714: My 2025 Progress Report: What Worked, What Didn’t, and What’s Next?

0:00:06 Hey, it’s Progress Report time. A look inside the last year of Side Hustle Nation projects,
0:00:12 experiments, successes, failures, tools, tactics, travels, and trials. I’m your host Nick Loper
0:00:16 wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Let’s start with the podcast. The
0:00:22 Side Hustle Show has been a bright spot for me this year. We crossed 700 episodes, maintained
0:00:27 the six episodes a month publishing calendar that started as an experiment last year. As you
0:00:32 probably heard, the Ad Sales Network, Yap Media, Young and Profiting has done a bang up job
0:00:39 of selling out all the available inventory and then some. And in a year where the website income
0:00:44 from affiliate partnerships and display ad revenue was down pretty significantly, I was really
0:00:50 grateful for that. So to give a sense of scale for the show, in the name of transparency, the show is
0:00:58 reaching around 220, 230,000 downloads a month or an estimated 100,000 unique devices, which is an
0:01:04 approximation of audience size, which is kind of crazy. Imagine standing at the 50 yard line in front
0:01:12 of a stadium of 100,000 people. And that’s pretty nerve wracking. And it’s also a responsibility that I
0:01:19 don’t take lightly, like trying to source compelling and legit side hustle stories and pulling out helpful
0:01:23 insights and advice from guests and from the hundreds of hours of audio in the archives too.
0:01:27 So there have been a few minor changes on the production side this year. So I’m still using
0:01:33 Riverside to record all the remote interviews. And then I mark up the transcript with sections to
0:01:38 trim for the editor. Hey, where did this go off the rails? Or what, you know, which questions just
0:01:44 didn’t really land. And what has changed is, first of all, the input. So I got a new mic a couple
0:01:52 months ago, this fancy Shure SM7DB, I think. That was a switch from the Heil PR-40 that had powered the
0:01:56 show for the previous 400 episodes. I don’t know if you can tell the difference, but it was advertised as
0:02:02 being better at cutting out background noise and room reverb and all that. And it requires less
0:02:07 equipment. So there’s less stuff on the desk now anyway. So on occasion, on the production side,
0:02:13 I will use this custom Claude project that I built to help out with editing suggestions. So what I did
0:02:19 was I fed in a bunch of before and after transcripts to give it an idea of how the side hustle show
0:02:25 sausage was made. And it still sometimes has a hard time with those transcription files because they can
0:02:31 be like 30 pages long for an hour long interview. And we don’t always agree on what to keep and what
0:02:37 to toss. Me and Claude don’t. But it probably speeds up the process a little bit, at least to let
0:02:43 quickly flag sections the AI didn’t like. And my prompt is something like, hey, you know, we just
0:02:48 recorded this episode. I’d like you to provide some editing suggestions based on the training material.
0:02:55 Keep an eye out for sections that are long-winded, that are repetitive, that are off-topic, or that,
0:02:58 you know, take a while to get to the true answer or something like that. And so it comes back with its
0:03:04 editing suggestions. Then what’s been a bigger time saver is for my show notes writer. Instead of
0:03:08 summarizing the entire episode manually, like we’ve done for years and years and years, she can now use
0:03:13 Claude to get a pretty solid summary of the conversation and then just edit and format adding
0:03:19 the images and the links instead of starting from scratch. Another post-production change is recording
0:03:26 a separate intro for the video version of the podcast. This was a tip I picked up from Whitney Bonds and
0:03:31 Chad Carson, who both do far better on YouTube than I do for their interview content. So trying to create a
0:03:38 more sizzle reel, you know, YouTube hookier style kind of intro that’s specific to that platform. And then
0:03:45 also for YouTube, as the podcasting landscape continues to feel the pull of a video, the plan
0:03:52 is to begin selling sponsorships as both audio and video placements. I believe YouTube is introducing a
0:03:58 dynamic ad insertion feature similar to what we have on megaphone for the audio side. So that’ll be an
0:04:04 exciting experiment in 2026. Because up until now, I’ve only ever used just YouTube’s like built-in ad
0:04:09 program. And I think YouTube is probably the best platform for audience growth right now, at least
0:04:16 for me as a long form podcaster. It was kind of weird, kind of surprising. But over the summer, over the
0:04:20 stretch of like two weeks, I had a handful of people ask me, you know, what I did. And so I told
0:04:23 them about the show. They said, Oh, that sounds cool. That sounds great. I’ll check it out. And then like
0:04:28 four out of five of them opened up YouTube to find the show instead of a podcast app. And I was like,
0:04:34 that was really surprising to me. And maybe telling about the future of podcasting if four out of five
0:04:38 people immediately thought to go to YouTube first, where in my head, I’m still questioning for interview
0:04:44 content specifically. Is anybody really sitting there watching two talking heads for 45 minutes? But I guess
0:04:49 people are, or maybe they have it running in the background. So I’ve also continued to invest in
0:04:56 listener growth, primarily through a couple sites, audience lift and pod roll. And I’ve tested probably a dozen
0:05:04 different, you know, podcast promotion channels spent 30, $40,000, probably more. But those two are the ones that
0:05:10 I found the most cost effective. So I try and allocate a percentage of the revenue every month into listener
0:05:17 growth to hopefully keep the flywheel spinning. Most popular episodes of 2025 included the ladders of wealth
0:05:22 creation with Nathan Berry. That was actually a greatest hits replay episode, but people like that
0:05:28 one, just a recent release did really well. Anthony Kolodziej’s vending machine story from zero to over
0:05:35 $50,000 a month, you know, building his vending machine route in the Chicago area. Episode 662, super inspiring
0:05:41 story. That one did well. The business idea giveaway episode. Those are always fun. Those always did well.
