This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, greetings, what's up and welcome. This is Side Hustle School, I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau, bringing you the weekly recap. This is the weekly recap for week number 16 of season three. It featured a cake artist, a cake artist who starts because she needs to make extra money, ends up building a six-figure business, bike tours in Amsterdam, a New York City dog walker, and a guitar enthusiast earning $7,000 a month in affiliate commissions. As usual, a wide range of stories.
Now in this recap, I'm going to give you a reminder about the only two things you can do to increase income in an existing Cytosil or small business, especially an e-commerce shop. You're selling something online, got a website, you're trying to sell something, what can you do to increase income or sales? And I'll bring you an audio update from a previously featured Cytosil. She's got a report of a fantastic income increase. And that's not all, she's also going to give you some contrarian advice.
I'm a big fan of contrarian advice, being willing to kind of look beyond the obvious and say, you know, everybody else is telling you this, maybe try the opposite or maybe try a different approach, whether it's the opposite or just something completely different that you haven't thought of before. So all that's coming up in a short period of time. But first, quick announcement, this week only, a special deal, my publisher is offering the ebook version of my latest book, Cytosil. I mean, it's kind of, it's about starting a Cytosil. I mean, we chose kind of an obvious title, Cytosil from idea to income in 27 days.
And they're offering that for just $1.99, $1.99 on several popular e-reading formats, including Amazon Kindle, Nook, Kobo and more. So if you want to pick up the ebook version of the Cytosil book, which provides again, a step-by-step plan to kind of go through and enact a lot of the things that we talk about on the show. This is the only time in fact, in the year and a half, since the book has been out, but it's been discounted. It's not like it's a fire sale or a furniture store that's going out of business all the time. So for this week, only $1.99.
And also this discount is technically available only in the US and Canada. If you're outside of North America, I apologize. Authors actually have no control over the pricing when it comes to publishing. It's a long and complicated process that authors are kind of excluded from. But if you are outside the country, you may be able to purchase from the US Amazon site.
So if you know how that works, if you're in a different country and you're used to using Amazon, either your local version or the US version, if you visit the US version, you might be able to do it. But the point, less than $2, this week only, everything must go. I mean, it's an ebook. They're probably not going to run out of stock, but still, you know, just on principle. [Music]
All right, let's move on.
Let's talk about the two things you can do to grow your e-commerce business. So I talk about this from time to time because it's really important. People often focus on getting more traffic to their website. And nothing wrong with getting more traffic to your website. That's usually a good thing.
If you're trying to grow your e-commerce business, however, you've got a website that is selling a product or a service. Your whole point is to get people to your website, get them to sign up for something, make a commitment, make a purchase. There's only two things you can do to increase those numbers. You want to have more money at the end of the day, more sales, more clients, increase traffic or increase conversions. So if you're focused entirely on one of them, try thinking about the other.
And people tend to focus much more on that first one about increasing traffic. So I tend to talk a little bit more about the other one, which is increasing conversions. So here's an example. If you're getting 100 visitors to your site every day and you're making one sale a day, and you've got this 1% conversion rate, which is not bad in some industries, but you could spend time and possibly some money trying to bring more visitors to your site. You could spend all your time saying, how can I go from 100 visitors to 200 visitors every day?
Or you could work on converting 2% instead of 1%, and you double your money. If all of a sudden, every day, you're still getting the same 100 visitors to your site, but instead of one person being persuaded to make a purchase, two of them are. That is 100% increase. So if you start with your overall goal, which is to get more people to your website and do a better job of persuading them to buy, and then kind of split those things off into their respective branches, try to do one small thing every day to make progress in both areas. And by the way, this doesn't necessarily have to be an e-commerce business.
If you have some other offer, the point is you've got something somewhere that you're trying to drive people to take action, whatever it is. But for e-commerce, a website specifically, you could do some search engine optimization. You can learn about that and research your keywords, try to rank higher in Google. You could otherwise focus on content, maybe make some blog posts, maybe do some videos, focus on backlinks, trying to get other sites to add links to yours, get referral traffic. You could possibly invest money in Facebook ads or Instagram ads or Google ads or something else.
So lots of different stuff you could do on the traffic side of things. Conversion-wise, you really want to focus on your offer. You want to focus on your offer and make sure you've got something that is truly compelling to those people who are coming to the website. So if there's anything you can do to improve your offer, that's probably going to increase conversion. You can also test your copy, test different headlines, test different pitches, maybe introduce scarcity.
Make sure you have some element of scarcity in your marketing. Why should people purchase? Not just why should they purchase in general, but why should they purchase right now? Like what's in it for them to sign up now? That is a huge, huge driver of making decisions for pretty much all of us.
I don't know anybody who is completely immune from it. So copy, offer, scarcity on the conversion side, traffic side, SEO content, links, possibly ads. There's probably more things you can do on both those things. Just remember, only two ways to do it. Keep your eyes on the prize, increase traffic, increase conversions.
Do one small thing every day to make progress. All right, good luck with that. Feel free to let me know how it goes. I always enjoy getting progress updates from our listeners. It's just fun to hear what you are working on.
