Nick Loper (0:01)

It's time for the 10 best side hustles of the year. What's up, what's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. It's the entrepreneurship podcast. You can actually apply. Now the end of the year is upon us, which means it's time to reflect back on the side hustles that stood out, the ones that got people talking, the ones that I was most excited to share. Now, the mark of a good episode for me is when I hang up the call thinking like, dang, I need to drop what I'm doing and go do that. Whatever it was we just talked about, I could totally do that. I should totally do that. And I try and exercise some level of discipline and restraint because the shiny object syndrome is real. But when the shiny object shines for me, I know it's going to be a hit episode. So I have selected my top 10 for the year. If you're new to the show, I'll do my best to reference episode numbers so you can go back and check out the ones that you're interested in. I've also put all of those into a Spotify playlist that I will link up in the description. Make it easy to go add that to your device, and if you're a longtime listener, see if your favorites made the list. Which ones did I miss? There's room for debate in all of this. Best is always subjective. These are in mostly chronological and numerical order, starting at the beginning of the year with an absolute banger of an episode. The most downloaded episode of the year, almost 75,000 downloads to date, was Jackie Mitchell and her $100 per day side hustle challenge. This was episode 594, and Jackie broke down how she successfully earned over $10,000 in 100 days from her personal $100 per day challenge. A good chunk of that income came from what I would call plug and play side hustles. For example, she mentioned paid surveys. Mobile game testing through Swagbucks could be worthwhile if you like playing mobile games. Now, her best paying spot for surveys was through a platform called Prolific. Prolific is going to always be at the top of my list. This is a survey site that researchers use. A lot of times they're post grad students or medical researchers or psychological researchers, and they're paying pretty well per hour for short little surveys. So maybe it's a 10 minute survey, but it pays like $7. Well, that's really good if you break down in terms of an hourly. Yeah, exactly right. So Prolific gives you Mostly I would say 30 minute and under surveys. It's just prolific.com anyone can sign up. I do believe that they are often on a wait list because of demographics. I would say consistently when surveys are available I can make anywhere from like 10 to $30 a day doing that. 10 to 30 bucks a day. Nothing to sneeze at, especially if that is in alignment with your side hustle goals. Jackie also mentioned paid focus groups. Kind of few and far between, but can pay 50 to $200 an hour. I'll link up some of my favorite resources for those in the show notes@sidehustlenation.com bestof24 another side hustle she talked about was data annotation, which I ended up testing out myself as well. Data annotation is one that I would rate a 3 out of 5. Just as my disclaimer in terms of accessibility and kind of like is the work enjoyable to do? I would say most likely no. But but it pays well and it's an interesting site. So Data Annotation and I'll group another site remotasks are both in the business of training large language models. So AI think of things like Google Bard think of things like OpenAI ChatGPT. So a lot of it is kind of veiled to the workers in terms of like which ones you' your training and some of that is just because you're signing different disclosures. You're essentially freelancing for one of these major companies. But the majority of your work is going to be editing and classifying and fact checking large language model responses. So maybe you're given two responses from two different versions of a language model, you're fact checking it for accuracy that it's not making up information you're looking at. If it was too verbose, did it run on and just give you way too much information that it didn't really need to give you? Was the grammar okay? Stuff like that. So there's a lot of different subsets within both Remotest and Data Annotation. You can get put on a lot of different tasks. There's more specific ones for people who code, which I know pay a ton, which is amazing if you code. I don't. Every time I see a qualification pop up for that I wish I did. But typically these will pay anywhere from 15 to 25 an hour in my experience. Okay. It's not bad. It's not nothing. No, I don't think so. No. What's the primary site that you're doing this through? Data annotation Is the name of the site? Yep. Data Annotation. Dataannotation Tech, yeah. Okay. The one that I signed up for was remote tasks to try and check it out. And I was almost deterred. It was like, I gotta do it for the blog post, I gotta stick through this. But like the onboarding process took probably a couple hours worth of training. Things like you had to do an editing task. Like that's easy enough. Like, okay, I would cross out this sentence or this is the way I would phrase that instead to be more concise or whatever. But then you had to come up with a prompt response on your own. And there was one that was factual. Make an argument for XYZ. I forget what he's like, why should we cut NASA's budget or something. Okay, well, people are starving so the money would be better allocated. You can make that argument. But the other one was a fiction response or a creative response. And that one was like, dang. I was really proud of what I came up with in the end, but 500 words. It was pretty decent sized. What I considered the opening of a book, but it was almost through the towel. This is pretty time consuming. Yeah, I feel that way. Data annotation is super similar and to my understanding, they really do screen out a lot of people through that test. Which is not to say that you pass because you have X, Y, Z. It is heavily geared towards people who enjoy long form writing, who enjoy fact checking and editing, who have very strong grammar skills. I think data annotation says something like grammar and writing skills and like critical reasoning are the things that they look for. So you don't have to have degrees, anything like that. But it is grueling work. So I don't know how far you got into remotests after that, but people who come to my page and say like, I took the data annotation test, that was awful. I can't wait to get in. I'm like, well, that's all that it is though. That's exactly what you're. If you take the test and you don't like it, that's all the prompts and all the work. Once I was accepted into remotasks, I earned 15 bucks for my first hour of actual annotation work, which isn't bad if that's something that you might like to do. I'll link up my full remote tasks review in the show notes as well. Again, side