0:05:46 That one was with Steve Chu, episode 657. We did an episode on the four types of passive income to stop
0:05:53 trading time for money. That one did well. Number 672. And number 675, where I asked Mr. Smart Passive
0:06:00 Income himself, Pat Flynn, to rate 10 popular passive income ideas. So we’ll link those up in the show notes
0:06:05 for this episode. But those are some of the ones that performed best on the audio side in terms of
0:06:09 downloads. I think those were all over 40,000 downloads apiece. But next week, I will share my picks
0:06:15 for the best side hustles of the year, a very subjective exercise. But to go back through the archives and pull out
0:06:22 some of my favorite ideas and clips. So make sure to hit the follow or subscribe button so that you don’t
0:06:28 miss it. Now more on YouTube. So for non podcast YouTube content this year, I really didn’t do a
0:06:33 great job of publishing with any consistency, maybe like seven or eight videos all year long. Those
0:06:38 typically come in three formats. The first is like product review videos, which have done well for the
0:06:43 channel in the past. They tend to have a long shelf life. And there’s, you know, maybe an affiliate play in
0:06:49 some of those second type is repurposed website content type of videos, which usually target a
0:06:54 specific keyword. And those can also perform well for months or sometimes years. And then the third
0:07:02 kind of video is a newer one for me. And that’s one that targets a topic that has done well for another
0:07:08 channel, but with my own spin on it. For example, I found a video called top five online business ideas.
0:07:13 You can start today with zero dollars, 400,000 views on this video and another channel way more
0:07:19 than their average. So I took a shot and making my own version of that. And it is nowhere near 400,000
0:07:23 views yet, but maybe someday it’ll get there. In fact, that was some of the video advice that I was given
0:07:29 this year. Look at competing channels for the videos that have popped and have way more than their normal
0:07:34 number of views. And then try to recreate that magic in your own style and your own voice with the
0:07:39 logic being that YouTube viewers really liked this topic. And if it went viral once, it could go viral
0:07:43 again. But videos have, you know, they take a long time to make and not all of them hit. Not all of them
0:07:50 have a positive ROI for video editing. I have a part-time editor who’s been with me for years. She does the
0:07:56 podcast episodes and the shorts. I’ve got another guy from Fiverr that I’ve worked with off and on for
0:08:02 one-off videos. And then I do a bit myself in ScreenPal and pulling clips with Pictory.ai. Pictory,
0:08:06 like victory, I guess. And I started using that last year. I still like it for sourcing stock footage
0:08:12 and turning scripts into videos. Some of the best performing non-podcast videos. This year, you know,
0:08:17 I did a recent review of FlexJobs, remote jobs platform. That one’s off to an okay start. The best
0:08:24 one was get paid to watch videos. That was under that second category that I talked about, the repurposing
0:08:28 website content. So that was an article that we already had. Let me go out and create the video
0:08:35 version of that. That’s closing in on 9,000 views. Another similar one was websites that actually pay
0:08:38 you. I think we have an article called like websites that pay you or websites that make money or something
0:08:44 like that. So that one’s doing okay. And then I spent some time repurposing a podcast episode that we did
0:08:50 about bank bonuses in that video is doing okay. But like, you know, instead of a half hour interview or
0:08:54 however long it was, you know, try and trim it down to, you know, eight or nine minute video about
0:08:58 earning bank bonuses. So overall, I mean, the channel, it’s doing okay. Like I’d probably give
0:09:03 it a C, maybe a C minus in terms of performance. It’s steady, but it just really hasn’t found a
0:09:09 groove in terms of either production or performance. We passed 40,000 subscribers this year. That was a
0:09:14 little milestone, but nothing would give me more street cred with the kids than to get to that
0:09:18 hundred thousand subscriber mark, earn that play button. But at this pace, you know, it’s like another
0:09:22 decade or so. So hopefully we can accelerate that. Hopefully we can make some more progress toward it
0:09:27 next year. But I mean, for me, like scripting is still the big bottleneck. So I was really excited
0:09:32 to try an AI solution for this, trying to, you know, several different prompts. And, you know,
0:09:37 sometimes they kind of have a harder time with generating longer form content. I don’t know what
0:09:41 the script length would be, but like, you know, to make an eight to 10 minute video, it’s a decent
0:09:46 length script. And of course you can prompt until you’re blue in the face, but it’s still so subjective
0:09:50 that most of what comes back. Yeah. It just doesn’t sound like me, or at least that’s a problem that I
0:09:54 ran into. It’s like, ah, that’s, that’s not how I would have phrased that. So I haven’t ended up using
0:09:59 this yet because it’s still running into that same issue. It doesn’t sound like me just yet, but I made
0:10:06 my very first vibe coded project. It was a YouTube script generator. So I built this in cloud code,
0:10:12 typing in plain language, the functionality that I wanted. And it actually built a working piece of
0:10:16 software. It was like, you know, the, the light bulbs go out, you kind of like, ah, you know,
0:10:20 the, the angels start singing. You see, you can see the light. And it was really exciting. So my idea
0:10:27 was to punch in the URLs of the top, you know, two or three performing videos on the topic that I had in
0:10:32 mind, and then to have the AI analyze the hooks and the content of those videos. And then I thought this
0:10:38 was key, combine it with some side hustle nation, original content on the same topic, you know, copy and
0:10:42 paste in from the website, which we have, you know, something written about this to create a
0:10:48 hopefully compelling script that could ultimately compete and hopefully outperform the example videos.
