This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome, welcome. This is Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. And here we are with the weekly recap. Looking back, this is week number 29 of season two.
I have been out and about around the world, but I just made it back. I was in Doha, Qatar, and then Vienna, Austria, a couple places along the way. Had a great trip, but glad to be back on the saddle. Got a bunch of stuff to work on, including a lot of things for you. In today's recap, I want to share some notes on SEO, search engine optimization, from a guest expert.
I got a great listener question that came in, and rather than try to answer it myself, I went to an expert. I'm not really an expert in a lot of things, but certainly not SEO. And I've also got a story to share with you, a helpful lesson perhaps, on this topic of whether you should tell your family about your side hustle or not. This came up a couple of days ago in the episode 566, a count that generates $10,000 a month in sweat equity. So I'll say more about that in a moment, but let's start with this question about SEO.
Question comes in from Abigail, also known as Abby. And Abby writes in to say, "Hey Chris, I've now listened to the side hustle audio book "more than 10 times. "I was desperate for a business coach "before I read the book, "but now I'm already making more money than I was "before on my existing business using these steps. "I haven't even got through the 27 days yet "and I've already launched my new idea." Brief interjection here to say, Abby, that's amazing, congratulations. I'm glad the book was helpful, but of course you did the work, so I acknowledge that.
And now back to the note. I wondered what advice you could offer about SEO and getting my website found. Do you know of anyone who offers training or advice in this area? Or do you think it's worth paying someone to do it for me? I run a baking business in a saturated market, but my products are unique and I'm learning how to create offers.
I can't believe this didn't occur to me before. I just want to be able to reach my audience. Awesome, Abby, well congratulations again and let's see if we can get your offers in front of even more people. So to get some info that might be helpful for Abby and hopefully some of our listeners as well, I went to my go-to expert about SEO, his name is Rand Fishkin. He's been a friend of mine for a while.
He wrote a new book called Lost and Founder, which is a great title, Lost and Founder. The subtitle is a painfully honest field guide to the startup world. I had a chance to read an advanced copy of that book and I really enjoyed it, but that book itself is not about SEO. That's about his experience starting a company. The company that he started was all about SEO and his new company is called Spark Toro, so you can check that out, we'll link it up.
But speaking of links, he sent several things to me, which I'm gonna pass on. He says my best advice is to start by checking out a few free resources. And he's got links here to two video courses from Skillshare. One is called Introduction to SEO Tactics and Strategy. Another one is called SEO Today Strategies to Earn Trust.
If you prefer text or visual guides, there's a link to a beginner's guide to SEO on mozz.com, M-O-Z, or M-O-Z. So several resources there that we'll link up in today's notes page. And he also says once she's got a baseline grasp on SEO fundamentals, I'd recommend working with a consultant if that's an affordable option. But she'll be vastly better at choosing a good one, as well as figuring out whether she can or wants to do it all herself with just a few hours of investment. All right, so some great SEO resources there from Rand.
Again, links to free videos and a free text and visual guide will be at the notes page, which today I believe is sidehustleschool.com/568. Thank you, Rand, and good luck, Abby. Let's do a quick sponsor shout out and then a story about what to do when your family doesn't understand. That would be when your family doesn't understand your side hustle or thinks your idea is terrible. But first, this message.
[Music]
Sometimes our family members or close friends can be supportive. Sometimes they can be our biggest cheerleaders. Sometimes, however, they can be critics, cynics, or skeptics. I got to thinking about this while recording the episode from a day before yesterday, number 566. And in this episode, Rebecca gave some advice.
We always ask people like, what's your advice to somebody who's thinking of doing something similar to you? And she said something contrarian, which of course I loved. She said, I would caution them against discussing their idea with family members or even certain friends because those people may not always be the most objective. And many times they might also try to talk you out of your ideas, whether your ideas are good or not. Isn't that interesting?
That makes perfect sense to me. Again, some people are incredibly supportive. Other people, not so much. Or maybe they're projecting some of their own experience onto you. Maybe they're disappointed that they're not starting their side project and so they're taking out their resentment or their envy on you.
Whatever it is, when you encounter that situation or you think, you know what? If I tell these people about this thing that I'm doing, this very well could be the logical outcome. Like they're just going to think it's stupid and they're going to tell me so. And maybe I'm going to get discouraged. What do you do in that situation?
Well, the two obvious answers are, you know, you either tell them or you don't, right? Like you decide, okay, I'm just going to tell them. And if they say something critical, then I'm just not going to pay attention. I'm going to keep doing my thing. Or you could say, I'm going to keep it from them entirely.
Now, there may be cases when door number one is correct and door number two is correct. But what I wanted to tell you about today was a different option, a third door, if you will. And to give credit to another friend of mine, this story comes from her. Her name is Laura Sims. She is a career coach and author living in Atlanta, Georgia, I believe.
