promote nothing. So that's like a huge area of opportunity. You gotta start putting links. You gotta start dropping stuff in there, Nick.

Let's go. Man, let's go. It's a huge area of opportunity for me. So maybe that's coming down the road.

And then I like to your point really about, okay, this is where I want to go. If I want to build an online income, I want to sell this product or I want to sell this membership kind of like, what are the shortcuts to get there starting with? Oh, I'm going to go recruit an affiliate partner. Okay, I got the product, but I don't have the audience.

Hey, he's got the traffic. He's got the audience. All right, let's go do that. And then through acquisitions, kind of like say, natural, but next step or next evolution that came out of that and then really coming down to email marketing.

If I, you know, I've got to get people in this sequence, I'm going to, you know, drive that, you know, and provide value. I'm going to help them out as best I can and then point them to relevant product services offers there. But those were kind of my notes again, I really appreciate you joining me again online income that coach. If you are new to the sidehouse social, that's awesome.

Thank you so much for tuning in. There are hundreds of actionable evergreen episodes in the archives. If you're not sure where to start, why not build yourself a personalized playlist? All you have to do is go to hustle.

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