0:10:53 That was the idea. And it was a really interesting exercise working with cloud code and having it
0:10:59 troubleshoot and pull in API keys and say, Oh, we’re going to need to transcribe those videos before we
0:11:03 can analyze them. So you’re going to need some open AI tokens for that. Okay, do that. Check off that
0:11:08 box onto the next step. And you just, you know, step by step by step, it built this thing. So still
0:11:12 we’re working on like the voice and the tone and like, no, no, no, it’s really got to be, it’s got
0:11:16 to sound like Nick, you know, so we’re going to keep tweaking with it. And hopefully you’ll be able to
0:11:21 build out some other projects next year as well. And this was me coming in as a non-technical person.
0:11:28 Yes, there’s a learning curve. The interface is very command prompty. And one of the hardest things was
0:11:32 trying to figure out, well, how do I even open it up? I, you know, had opened it, figured out this
0:11:36 that once and then I could spend half an hour, like what folder was it installed in? It was just
0:11:42 dumb, dumb, dumb stuff. But hopefully as you go on, it gets easier. So to me, it’s really cool. So I can
0:11:48 start to see the light of why people are so fired up about vibe coding in minimum viable product, either
0:11:53 for their own internal use, like this one was, or as a potential tool to sell to other people. I can start
0:11:59 a software business. Really, really cool. So that’s the podcast and YouTube side of the business. The other
0:12:05 big elements have been the Side Hustle Nation website and email newsletter list. We’re going
0:12:07 to get into those right after this.
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0:14:35 All right, we’re talking 2025 progress report for Side Hustle Nation. A big chunk of the business
0:14:41 historically has come from the sidehustle.com website. And just about like every other
0:14:47 informational content publisher, the site’s been hit by changing search results, changing search
0:14:55 behavior, Reddit, AI answers, all of that. Now it hasn’t gone to zero and it never experienced the 90%
0:15:00 overnight drop that some other content sites saw in the wake of the helpful content update a couple years
0:15:08 ago. But it has been a slow drawn out erosion of traffic in revenue over the last couple of years.
0:15:13 And that’s been painful because the website side of the business is probably the most passive and
0:15:19 probably the most profitable portion of the revenue. I mean, once you have an article published,
0:15:25 it can stick in Google for years with, you know, minimal maintenance. And now, even if you do get
0:15:31 something to rank, I feel like it’s buried under an AI answer, a wall of sponsored results, a Reddit
0:15:36 listing or two, an image carousel, you know, people also ask. And then maybe at the very bottom of the
0:15:42 page, way below the fold is your content. It’s still ranking well. It’s just not getting clicked on
0:15:48 at nearly the same pace that it was before. Now, in the past month or two, I’ve seen actually some tiny
0:15:54 signs of life here. But overall, I mean, we’ve stopped publishing new articles outside of the
0:16:00 podcast case studies. And I just haven’t been super motivated to keep the archives updated like I used
0:16:06 to because, you know, I just question if it’s really worth the time. Now I have gone in a couple days over
0:16:12 the last few months, and bulk updated a bunch of posts trying to target the pages with the highest
0:16:17 traffic to make sure they’re up to date. This is like swapping out screenshots, reordering the list
0:16:22 in the listicle in some cases, doing some fact checking, updating statistics, and in a lot of
0:16:28 cases, removing content to reduce word counts. That seems to be the trend. How can we get to the point
0:16:33 faster and, you know, not have as much fluff, right? I think there’s still a trend towards like, look,
0:16:37 if you’re the expert, why don’t you do a little curation instead of throwing, you know, 800 different
0:16:43 options at us. And that is pretty tedious work when there are hundreds of articles on the site. But, you
0:16:48 know, I don’t want to completely neglect this income stream, because it still pays the bills, it still
0:16:54 covers the mortgage, and then some. So it’s not nothing. It’s just not what it once was. And I’m not
0:16:59 particularly optimistic it’ll ever fully recover. But still, if I can spend a few hours a month to maintain
0:17:06 what I have, or to even just slow the decline, that’s probably still worth it. And with the
0:17:12 organic traffic declining, my next thought was to experiment with paid traffic and specifically
0:17:18 paid search traffic arbitrage, you know, driving traffic to content pages with affiliate offers,
0:17:23 and then hopefully making a profit on that. This was actually the model of my very first online
0:17:29 side hustle, you know, buy traffic from Google for, in my case, a specific shoe related keywords,
0:17:33 you know, brand name plus style name type of keywords, and then earn a commission when somebody bought
0:17:38 shoes through the site. So I’m no stranger to it. But it definitely has become a lot more
0:17:44 sophisticated over the last almost 20 years. And even though I’ve been running a couple small scale
0:17:52 Google ad campaigns for the last four plus years, never really had a great revenue attribution that I
0:17:58 trusted, like I would put money in, and I would feel reasonably confident that it was profitable. But I
0:18:01 couldn’t tell you for sure, and not a great model when you’re trying to ramp up the ad spend. I mean,
0:18:08 I always thought it would be awesome to be able to profitably spend $500 a day, $1,000 a day more.
