This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Greetings. Hello and welcome to Side Hustle School. This is our weekly recap. We have just come to the end of week number 19. I know a lot of you have been listening to the show from the beginning on January 1. You're awesome. I hope you're still enjoying it. I hope you're learning.
I love getting emails and seeing notes on social media about all the different projects that listeners are working on. Now over here, I'm heading to Amsterdam this week. I'll be at an event called The Next Web. And then we're also doing a special event for readers and listeners on Friday night at the American Book Center. And for everyone who's not in Amsterdam, well, the show will keep coming out every day per usual. About a week and a half ago, I did two
Side Hustle School workshops, one in Chicago, one in Boston. And when I do these, I feel like I learn as much as everybody else there. Now out of one of those workshops, I wanted to pass along two recommendations to you. A lot of people have WordPress-based websites. It's a very easy way to start a website, as I've talked about before. In fact, if you want a whole tutorial on how to
do that, just go to sidehustleschool.com/extended. You can hear a special episode about it, read a lot more information online. But for everyone who has a WordPress-based site, there are two free plugins you can get, which will both help you do some pretty cool things. And it's really simple. The first one is an SEO WordPress plugin called Yoast. Now I'll explain all of this. The plugin
is called Yoast, Y-O-A-S-T dot com. Or from your WordPress control panel, you just go to plugins and search SEO or Yoast. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's all about making your website and your web pages on your site more friendly to Google, so that hopefully you'll have a higher Google ranking. Well, there is a whole industry behind this. But for most of our
purposes, we don't have to worry about that. If you get this free WordPress plugin and you install it, the only thing you need to decide is which keyword or keywords you want to focus on for any particular page. And this plugin will essentially do it for you, or at least help you do it without a lot of effort on your part. So that's pretty cool. Second one is a split testing plugin, also known as AB testing. You can get this at simplepagetester.com. Or once again,
from your WordPress control panel, just type in simplepagetester. It will come up. You can install it for free. Now, what is an AB test or what is a split test? It's essentially a way to show visitors to your website a different version of something to see which one they prefer better.
So you might want to test a headline, or a price, or an offer, or an email signup form, really anything. And to AB test it, if you have 100 visitors coming to your website, you would show 50 of them one version and the other 50 the other version. And then you would see which version performed better, which one got more email signups, or got people to click through to the page you wanted them to, or whatever. Now, over time, if you do this, you can learn a lot. And not only learn, you can optimize, make your site so much better, figure out lots of stuff about your visitors, your potential customers. And the big question is,
well, how do you do that? Well, that's what this plugin can help you with. It will make it super simple. You put in your variables, it will do the testing for you. It will show you the data.
And then when you see what's a winner, you switch to that version. Then maybe you go on to test something else, or maybe you test something against the winning version. There's all kinds of possibilities. And I will link up both of these resources on the show notes page so that you can check them out for yourself. So for today on the weekly recap, we've got listener questions, a look back, and a look ahead. Let's jump right in.
Hi, Chris. My name is Elise. I'm in Denver, Colorado. And I've been listening to Side Hustle School since you began. And really just listen every day for that daily dose of inspiration as I've thought about launching my own Side Hustle, which I did in the last week.
It is a personalized coloring book business, and that leads to my question. I've been thinking about, in addition to selling personalized coloring books through Shopify, of also creating some video tutorials for people who want to make their own coloring books using Canva, the program that I've been using. So I just wanted a little perspective from you. Do you see people who do both the selling an item and tutorials for how people can DIY sort of for an added value for their customers who want to do that? And how have you seen that work for other people?
Thank you so much. And I really appreciate all you do. Hey, Elise, this is so fun. Congratulations on starting your Side Hustle. I would love to take a look at that. And the idea sounds pretty cool too. I don't know offhand somebody
who's doing exactly that. But in general, it is smart to reach people in different ways. It's probably why I started this podcast myself. So since you already have a vision for it, might as well try and see what happens. I guess my only further comment would be the people who buy adult coloring books, or coloring books of any kind, don't all want to make them themselves.
