323: Financial Independence Fast-Track: How to Replace Your Salary by Buying Mini Businesses

Stacy Caprio was desperate to leave her day job.

She ended up doing just that after acquiring – and improving – a portfolio of mini online businesses. In her case, these were websites that make money from advertising.

Now, this asset class can be risky, and Stacy is open about her early failures.

But if you have some online skills, (or management skills to bring people in if you don’t want to run the site yourself) this can be a fast-track to the cash flow you need to fund your lifestyle.

Since websites often sell for 20x monthly earnings, they’re perhaps 10-15x “cheaper” than if you were to rely solely on traditional investments and a 4% withdrawal rate.

Sound like the kind of investment that suits your lifestyle?

Tune in to hear where Stacy finds these businesses to buy, her unique filtering criteria, and a few quick ways she’s been able to accelerate the cash flow of her portfolio for even better returns.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Financial Independence Fast-Track: How to Replace Your Salary by Buying Mini Businesses

322: My 5 Favorite Books of the Year and My Top Takeaways from Each

“We are simultaneously gods and worms.”—Abraham Maslow

Power plus humility, right? It’s a great combination and something to keep in mind as we try and build our businesses.

We can accomplish amazing things, and yet, we’re gone in a flash. Mere blips on the historical radar.

But let’s be the gods of our side hustle universe today, and focus on shaping that business in a way that best serves ourselves and others.

In this special solo edition of The Side Hustle Show, I’m breaking down my Top 5 books from last year, and the actions I took (or am taking) as a result of reading them.

Hopefully there are a few nuggets you can borrow!

Full Show Notes: My 5 Favorite Books of the Year and My Top Takeaways from Each

321: Hosting Trivia Nights for Fun and Profit: Turn Useless Knowledge into Cash

Can you make money hosting trivia nights at local restaurants and bars?

I’m a bit of a trivia nerd, so this week’s show was especially interesting to put together!

To help walk me through how this business works, is probably the best-qualified guy in the country to do so.

Adam Johnston is the co-founder of LastCallTrivia.com, a business that started with just $300 and now powers trivia nights all around the country and provides tools for side hustlers to do the same.

Over the last 10 years, Adam has managed to help turn “useless knowledge” into a 7-figure operation.

Tune in to hear how this business works, how to pitch and price a trivia night, how to get a new venue off the ground, and most importantly, what makes for a great game.

Adam and I even fire some trivia questions at each other, so have your score sheets ready!

Full Show Notes: Hosting Trivia Nights for Fun and Profit: Turn Useless Knowledge into Cash

320: Multiplying Money, Morning Routines, and $100k Side Hustles: 20 Questions with Nick

It’s time to dive into the ol’ listener mailbag and answer a few questions in this week’s edition of The Side Hustle Show.

I’ve had quite a few interesting questions come in since the last Q&A episode, and picked 20 to talk through in today’s show, including:

1. Let’s say you’ve got $100. How do you turn it into $200?
2. What’s your #1 morning ritual?
3. Should I create a course around self-care? Am I even qualified to?
4. I haven’t made a single sale (on Etsy) and am super demoralized. What can I do?
5. How hard is it to make a website?
6. How do you find a “tech” person for a reasonable rate?
7. Why don’t you use ads to monetize your website?
8. In starting my online business, which social media platforms should I focus on?
9. What side hustles do you recommend that could generate $100k a year within a year?
10. When you started Side Hustle Nation, how’d you get engagement from Day 1?
11. No one is buying my book. How can I market it?
12. What WordPress template do you suggest?
13. How do you refer to affiliate links when you haven’t used the product?
14. How big of a content backlog do you have / should you have?
15. I’m a college senior interested in entrepreneurship. What do you recommend with the “real world” fast approaching?
16. How was your trip to Mexico? Did you feel unsafe?
17. How do you balance family, job, and business?
18. What’s the goal of your local meetups?
19. Why’d you give away the PDF version of The Progress Journal for free?
20. How do you organize your side hustle financially?
21. Which gigs should I create first on Fiverr?

Full Show Notes: Multiplying Money, Morning Routines, and $100k Side Hustles: 20 Questions with Nick

319: Master, Multiply, and Monetize your Message: From Ranting in His Car to “Immortality”

“What I want is immortality,” Jack told me. “But I don’t want it in my name, I want it in actions of others.”

With the size of his audience today and the number of people he’s helped along the way, there is a very real chance of this happening.

Jack Spirko of is a little bit of a legend in the podcasting space, and he’s built a really cool and unique business on the back of his show–which of course started as a side hustle.

Actually, it started with him recording the first year and a half of episodes in his car on his commute to work!

For the last 10 years and 2300+ episodes, The Survival Podcast has covered topics related to “modern survival.” That is, things like growing your own food, generating your own power, and of course starting your own business.

Tune in to hear how Jack built an incredibly loyal and active listener base, how he started leveraging his audience to help grow his podcast, how he built his no-extra-content-required membership site model that drives 90% of his revenue, and his tips for starting and growing your own podcast and audience today.

Full Show Notes: Master, Multiply, and Monetize your Message: From Ranting in His Car to “Immortality”

318: Pinterest Marketing for 2019 and Beyond: How to Get More Traffic

With 250 million active users, Pinterest is a content discovery platform nearly every blogger and business owner should be spending some time on.