0:18:12 Just thinking of all the credit card points and free flights, right? But this time around, to skip ahead
0:18:18 in the story, just could never get it to work. I signed up with AnyTrack for the revenue attribution
0:18:24 side of things. And it actually told me a pretty scary story that the money I’d been spending on Google
0:18:35 ads for years was probably not profitable and probably not even close. So as I refined the landing pages and
0:18:41 tested different bidding strategies and worked with paid traffic specialist consultants, it still never
0:18:47 achieved reliable profitability. So I can chalk that one up as a big expensive L for the year. Now, the other side
0:18:53 effect of less website traffic was less people joining the email list this year, which outside
0:19:00 of deleting, you know, inactive subscribers, I don’t think ever had a down month or a down quarter. But I
0:19:04 started noticing something in the second half of the year that the subscriber count was actually going
0:19:10 down. Now I get unsubscribes every time I hit send. That’s normal. You probably do too. But the subscriber
0:19:15 growth has always outpaced those. So that was not a great sign. So a few things I’ve been trying on the
0:19:22 email growth side. Number one is the creator network. This is built into Kit. This is where other creators
0:19:27 and newsletters recommend you during their signup process. Like, hey, you might also like this other
0:19:32 newsletter, you know, co-registration kind of thing. And that’s driven over a thousand signups so far,
0:19:37 which just it feels like a cool bonus just for being on Kit. Another thing I tried earlier in the year
0:19:44 was a bit more out there. And that was partnering with the owner of a large and fast growing Facebook
0:19:50 group for drivers for a popular delivery service. He said, Hey, Nick, I’ve got this big group of
0:19:56 delivery drivers, but I don’t have an email list. Naturally, if they’re driving as a way to make extra
0:20:01 money, they might be interested in other side hustles. Would you be interested in paying me for
0:20:08 everyone who signs up for your list? I said, sure, that seems reasonable. Let’s, you know, let’s give it a
0:20:14 shot. And so that was driving hundreds of signups a month automated through the group leads browser
0:20:19 extension. And with kind of a language or disclosure that was similar to the side hustle nation,
0:20:24 Facebook group, email signup, like, Hey, would you like to receive expert side hustle advice and
0:20:28 money-making tips from side hustle nation or something like that? But ultimately the group got
0:20:34 shut down. The faucet turned off. I don’t know why necessarily, but I think I would be open to a
0:20:39 similar partnership again in the future. Again, I don’t, I just don’t have great revenue tracking on
0:20:44 the email side. Like I couldn’t tell you, is it worth it to pay a dollar per subscriber, but I have
0:20:50 a sense and maybe a hope that as the list grows, business growth follows, especially if I can turn
0:20:56 an email subscriber into a podcast listener, into a fan who tells five friends, into someone who,
0:21:00 you know, finds an affiliate offer they can take advantage of, I’d be open to testing that
0:21:06 again. So trying to drive leads and signups from Facebook and even partnering with other group
0:21:14 owners there. Another recent one was in our marketing tips roundup episode, Lewis Waldron mentioned a
0:21:22 newsletter discovery service called refined, R E F I N D refined. And so I decided to give that a shot
0:21:29 as well at a buck 50 per engaged subscriber. They have a pretty aggressive filtering or, you know,
0:21:35 onboarding rules system. So you’re really only paying for the people who open your message. And
0:21:40 of course, it’s still trying to drive signups from the podcast through the playlist quiz and other
0:21:47 episode specific lead magnets, because here’s the truth. You’re the person I want on the email list,
0:21:53 the podcast listener, you know, me so much better than the person who got, you know, recommended
0:21:57 side hustle nation from another creator, so much better than the person who clicked the result in
0:22:02 Google and skimmed some article for 45 seconds. So get yourself signed up. If you’re not already
0:22:09 side hustle nation.com slash join is an easy way to do that. I did create a few new episode specific
0:22:16 lead magnets this year. Uh, the local directory research file from the episode with Frey Chu was one of
0:22:22 those. The AI assisted brainstorming worksheet was another one of those. I made a side hustle
0:22:27 selector, like weighted decision matrix with a bunch of questions. Like if you’re contemplating a bunch of
0:22:31 different side hustle ideas and you want to pick objectively the best one, this little selector
0:22:37 tool will help you do it. And so together those have resulted in around 500 new signups, but that’s
0:22:41 also another priority, like trying to drive signups from the email list, because like I said, those,
0:22:46 you know, you, you are the person that I want on the list because it’s such a better relationship than
0:22:51 the random person who just happens upon it on a elsewhere on the internet. Starting last year with
0:22:58 Jacques, the online course guy and a kit and probably a few others. I’ve been trying to do more educational
0:23:04 workshops and webinars for the side hustle nation audience in bringing in other guest experts to teach
0:23:09 them like Jacques. And ideally in my mind, that would be, you know, once a month or every couple
0:23:13 months. It’s kind of a value add for subscribers. But I think this year we only ended up doing four of
0:23:19 them. We did a home services Academy with Johnny Robinson early in the year. Hopefully we’ll have
0:23:25 some new cleaning business case studies coming out of that. We did a LinkedIn marketing one with Joe
0:23:30 McKay. We did the vending machine Q and a session with, uh, with Anthony Cologia. That was awesome.
0:23:35 And we did a flea market flipping workshop with, uh, with Rob and Melissa from flea market flipper.
0:23:40 And these are always a fun time to hang out live with the audience, get some real-time interaction
0:23:46 and do a deep dive on one of the side hustles or one of the marketing strategies that we cover on the
0:23:52 show. So this is something we’ll probably continue to do going into 2026. And if there are any creators
0:23:57 or instructors that you want to hear from in that type of setting, be sure to let me know. I’ll see if I
0:24:02 can get them lined up. The other thing I would like to do is show up as the instructor for other
0:24:07 people’s audiences. Like we can talk generating side hustle ideas. We can talk about narrowing
0:24:12 down your side hustle idea. We can talk about scaling your side hustle. We can talk productivity
0:24:16 frameworks, podcast growth, email list growth, whatever you think would be most beneficial to
0:24:21 your audience. Hit me up. If you think it might be a fit. So outside of those lead magnets, I did create
0:24:28 one new digital product this year. It was a quick online workshop called scale. My awesome side hustle
0:24:34 or the smash masterclass for short scale. My awesome side hustle. It walks through the three levers you can
0:24:41 pull to unlock growth and scale in your business, traffic conversion and economics side hustle nation.com
0:24:47 slash smash. If you want to go check it out. And as I’ve done for the past few years, I launched this as
0:24:54 part of the BC stack bundle sale in June and the pitch might sound familiar. Hey, I built this new
0:24:59 thing. I think it’s awesome. It’s going to be super helpful, but don’t have any testimonials for it yet.