A lot of people buy them because they're a fun activity to complete, either on your own or with somebody. But I don't think that's a reason to not do what you're thinking of. Because even some people who might not necessarily want to make them could still be interested in the behind the scenes, which is kind of what they would get through those tutorials. So anyway, I think it's fun. Congratulations and let us know what happens. Hey, Chris, this is Johnny from Phoenix, Arizona.
Recently, I came across a situation with my Side Hustle where I've had a very difficult client. And I'm not sure, first of all, if I handled it well, and second of all, how I should continue handling it. So I would love to hear kind of your opinion on what you think of how I handled it and maybe how I should have done it differently, and how it might pertain to your podcast and how it can be included in there. Based on what I've heard so far from your podcast, they're all success stories. And that's great. The thing is though, a lot of Side Hustles, and I've done other Side
Hustles aren't successful, and they're not going to be. So more than anything, how do you address the hustles that people do when they're not successful? Let me know what you think. And I'm looking forward to hearing from you soon. Hey, Johnny, thanks so much for listening.
Sorry to hear about the difficult client. You didn't mention entirely what that situation was. So it's hard for me to say whether it's better to handle that one way or another, since I don't know what it was. But I do want to address your point about successes and failures. You're absolutely right that the show features mostly successes.
I do want to highlight the stories of ordinary people out there who haven't gone to business school, who are all busy working and doing other stuff, but yet somehow find a way to create this second income for themselves. But I think if you listen over time, or at least my goal, let's say, my goal is to kind of show how the process works from start to finish, including some of the struggles and challenges and obstacles that that person faces. And so often in a story, I'll say, oh, this person tried this and it didn't work. And they tried that and it didn't work. But then, for example, they tried this other thing, and this is what took off. That's very normal in
this kind of journey. There are lots of things that don't work. And I don't mean to shy away from that at all. What I hope to do is encourage people when something doesn't work, don't just keep trying the same thing because it didn't work for a reason. But maybe there is a way that you can shift. Maybe there's a different tactic or strategy, or just a different idea in general.
That's why I encourage people to start quickly, to experiment, to gain experience. And over time, it's not like each idea you have is going to be a huge success. But I do believe that you can be a success. I do believe there's something out there for you. So thanks again for asking that question.
And I also hope you get much better clients. Thanks, man. So when we look back on this week, we started with episode 128, the epic scavenger hunt that becomes a six-figure income. Now, this was really great because I always say that a side hustle should be fun, at least in some way. It doesn't mean that every aspect of it is going to be fun, but it should be something that you look forward to. And maybe it's something that's also creative or it uses a different part
of your brain than you use for your day job. Well, in this story, the side hustle itself was built around fun. And this guy, Chris Damienakos, had always loved contests and scavenger hunts. He made a six-hour one for his friends and family once. And they said, "This is great. A lot of
other people would like it too. Maybe make it a little shorter." So then over a number of years, he created this series of scavenger hunts that tourists or visitors to his city of Boston could sign up for, as well as corporate teams or nonprofit teams or other people who work together. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger. He eventually expanded it to other cities. He finally quit his job. It took a while because he wanted to be absolutely certain,
but it's still going. It's still doing really well. And he's been helped by a lot of free advertising, essentially, in the form of reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp. Now, I say that's free advertising. Obviously, he had to put together a great service to earn those reviews, but they are organic. People trust those reviews. So they're almost like a form of asset for him. That story
was followed by episode 129. Two college buddies create a $15,000 bow tie hustle, an interesting look at creating a fashion item, doing something with textiles and apparel, using an overseas supplier. So if you're interested in manufacturing something or designing an item of clothing, we looked at the resource Alibaba.com, which is a network of global suppliers you can find to make or produce pretty much anything you can think of. Episode 130 was the resourceful college dropout who earns two paychecks from one employer. This was pretty unusual in the sense that his employer basically started a side hustle and put him in charge of it, giving him a portion of the proceeds.
Doesn't always happen like that. It may not even usually happen like that. But that's why I try to feature different stories on the show to show you creative thinking and a variety of application for it. Episode 131, the equine lover makes $5,000, but then stables her business to change horses in midstream. This was an interesting application of the lesson. If at first you succeed, keep trying.