I had to stumble for a second because for a while she was in Texas and came to several of my events in Texas. But now she's moved and Laura has a great experience of navigating this process and finding that third door, that third way. In her story, she was getting ready to make this really big career change. She had previously worked as an actor and an acting teacher in California. She enjoyed that for a while, but then wanted to make a shift.
And she knew if she just called her mom and said, hey mom, I'm thinking about starting an online business, her mom would be very worried. And her mom would have all kinds of questions and just basically not understand. And so what she did, the way she navigated that situation was she told her mom, but not until the whole project was ready to go. So there was a whole process a couple of months while she's getting things ready, building a website, all that stuff. She didn't talk with her mom about any of that.
But then when she was ready to launch that website, that's when she said, hey mom, like I've been thinking of making a change for a while and I've been doing all these things to prepare. Here's the website, you can take a look. And starting next week, people will be able to hire me for coaching sessions. In doing it that way, she was able to directly or implicitly assuage her mom's concerns. And she was also able to go through the messy preparation phase on her own.
So the analogy she used for this and the recommendation that comes from her acting days is there's a dress rehearsal and a performance. At the dress rehearsal, a lot of things go wrong. The show isn't fully filled out at that point. There are issues that have to be worked out. There might even be some things that need to be changed.
And that's just part of the process. You go through the rehearsal to figure out how to have a great opening night. And when it comes to family members or anyone else who might not understand or you think might be negative, you don't invite them to the dress rehearsal. That's a private time. That's a time for you to figure things out.
You invite them to opening night. So in other words, you don't tell them about an idea that you may turn into a product or service and create an offer for, et cetera. You tell them about the product or service that you have spent the past weeks or months or however long preparing. That way, a lot of their objections and concerns can be addressed in the beginning. They might not have anything negative to say at all.
In fact, they might say something positive. But if they do say something negative at that point, you're not gonna be derailed because you've already put in all this work. So I really like that story and analogy. Not everybody has to be involved in your inner process. Not everyone has to go behind the scenes.
So think twice before inviting people to your dress rehearsal. Save it up for when you're ready to invite them to opening night. You can learn about Laura's work at yourcareerhomecoming.com. As with the other things, we will link them up in the notes. [Music]
It has been an action-packed week of the show.
I hope you've enjoyed the episodes that we've had, starting with episode 562. Avoiding toilet paper leads to $10,000 a month side income. Put this on the list of side hustle school classics, at least in terms of people making money in unusual and unexpected ways. This is a guy from Canada who is reselling bidets. If you don't know what a bidet is, or if you want to know how he makes $10,000 a month, go back and listen to that episode.
We also had a story of a bartender and yoga teacher who earns extra income, $100 a day in fact, with revenge by mail postcards. Also a pretty creative idea. In addition, there was a Los Angeles accountant, a CPA who creates her own natural deodorant. That deodorant is also doing $10,000 a month. So apparently this is the week of bathroom products that do $10,000 a month in side income.
How about that? For the deodorant project, I called it sweat equity. And of course, several other stories as well. Looking at my notes, I've got some good things coming up. Got a story about mouthwash.
I got a story about some teaching resources, somebody making six figures from it. There's also something about a sports photographer and this month's extended cut. Once a month, I do an extended episode that is not focused on a story. It's actually focused on a specific topic that is requested by our listeners. The topic this month is working on the road.
I'm gonna give you a list of all the tools and resources that I use to take my work with me wherever I go. I look forward to bringing you that episode and everything else. Before I sign off for the week, just wanna say thank you to everybody who makes this possible. First of all, you the listener, you're amazing. Thank you for being part of the Sato School community.
Everything that we do is for you. It is my greatest hope that this show will be helpful, interesting, useful to you. You're gonna learn something that you can apply in a way that's gonna make a tangible difference in your life. That's why the whole tagline of the show is inspiration is good, but action is better. I want people to be like, wow, that's interesting, that's inspiring, that's motivational, but also, I'm gonna do something about it.
If you have the goal of creating a new source of income without quitting your job, without taking a lot of risk, and by using the skills you already have, well, that's why I'm telling you a different story every day of somebody who's doing exactly that. And it's not just me. We've got a production team led by AC Valdez. It also features Sarah Barrett. On the West Coast, we've got Whitney Karinek, Jed Chang, and my cat Libby Gillipo.
Two of the three of them work really hard. And all of us together, Team Sato School, are part of the OMR project that is led by best-selling author Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen is working on a fun project that I'm gonna tell you about pretty soon, probably next week or the week after. If you wanna do us a quick favor that just takes a moment, we really appreciate it if you can give us a rating and review in Apple Podcasts. Or if you're listening somewhere else, a rating and review there.
Or, of course, you could just tell your friends about the show, which is the number one way that our community has grown. There's no big marketing campaign. It is all organic and grassroots. I hope you'll join me tomorrow and each day next week with more stories and actionable ideas. Consider this a 10-minute daily investment in yourself.
Episodes go online at 601 a.m. Eastern time every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