0:25:05 So this week only you can get lifetime access for half off, but wait, there’s more to sweeten the deal.
0:25:10 You’ll also get access to these 50 other plus products designed to help you grow your online business
0:25:18 included for free. And so that was pretty effective resulted in around $9,000 in sales between affiliate
0:25:25 commissions and bonuses for BC stack and participating in bundle sales like this one can also be a powerful
0:25:30 list building strategy. Talked about it a little more in the episode that we did with Chanel from
0:25:37 gross in reverse, but added around this time around 500 new subscribers to the list. Now also over the
0:25:41 summer, our neighborhood hosted a little vendor fair. And so I’ve been trying to be more active in the
0:25:46 local community, like sponsoring events at the kids school and stuff like that. So this was a good
0:25:51 excuse to get out of the house and meet some neighbors, meet some new people and, and hopefully
0:25:57 recruit some new listeners. So I ordered up this cool, like expo show table banner with, you know,
0:26:01 bright side hustle nation branding. It looked, it looked awesome. It looked legit. And I printed out
0:26:06 some, you know, family friendly side hustles with the corresponding episode numbers to promote the
0:26:13 show. And then our oldest setup shop with me, and he was selling some 3d printed toys and, and, you know,
0:26:17 fidget gadgets that he made. And so he ended up making like 70 bucks or something like that, which was
0:26:21 really cool for him. And it forced him to talk to strangers and explain how this stuff was made.
0:26:27 And I also brought a stack of books with me to have on display and to sell if anybody wanted
0:26:31 them. And I think I sold like two copies. So he definitely outsold me that day in, in terms of
0:26:39 revenue, but a funny thing happened. I said, I’m there mainly to promote the podcast. And even the
0:26:44 neighbors who, who came by, who knew me and knew what I did, they were like, I didn’t know you had a
0:26:49 book. And I wanted to be like, I mean, you know, it’s, it’s self-published. I got several of them.
0:26:56 But I promise you the 700 episodes, the 33 million downloads, I promise you that’s way harder,
0:27:01 but it was the book. It was the book that held a certain level of esteem and perceived authority.
0:27:07 I just thought that was interesting. If you’re contemplating self-publishing or adding a book to
0:27:12 your product portfolio, now we might have to do a second edition. The book that I had there was the
0:27:18 $1,000, 100 waves book. So we might have to do a second edition of that. And actually the book project
0:27:24 that I started working on over the summer was updating the side hustle book, the perma-free
0:27:31 title that was last updated 2019. So definitely do for a refresh sidehustlenation.com slash book.
0:27:36 Supposed to be free on Kindle. If you are in the U S you can check that one out. What is nuts about
0:27:41 that? It has been downloaded on, according to the KDP dashboard, Kindle direct publishing dashboard.
0:27:49 It’s been downloaded over 150,000 times, which is super crazy. So don’t sleep on Amazon as a top of
0:27:54 the funnel point of discovery for your business. Do for an update. Maybe AI can help with that. That’s
0:27:58 on the project list for this coming year. And my latest experiment, we just did an episode on this.
0:28:04 My latest experiment has been with the Facebook content monetization program, which is essentially,
0:28:11 like, it’s similar to YouTube, right? It’s Facebook paying creators to publish engaging content that
0:28:15 keeps people on Facebook longer. So they see more ads, they make more money. They share some of that
0:28:19 revenue with you. And this is, this is way easier than creating YouTube videos, at least for me.
0:28:26 So this was inspired by Jeff Rose from good financial sense, who I started to notice was at the top of my
0:28:30 feed. Whenever I logged in, I was like, what is this guy doing? And then he started sharing some of his
0:28:38 things, earning screenshots, and I was blown away. A thousand bucks a day, posting random money-related
0:28:44 memes and charts and tweets on Facebook. So like I said, we did a whole episode on this last month,
0:28:49 what kind of content performs best. But the gist of it was Jeff’s strategy was to look for material
0:28:57 loosely related to his niche of personal finance that had gone viral on other platforms like threads,
0:29:04 like Twitter, like even Facebook itself, and then repost it with a new, sometimes snarky, sometimes
0:29:10 polarizing caption, and then post a ton. Like he was, I think he was doing like 20 plus posts a day.
0:29:15 And then trust that a few of those posts will take off, get engagement and make money. The tricky part
0:29:22 is I’ve heard from a few listeners since airing that is getting invited to the monetization program to
0:29:28 begin with, which at the time of this recording is invite only. So it’s not something that you can
0:29:35 apply for, unfortunately, but you might find like I did, I already had an invite sitting in my long
0:29:40 neglected side hustle nation Facebook page. So I’m nowhere near a thousand dollars a day, full disclosure
0:29:46 there, but this is a new income stream for me, which is always exciting to unlock. My best day so far is
0:29:51 around $40. And if I could hit that consistently, that would be around 1200 bucks a month. Jeff and
0:29:56 some other friends are already doing really well here. So I’m motivated to keep pushing on this one
0:30:00 with the ultimate goal of having a team member, be the one who sources and schedules the material
0:30:06 because on the downside, and we talked about this in that episode, it’s pretty time consuming in which,
0:30:09 which I guess is a whole relative, like for a few hundred dollars a month, it’s time consuming,
0:30:13 right? For a few hundred dollars a day, that’s a different story. But like I mentioned in that
0:30:19 episode, I find my screen time is way up. I find myself checking Facebook way more than I ever did
0:30:25 before to see if I got any new comments or likes or shares, probably not the healthiest behavior. So I
0:30:31 would love to find a trusted social media manager to take ownership of it once the revenue justifies
0:30:36 it. So if you know anyone, please send them my way. All right. We have talked podcast. We have
0:30:42 talked YouTube. We’ve talked the SideHustleNation.com website, the digital product portfolio, the email
0:30:48 list, the new monetization experiments, and I’ve got a few more progress report updates, including
0:30:52 conference travels and what’s been on my reading list coming up right after this.