The Pinterest tactics shared on this podcast in late 2015 by Rosemarie Groner were extremely effective … for a while.

But I began to see declines in traffic, and today Pinterest brings in perhaps a quarter of the visitors it used to.

Still, I’m convinced I could be doing better on the platform to reach more people and help more people with my content.

Just like Google, a top-ranking pin can bring in consistent qualified traffic month after month after month.

But also like Google, there’s a certain science to the Pinterest algorithm.

To help me breathe new life into my account — and walk through how you can do the same even if you’ve never used Pinterest before, I invited Kate Ahl from SimplePinMedia.com to join me on the show.

She’s an expert on all things Pinterest marketing, and in this episode, she breaks down everything I’m doing wrong and what you and I should be doing instead to start reaching more people and driving more traffic.

Tune in to hear the right way to set up your profile, how to set up and optimize your pins and boards to increase your reach, and how to rank you content in Pinterest’s search results to drive more traffic to your site.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Pinterest Marketing for 2019 and Beyond: How to Get More Traffic

317: Licensing or Franchising a Business? How a School Nurse Started a 6-Figure Side Hustle

“It’s a business with training wheels,” Timika told me.

Timika Downes is a school nurse by day but was looking for ways to add income after hours, and ended up licensing someone else’s business idea.

Her side hustle is a lice clinic; a brick-and-mortar facility that helps parents and kids get rid of lice.

Not the most glamorous niche in the world, but Timika’s clinic did 6-figures in her first year, all on the side from her day job, and it now runs with little time investment from her.

The lice clinic is actually just one of several side hustles Timika has going on – she also co-hosts the House of FI podcast, blogs at ReluctantFrugalist.com, and she has 3 kids.

Her story is an interesting one. It highlights the differences between licensing and franchising a business, and Timika explains how you can leverage the support of a licensing company to get a business off the ground quickly.

Tune in to hear how Timika evaluated the risks and benefits of the licensing opportunity, how she drives business, and how she’s set this up to be a hands-off 6-figure business.

Full Show Notes: Licensing or Franchising a Business? How a School Nurse Started a 6-Figure Side Hustle

316: YouTube for Bloggers: From “Accidental” YouTube Channel to Full-Time Income

Meredith Marsh is a “total introvert with over 3 million views on YouTube.”

When Meredith started VidProMom.com she didn’t set out to be a “YouTuber”. She started a blog and YouTube channel because she wanted to help families better capture those classic, picture-perfect family moments.

What she discovered was “a pretty big gap in the whole video creation side of things for people who are creating videos for fun,” Meredith said.

She started creating a video series on how to use a GoPro and some of the software – and things quickly snowballed.

Her YouTube channel was getting more subscribers than all her other social media metrics and blog visitors added together – so it was obvious that YouTube was the ideal platform for her content.

A year after starting her channel Meredith left her day job, and her blog/YouTube channel that started as a side hustle is now her full-time job.

Tune in to hear how to set up your YouTube channel for success, how to master the YouTube algorithm to reach more people, and how to make money from your new video content.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: YouTube for Bloggers: From “Accidental” YouTube Channel to Full-Time Income

315: From Toy Guns to a Full-Time Business

“There was no safety net, it had to work,” Kelly told me.

Kelly Hardwick was talking about her business and blog, FemmeFataleAirsoft.co.uk.

It’s a site she built to write about her new hobby in airsoft, which Kelly described as a war games sport, like the Call of Duty video games in real life.

Kelly started playing airsoft regularly in 2014. However, she was disappointed with the lack of airsoft content online for women. “Be the change you want to see in the world, right?” she told me about why she started her blog. 

She started her blog along with an Instagram account, and it’s actually been her Instagram following that has become the linchpin of her business.

Her Instagram following has gone from 0-65k in less than 4 years, and it’s this popularity on Instagram that has helped her land paid guest posts, social media sponsorships, grow her social media management business, and secure other business opportunities.

Tune in to hear how Kelly has grown her audience from 0 to more than 60k followers, how she first monetized her blog, and how she develops profitable relationships with other companies in the airsoft space.

Full Show Notes: From Toy Guns to a Full-Time Business

314: The Simple Way to Finally Set up and Sell Your Online Course (And Scale to $40k a Month and Beyond)

After sitting in on a free webinar and seeing dozens of people buying a course about urban farming, Nate knew he could also create and sell his own course.

Nate Dodson of MicroGreensFarmer.com began urban farming initially to take greater control over the food he was eating and to combat Crohn’s disease.

But he soon found himself growing more than he could reasonably consume, so like any good entrepreneur, he started selling his produce – and specifically microgreens.

With a little bit of effort, he was selling $400 a week worth of microgreens to farmer’s market vendors, local restaurants, and home delivery in his town.

But Nate’s little side project has absolutely exploded in the last 2 years, and it hasn’t come from selling more produce. Instead, it’s come from teaching other people how to do what he did.

Today Nate is selling $40-50k worth of his microgreens business course a month, mostly on autopilot, and he’s followed a very straightforward path to get there that anyone can apply to their own business.

Tune in to hear how he created his product, how he drives consistent traffic, the simple sales funnel he uses to convert browsers into buyers, and the changes he’s made in his business to increase his revenue to $50k+ a month.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Simple Way to Finally Set up and Sell Your Online Course (And Scale to $40k a Month and Beyond)