This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Not every side hustle requires building a product or even offering a service of your own. Today's story and the Throwback Thursday series feature someone who carved out a niche helping sell ad placements without organizing any events, designing materials, or running a business themselves. They're actually doing ad placements for medical conference sales and they have worked behind the scenes as a commission-only salesperson. These are relatively small events but they have a very targeted market and the organizers were more than happy to outsource the ad and sponsorship sales process at least partially to this person who found a way to basically make money by being a connector. So that sounds good, right? If you like to introduce people, if you like to
bring different parties together, if you have that kind of skill, this might be a business for you. You could apply it in lots of different ways. They did it to medical conferences but there are many different adaptations. So let's talk about selling ads for these medical conferences on commission. Her name is Carrie. I'm going to pass the microphone to Carrie. I'll be back at the end with a quick
wrap-up. Hi, it's Carrie. Just reporting back on my latest side hustle, I kind of stumbled into this one. A friend of mine works for a company that organizes continuing education conferences for medical professionals, mostly medium-sized in-person events for specialists like dermatologists and radiologists. They always had a hard time selling ad placements for their printed programs and email newsletters, pharma companies, medical device reps, scrub brands, laser manufacturers. There's a lot
of money in this space but it's all about warm intros and persistent follow-up. One day my friend said, "We'll give you 25% of anything you sell if you want to try." I figured why not? I had zero experience in medical anything but I knew how to write a decent email and wasn't afraid to follow up 10 times. At first I just focused on the sponsors they'd worked with before. I'd go through old programs, look up each company, and reach out asking if they wanted a spot in this year's guide.
If I closed a $2,000 placement, I kept $500. Simple as that. The first event I worked on, I made $1,250, mostly from repeat advertisers. The next time around, I expanded my outreach and made just under $5,000. That's when I started taking it more seriously. Within a year, I had
informal arrangements with three different organizers who all ran small conferences in niche medical fields. None of them wanted to deal with ad sales, but all of them were happy to pay a 15 to 25% cut to someone who would. I set up a CRM, tracked follow-ups, and built a list of about 40 companies that consistently advertised across events. Over time, I wasn't just selling ads. I was advising the organizers on how to improve their sponsorship packages.
I'd say, "Don't just offer a logo in the program. Bundle it with a speaking slot or post-conference email." The more valuable the package, the more commission I made. In my best year, I earned just over $12,000 from this hustle. I did it entirely on the side, around freelance projects, no website, no business name, just me and a Google Sheet. Eventually, I stopped. Not because it wasn't
working, but because my other work got busier and I didn't want to keep up with the outreach cycle, but it taught me something valuable. You don't have to own the product to profit from it. Sometimes, if you're good at connecting people and closing deals, that's all you need. The cool thing I think about this side hustle is, once you get it going and you have these relationships, you can likely continue to profit from those relationships. When I say profit from the relationships, I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean you're bringing value to the different
parties. You're the one who's brought them together. It's harder to make that first sale, just like we talk about with the first $1,000 series. It's harder to get going than it is to keep going and to double down. It's interesting that this person stopped. I think that's also okay.
You can just stop and do other things with your life, but it also seems like the kind of business where once you have it built up, it could be kind of in maintenance mode. Maybe somebody else out there will replicate this in their own way, earning perhaps more than $12,000 a year from this project. I hope you do. Let me know what you think, who you'd like to see featured from our archives of thousands of episodes. Visit us all school.com/questions, notes pages there for every episode, and new episodes drop every day, seven days a week, always free. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're
listening to Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