0:31:02 On the conference agenda this year was podcast movement in Dallas and FinCon in Portland. The family
0:31:07 got to tag along in Texas, which was cool. And this was actually my first time to podcast movement
0:31:12 since 2017. So it was fun to see some old timers there, members of the gray beard club, I called
0:31:19 them and actually ran into the old editor of the SideHustle show, Brendan, who I’d never met in
0:31:24 person. It was like one of those where I looked at his name badge and he looked at mine and we were
0:31:28 both like, dude, you know, it was, it was a really cool kind of moment because we’d never met face to
0:31:33 face. He’d done hundreds of SideHustle show episodes in the archives for us, but it was also
0:31:39 interesting to see how much the event and the industry has changed. Not a lot of solo independent
0:31:45 creators in attendance, a lot of software companies, a lot of agencies, a lot of networks, not a lot of
0:31:52 fellow hosts. So rumor was that they, they go to PodFest in Orlando instead. Now at FinCon, it was a
0:31:57 great family reunion of internet friends. As always, I was happy to have a driving distance FinCon, you know,
0:32:02 just three hours down the road from me. So that was good. But the community has definitely felt the
0:32:10 impact of the last couple years of algorithm changes in AI in the search results. A few friends noted the
0:32:16 disappearance of what they called the creator middle class, the people who were making a living online with
0:32:22 their website. They were relying on Google traffic and advertising or affiliate income and the freelance
0:32:27 writer community that supported those types of businesses. Those entrepreneurs had either
0:32:32 pivoted to another model or they simply weren’t there, which was kind of sad to see. The two big
0:32:38 topics at FinCon for me were AI and video, at least in the sessions that I attended. And I’ve already
0:32:43 made some changes to the video production strategy, like I mentioned, but haven’t done a great job of
0:32:49 prioritizing any of the agent building ideas that I walked away with. There was one cool session where
0:32:57 basically write down all of your repetitive tasks and processes and all of those are potential agent
0:33:03 ideas. And you can use Zapier or Make or N8N or maybe now with my newfound Claude Code companion,
0:33:09 I’ll be able to take a swing at some of those as well. Thought about going to the kit event in Boise
0:33:13 creator. I don’t know what it’s called. Thought about going to the Mediavine event in Boston,
0:33:18 but didn’t pull the trigger. Thought about going to CEX creator economy expo in Cleveland, I want to say,
0:33:24 but curious what business events or conferences that you made it to. Send me an email. Let me know.
0:33:32 Oh, I also went to Rhodium Summit in Vegas. So my coaching program with 2X ended late last year. So
0:33:38 decided to give Rhodium a try. This is a long running community for online business owners. A couple of
0:33:43 friends had recommended it, but just one event a year in person instead of like the four in-person
0:33:48 masterminds with 2X. Just a couple group calls a month, no one-on-one coaching, much, much lower
0:33:54 price commitment as well. Probably worth mentioning. You know, I walked away from the in-person summit
0:34:00 with a really long list of ideas. And this is part of my new year planning that I still need to do is
0:34:04 like the full brain dump and debrief on my notes to kind of itemize out the potential projects
0:34:11 and their time and cost and potential impact to the business as well. The challenge is, and it seems
0:34:16 silly when you look at the output, well, it’s only an hour of audio a week that you’re making, but it
0:34:20 takes a lot of time to keep the show going. So I probably need to do that full time audit exercise
0:34:27 again and see where there’s an opportunity to free up some hours. And in fairness, I have been grateful
0:34:32 to be able to do quite a bit of non-work travel and time off this year too. Going skiing with the kids,
0:34:37 you know, traveling with the family, going golfing with dad, that kind of thing. Now, speaking of
0:34:42 the kids, they’ve gotten into the content creation game themselves with their own Dude Perfect inspired
0:34:49 trickshot YouTube channel. This has been super fun to work on, even if, you know, my latest side hustle
0:34:54 probably doesn’t even qualify is as an unpaid, you know, glorified tripod a lot of the time. Here, dad,
0:34:59 can you film us? Hey, dad, can you hold the camera? But they’re having to practice persistence in
0:35:03 taking a lot of tries to land a hard shot for one. And second, they’re learning video
0:35:10 editing. Our oldest edits all the clips in iMovie on his iPad. He’s learning to set up the shots to
0:35:14 get the right angle and try and avoid getting, you know, street signs and license plates in there.
0:35:21 And more impressively, they’ve actually stuck with it. They made 10 or 12 videos at this point where,
0:35:25 you know, we just did the first one for fun. One afternoon in the summer, they’ve actually kept it
0:35:29 going. The neighbors are into it. You know, they’re helping set up shots. They’re coming up with ideas.