I want to make sure we can support you fully and craft everything that we make around what is most suitable and helpful for you. So with that in mind, I want to bring you this week's blast from the past segment and audio update from someone we featured on the show a while back. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, she has a fantastic income increase to report, as well as some contrarian advice, which I will pick up on after her message. So first, here is Heather. - Hey, this is Heather McConaughey from Austin, Texas, founder and CEO of The Positive Thread, and I was featured on episode number 308.
I'm happy to report that my side hustle is now my full-time hustle. Since that episode, I've grown my business such that I quit my full-time job over a year ago. We've earned almost $300,000 in the business, which is incredible. When I was originally on the podcast, I was making $1,400 a month, and in the first two months of 2019, I had two $20,000-plus months back to back. I also launched a podcast one year ago that airs weekly and hired two team members.
One of the challenges I faced was how to grow the business without compromising delivery. I often felt pulled between creating a great experience for my clients or working on sales and marketing. What I learned is that delivery to your clients is the way to make your business grow. The more I focused on providing an excellent product and experience to our clients, the more the business grew organically. Now I prioritize my clients first before I work on marketing and sales.
Something I learned was that public relations firms usually aren't effective when you're starting out. I made the mistake of hiring a PR firm to help increase brand awareness. I paid this firm $3,000 for two months of work, and they did nothing. I fired them and have since been featured on local Austin TV four times and secured an article in a local magazine, all of my own doing. My advice would be don't bother with a PR firm.
Work your personal relationships to get media coverage when you are just starting out. We have lots of exciting projects in the works for 2019, including meal plans and digital courses that empower women to balance their hormones and reclaim their energy. We are also hosting our first wellness retreat this spring in Hawaii. - Awesome, congratulations to Heather. $300,000 and going full-time and hiring team members.
Starting a podcast, all wonderful reports there. Again, her episode was 308, ER nurse masters CrossFit and becomes nutrition coach. It's always really great to hear those reports. Along with the honest look at what hasn't worked super well. So totally agree, delivery to clients is the way to grow, prioritize your clients or customers.
And her contrarian advice there was don't bother with PR. At least don't bother with paying for PR. I gotta say, this is a common experience. What she mentioned about spending thousands of dollars and receiving no results from it, I hear that a lot. And I know I'm gonna get emails now from people who are PR consultants or otherwise in that industry telling me that I'm wrong.
But again, I'm just saying it's a common experience. It's not necessarily the case for everyone, but I do hear that often. So I would tend to suggest, unless you really know what you're doing, if you have a deliberate strategy, you're really convinced that whatever these dollars you're gonna spend are gonna result in a positive return on investment, maybe save those dollars for something else. So contrarian advice for you there. And you can follow along with Heather at thepositivethread.com, thepositivethread.com, which we will link up on the show notes page.
Show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/841. That's for today, anyway. We've got a new page for every single day of the show. More updates to come. Like I said, I'd like to hear from our listeners as well.
You can call the Hustle hotline, 844-9HUSTLE. That is 844-948-7853. Or if you prefer, you can also make a little voice memo with your phone and email that to podcast@sidehustleschool.com. [Music]
That is just about it for today. Of course, we've got a great set of diverse stories coming up next week, including something about a monitor for toddlers, including something about books, something about plants, something about big kid problems.
Not quite sure what that is, but that is what I see on my notes. So I look forward to diving into the research, not preparing these stories and bringing them to you, all in an attempt to be helpful and useful, give you something to think about, maybe something to take action on, maybe a little bit of inspiration to say, huh, that person did this thing, maybe I can do something like that. Maybe that gives me an idea for something else I've been thinking about, but I haven't been able to figure out until now. So our whole point of "Side Hustle School" is to provide that foundation of support for you, let you know that you're not alone. There are people all over the world with the same desires, the same values.
They want to create a new source of income. They want to do it without taking a lot of risks. They don't want to risk all their life savings. They don't want to walk away from a stable job, at least not now, at least not right away. That's what it's all about.
And that's why we have a new episode every single day. We have an 841-day streak so far, and not going anywhere for a while. So do stick around. I want to say a big thank you to producer Chuck Reed, content manager Whitney Karinek, community liaison, Jed Chang, Cat Herdertina Hart, and the official show cat Libby Gilliboe. Those are just some of our main team members.
There's also other people working on the show. It really does take a village. We're also part of the Onward Project, which is curated by best-selling author Gretchen Rubin. Make sure you're subscribed to her podcast, happier with Gretchen Rubin as well. This is a free listener-supported show.
Be super grateful for any quick ratings and reviews. You can give me a little five-star review and Apple podcast goes a long way. You can also tell your friends, show them how to subscribe. If you know somebody who needs another source of income, send them to us. We'll do our best to take care of them.
So I hope you'll join me tomorrow, every day next week, with more inspiring stories and actionable ideas. It is a short daily 10-minute investment in yourself. Our episodes go online at 6.01 a.m. Eastern time every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