And yes, I said that correctly, because just because something is working out doesn't mean you should keep doing it. Maybe there's a better way to do it. And that's what Krista found in this story as she went from screen printing t-shirts to using a print on demand service. That episode, like every other on side hustle school is free. You don't have to pony up to listen to it. There were two more stories, one about a hair salon owner who designs mittens
for cold runners actually undertakes the detailed process of obtaining a patent, which is no small thing. But for her, she thought it was worth it. Now, I really liked something that she said that I didn't actually put in the story. She was saying when she first had the idea and she realized she wanted a patent for it, she knew it would cost a fair amount of money. And she asked one of her friends, where am I going to get this money? And he said, do you own any stocks? And she said yes.
He said to her, well, if you can invest in someone else's company, you can invest in yourself. If this is your dream, why not sell the stocks? And so she did. I really like that. Because even though the whole philosophy of side hustle school is for people who are employees, or otherwise don't necessarily want to take a big risk, become an entrepreneur, or a small business owner, they just want to create security for themselves. I still thought this lesson of investing in
yourself was really powerful. This wasn't just a random idea she had. This was a dream that she had put a lot of work and research into figuring out a viable path forward. And after thinking about it for a long time, she decided to go for it. She now has that patent. And she's selling her
running mittens online and at expos in her local area. And lastly, another story of overcoming a hardship where a psychologist earns more than $70,000 helping students apply for college and graduate school. $70,000 I think it was actually $74,000 is obviously a very significant side income. And I like to highlight stories like that to show you even though making $500 a month or $1,000 a month is great, a lot of people really can go above and beyond that and create successes like you hear in that story. Now coming up next week on the show, another episode every day, we're going to begin with the story of a British man who makes terrariums and sells them worldwide.
This is not to be confused with the famous viral episode number two of side hustle school, which was about a British man who makes $700 a month blogging about fish tanks. So this is another British man who actually makes terrariums, not fish tanks, but containers or mini greenhouses for plants. Obviously the British have this entire market covered. So we'll look at how this other guy does it. There's also a story of a woman in Alabama, a former target employee who ends up starting an organic food business, grows it to become one of the most popular resellers on Amazon, as well as seeing her product in whole foods and other grocery stores. She's actually shipping $35,000 a month to customers around the country. There's
also something about how two women start a handmade lip balm empire, and as always so much more. And as we are at the end of this week, I want to, as I try to every week, say thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of this. If you make a commitment to make side hustle school part of your routine, I commit to supporting you fully in your quest to create that new source of income. Maybe you've already figured out your idea and you're trying to make it a reality.
Maybe you've done this before and you're going to do it a second time now or a third or a fifth time. Or maybe this is all new to you and you just stumbled into this world. Well, in all of those cases, welcome. This is for you. I hope you enjoy it, but more than just enjoy it, I hope you do something with it. That's my greatest hope and that's why I make the show. And by the way,
it's not just me. I'm the voice you hear, but I want to give credit where credit is due. This show is recorded on location at World Domination headquarters in Portland, Oregon. It is then taken on an epic scavenger hunt to Brooklyn, New York and the Panoply Studios. Our all-star production team there is Jason De Leon and A.C. Valdez. Show notes are by
Whitney Karinek. My Cat, Liberia Gilavo works the night shift. She uses the stairs as her treadmill desk. Just kind of runs up and down all night. Life advice this week comes from Bill Murray.
Don't give up on your dreams. Keep on sleeping. All of us, side hustle school, Bill Murray too. We're part of the Onward imprint curated by best-selling author Gretchen Rubin. Onward is a collection of podcasts full of actionable ideas to make your life happier, healthier, more productive, and just more awesome. You can check it out at theonwardproject.com
or in iTunes, which is actually now called Apple Podcasts. So it's the same thing. Just a new name. I'll have to get used to calling it that too. Speaking of that, if you want to do something really cool, you could leave me a quick rating or review in Apple Podcasts formerly known as iTunes. You can say whatever you want, or you could also give us a shout out on social media
using hashtag side hustle school. I know it's a pretty obvious hashtag, but just to be clear, I hope to see you tomorrow and every day next week. Just like Susan did in episode 132 with those running mittens, I hope you are investing in yourself. Episodes go online at 601 AM Eastern time every day. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