0:35:34 I’ve got kids in their class, you know, when I go to volunteer, they’re asking me if they can be in
0:35:37 the next video. Hey, I’m really good at flipping water bottles, I promise. And they’re motivated,
0:35:42 the kids are, to beat Side Hustle Nation and subscribers. But dad’s still got them. I’m still
0:35:47 gaining ground faster than they are, so at least so far. But really awesome to see them take an
0:35:53 interest in creating content besides just consuming it. I mean, I got this text while I was at FinCon,
0:36:00 you know, from my oldest, you know, 102 views, we went viral. And I just loved it, like the level of
0:36:05 excitement for, relatively speaking, not a lot of the content. Like, I remember being excited for,
0:36:09 you know, the first 50 download days. So I can absolutely relate to that. It was pretty cool.
0:36:15 The other big focus this year has just been on general health and fitness, which should probably
0:36:21 always be a focus. I started the year with a pull-up challenge. And the plan was to just add
0:36:28 one a day and see how far I could get. Like, one pull-up on January 1st, 31 on January 31st,
0:36:33 all the way up to 365, potentially, maybe, hopefully, on December 31st. So the kid’s got
0:36:39 this pull-up bar for Christmas last year. And our youngest, you know, over winter break, he’s like
0:36:43 knocking out dozens every day. And he’s got this little, like, clicker to keep track. And this is,
0:36:47 it’s the combination of not weighing anything and being super strong from doing monkey bars at recess
0:36:52 all the time, in his case. So I thought, I should get in on this. And it seems easy enough. Like, if you
0:36:57 can do 10 in one day, you can do 11 the next day, right? Didn’t have to be consecutive. That was the
0:37:02 other rule. Like, it was usually just, like, sets of 5 or 10 at a time. But I was curious when or where
0:37:07 this would break down. If it would, I don’t know. Never done anything like this before. First month,
0:37:12 fine. No problem. Second month, a little more challenging, especially while we’re traveling,
0:37:18 having to jump into the hotel gym to knock out a couple sets. But second month, also fine. So now
0:37:23 we’re up to 60 a day. And the problem is, you’re never fully recovering, right? There’s a reason
0:37:29 athletes, you know, have rest days. So by March, I start incorporating some of those rest days. Like,
0:37:35 if it was day 70, okay, knock out the 70, but then only do 35 the next day. Then bump it to 72 the next
0:37:41 day. But that was still too many pull-ups. So the streak, you know, came to an end somewhere in the
0:37:48 early 80s for my right lat. Just couldn’t take it anymore. But I still do some every day. And the
0:37:54 net result is, you know, I do way more than the zero pull-ups I’d done for years prior to that. Good for
0:37:59 back strength, good for shoulder strength, good for, you know, shoulder mobility, maybe grip strength,
0:38:04 maybe some spinal decompression benefits as well from hanging there. Who knows? It was a fun project or
0:38:10 fun experiment. And so the pull-ups were part of a broader focus on resistance training this year.
0:38:18 in addition to my existing diet of cardio, yoga, and walking. And this was inspired in part by Peter
0:38:23 Atiyah’s book, Outlive. First part of the book, if you haven’t read it, just details your most likely
0:38:27 ways to die. Heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes. I think he calls them the four horsemen.
0:38:33 The second part of the book is where he gets into the actual actions you can take to prolong your health
0:38:40 span, including a focus on building muscle where there is like this natural rate of decay. And so he’s
0:38:43 like, well, if you want to put your bag in the overhead bin when you’re 80, you’re going to have
0:38:48 to be able to lift, you know, 40 pounds or something overhead when you’re 60. You’re kind of like reverse
0:38:51 engineering it almost in a way, or you want to be able to pick up your grandkid. Well, that’s the
0:38:58 equivalent of a whatever, 50 pound kettlebell squat or something today. So one of the most eye-opening
0:39:03 things for me was the recommended daily intake of protein was about 50% higher than I had been
0:39:08 eating. So that was one of the big things. The book also inspired me to make a couple of Dexascan
0:39:13 appointments this year, which seems a little sketch because in our area, the ones you can book are in
0:39:18 this like random body spec van in a parking lot. Like it’s not at a doctor’s office or anything,
0:39:25 but it’s like 40 or 50 bucks. Like it’s not super expensive. And then they give you your body fat
0:39:31 and lean mass percentages as kind of motivating to try and improve those numbers. In the six months
0:39:36 in between scans, I was able to gain a couple pounds of muscle, which obviously isn’t huge,
0:39:43 but it was an indicator that at least things weren’t going in the wrong direction. What was also fun was
0:39:48 uploading the scan results into ChatGPT along with some blood work results to get some recommendations.
0:39:54 I was really impressed with the analysis and it felt like a way more in-depth conversation than
0:39:59 I’ve ever had at the doctor’s office. They always seem to be, you know, rushed to get to the next
0:40:04 appointment or kind of hand wavy to any questions or concerns because they don’t really have time to
0:40:09 give a detailed explanation of that dismissal. But, you know, Chatty has got all the time in the world.
0:40:15 So that was kind of fun. So Outlive, definitely an influential read this year, maybe late last year.
0:40:20 I really wasn’t motivated to read a lot of nonfiction traditional business books. The other
0:40:25 title that comes to mind was Die With Zero because a lot of other people were talking about it. Now I’ll
0:40:32 say this. This is a book by a rich person for rich people. If you’re not in that category, you might be
0:40:37 more annoyed by it than helped by it because at certain points it can come across as really out of touch.
0:40:41 I want to say the author is reported to have a net worth in the range of a hundred million.
0:40:46 So yes, very easy for him to say, hey, spend the money. You’re not going to run out. It’s all fine.
0:40:52 But what was helpful about the book or maybe eye-opening was his illustrations of people who had already
0:40:58 earned the last dollar they’ll ever need. And yet they continue working for years, sometimes decades,
0:41:05 accumulating quote-unquote useless dollars. And I get there’s a fear, a very real fear of running out
0:41:10 of money in your old age, which is where the book can feel a little dismissive. But it does require
0:41:16 you to take stock of your realistic lifespan and your spending to see where you might end up and ask,
0:41:20 well, okay, what kind of margin of safety makes sense? You don’t want to outlive your savings,
0:41:25 but you don’t also want to die with a couple million dollars in the bank that you never got to enjoy.
0:41:31 So the book helped solidify some of our thinking around a coast fire, the idea that at a certain
0:41:37 point you can stop saving as aggressively. You can spend more of what you earn. You can let compound
0:41:42 interest do its thing with what you’ve already accumulated. Those factors plus a healthy voluntary
0:41:48 separation offer inspired Brint to retire a couple months ago. She put in 20 years, which seemed like
0:41:54 a nice round number. And now on to the next chapter. I am excited for that. I’m hopeful that she can help
0:41:58 me out with some stuff on the Side Hustle Nation to-do list, but I’m also confident she’ll keep
0:42:03 busy with her own projects, photography or otherwise. So we’re excited for that in the extra flexibility
0:42:08 that one less working schedule might afford. But on the reading list, not a lot of traditional
0:42:12 business books this year. Instead, I’ve gotten really into this genre that I’ve learned is called
0:42:19 narrative nonfiction. Started a few years ago with Undaunted Courage, this day-by-day account of the
0:42:24 Lewis and Clark expedition, American Kingpin. Was that the one about the Silk Road website and,
0:42:29 you know, trying to track down this guy? True stories that read like a novel. The Wager, this
0:42:35 incredible shipwreck survival story off South America. Loved it. And so what I started to do was
0:42:42 punch those into ChatGPT and say, hey, I really like these titles. What else have you got? And it has
0:42:48 recommended some great ones this year. So this is, you know, all kind of in that genre. Island of the
0:42:53 Lost was a recent one. Another shipwreck story off of, you know, these islands, a couple hundred miles
0:42:59 south of the South Island of New Zealand and living off the land and having to club baby seals to get
0:43:04 food. Like how hungry would I have to be to be able to, you know, whack a baby seal and, you know,
0:43:09 and just what they go through and what they’re willing to do, what they’re able to do to survive.
0:43:15 I read skeletons on the Sahara. It’s like Sahara Desert, but spelled with a Z. And it’s like,
0:43:20 these people, again, are shipwrecked and they’re sold into slavery and they’re dying of thirst and
0:43:25 starving across the desert. And eventually, you know, how they find their way to freedom and negotiate
0:43:31 their way out. The Wide, Wide Sea was another book. This is a story of Captain Cook’s second or third
0:43:36 round the world voyage where he, you know, I didn’t realize he went in search of the Northwest Passage,
0:43:40 which doesn’t exist, but he made it all the way up into Alaska and, you know, above there into the
0:43:45 Arctic Ocean. They’re like, well, it’s frozen. We can’t go any farther. All the way back to Hawaii,
0:43:50 where, you know, he spends lots of time in the Hawaiian Islands. And he ultimately, spoiler if
0:43:54 you don’t know the story, but, you know, he ends up getting killed south of Kona on the Big Island.
0:44:01 And just, again, crazy story, like the era of seafaring discovery. I went to the Amazon with
0:44:08 the River of Doubt and this was a Theodore Roosevelt adventure story. The Lost City of Z was exploring
0:44:13 the Amazon and just the many ways the jungle tries to kill you. I read a book called Gold Diggers,
0:44:20 which is about the Yukon, Alaska, Canada gold rush. The plight that these poor people went through,
0:44:26 like, oh, you gotta climb up this mountain because there’s no roads to this place, right? And not only
0:44:31 in the movie, like in White Fang or whatever, they show them climbing up this mountain, like in this
0:44:36 iconic picture. And in the movie, they just show it once. But like, in reality, you had to do it
0:44:40 dozens of times because you had to bring like a year’s worth of stuff with you, you know, shuttle it
0:44:45 to the top, go back down, grab more stuff. And when you get to the top, there’s still no road. You got to
0:44:51 build a boat and float down the river and hopefully not die and capsize in the rapids. Crazy, crazy stuff.
0:44:58 So I think the common thread to all of these is common people in uncommon situations, usually under
0:45:04 extreme hardship. They’re facing starvation. They’re freezing. They’re stranded. They’re being
0:45:08 sold into slavery. And yet they found a way to survive. They found a way to live through it and
0:45:13 tell the tale. And this hits me whenever I’m bent out of shape or I want to complain about something
0:45:17 like, oh man, I just couldn’t get comfortable on that flight or I didn’t sleep well last night.
0:45:25 And it’s, that was so annoying. Except wait, I am warm. I’m fed. I can deal with a few hours of
0:45:29 discomfort if these people were able to deal with far, far worse. So those have been some of my
0:45:34 favorite reads for the year. I will link those up in the show notes for this episode as well.
0:45:39 If you’ve got any recommendations in that genre, definitely hit me up. Otherwise I’ll be going to
0:45:45 that chat GPT well to see what it turns up next. And I know this was a little bit of inside baseball,
0:45:51 just a glimpse into the business of Side Hustle Nation. No hockey stick growth to report. Just
0:45:56 doing my thing, trying to share cool and creative Side Hustle stories and really grateful to be able
0:46:00 to do it. Big thanks to our sponsors this year for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:46:05 If you haven’t checked out sidehustlenation.com slash deals in a while, that’s where you can find
0:46:11 all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for
0:46:16 tuning in. Again, Merry Christmas to you and your family. Happy New Year. Until next time,
0:46:20 let’s go out there and make something happen. And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the
0:46:22 Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.