hustlenation.combestof24 I just got a kick out of the whole episode with Jackie, so make sure to go back and check that one out if you missed it, episode 594 in your podcast player app. Moving on to number two. And I should add that this list isn't in order from best to worst or anything like that. I'm just going in the order that the episodes aired. But number two is website rentals. And this was a unique side hustle shared in episode 597, where the name of the game is to build out a descriptive website for a local niche service. I want to say concrete driveway repair in Wellington, New Zealand was one that we talked about as one example. But you know, niche service plus location. Step two, get that site ranking in Google, open up your local SEO playbook, do what works there. And then number three, where the side hustle comes in or step three is to rent out that site to a qualified local service provider who's hungry for more leads. In some cases, these sites can rent for 500 to 1,000 to maybe 1,500 bucks per month or maybe even more depending on the traffic and the customer value. And they're relatively hands off. Once you've got a service provider in place, they'll handle the inbound customer inquiries and you're just in charge of making sure the site stays at the top of Google. This is Meow Rios describing what makes a good niche for this rank and rent model. I like something that's service based, that you don't have a storefront, basically like a plumber, the concrete guy or roofer, you go to the client side to work. So it's not that people coming to your office. So service based business. The second one is I really like those high ticket type of work like concrete driveways, patios, earthwork, demolition, roofing. Nothing sexy, nothing sexy. But those niche work, they work and that's because the value of these jobs is worth quite a bit to the service provider. And so just like if we can get more leads in, if we can book up our calendar, then yeah, it's worthwhile. We'll just add this to our monthly marketing budget. Yeah, exactly. I've done the smaller niche like handyman. I probably would not do handyman again. Having said that, I have a handyman site that's producing lots of lots of leads and business has been with me since the beginning when I started business. So. And sometimes like a smaller niche, like a gather cleaning can be good because, because it's high volume, so you get like a 60 to 90 leads per month. But the thing with gutter cleaning is sometimes you start a job with gutter cleaning and you find out the gutter needs repair, the roof needs a repair, the roof needs repaint. So a small job can turn into a bigger job. You just never know. So but my personal favorite is still a bigger ticket niche. Do you like to go deep in one location or deep in one niche? Or like it's really a matter of like trying to find the sweet spot of I'm going to do carpet cleaning in Dallas and then I'm going to build out all these other niches for Dallas or I'm going to go do carpet cleaning in 100 different cities. There's two ways to tackle this. So if it's a big city, like with a population of a million and above, I like to go either niche down. So for example, if it's concrete, I don't do all concrete. I just specialize at certain type of concrete either as a stem concrete or concrete, concrete resurfacing or concrete driveway. So you have to be the specialist in the service that you provide. I found you get a lot more success than just do something every general in the big city now. Okay, the bigger the city, the more niche down. Yeah. So niche down for a big city. And if it's a big city also you can, let's say for New York City it's just too big. So you have to niche down to a different boroughs like Manhattan or Brooklyn or Queensland, Long Island. So yeah, either niche down to the specialized area or niche down to the local area. So that's a general rule. I found anything above 50k should work. The population wise, I'm talking about 400k. Population wise seems to be very sweet spot. So it's not a big city. Your local competition is not that strong. And you have enough volume, the population produce enough leads, enough search volume that is going to help you to rent the site out. Okay, cool. And I swear I was on Wikipedia at one point, like here's the list of cities with population, you know, 100,000 to 250,000. Or you could probably just ask ChatGPT at this point, like come up with this list for me and there's a potential starting point. Anything else that goes. So I'm trying to cross reference these cities. Am I looking at the local competition yet or am I? Yes, one thing I'm doing, I'll just actually give you an example that just shows you the initial research. Sometimes it's not about what you provide, is has to be good enough, is about your competition. So I'll give you an example of two sites I built one is a. That's in Wellington, the capital city in New Zealand. On the data shows that the landscaping business has a huge demand, very high volume. The keyword difficulty is medium. So you have the local competition. So I thought given that how much demand I'm going to build a site for landscaping. A few months down the track the site is ranking. However, the quality of leads and the number of leads are not great. So we still producing the leads, but it's just not ideal. So what I did is I built a specialized. So I work at this landscaping company and they do all the paving, concrete, artificial grass retaining everything. And then what we did is we found the concrete driveway in the local area. There's no company just do concrete driveway. There's a lot of landscaping company. There's a lot of concrete company just does a very general general contractor. But no company does concrete driveway. So I built a site for concrete driveway in Wellington and that site blew up. It's completely blew up. So what happened is this contractor. If a client want a concrete driveway down in front of the house, sometimes they're going to do the backyard. They need a retaining or again they need paving work again. So is finding the right market to get into, therefore dominate. So you are still providing the same service. However, it is extremely important to actually pick the niche that with very little competition. Interesting. So it was the landscaping company that was doing the driveways. Yes. So that's the same. It's the same company. The local landscaping company. There are a few big one that have a good name. So they dominate the market. So it's very hard for someone small to medium business to just get into the market. Because when people think about landscape landscaping, there's a big name out there. But if you change your arena to the concrete driveway, well, no company is doing that like specializing that. So it's just really easy to get into. And you ended up getting all the landscaping work but through the right channel. That's really interesting. Trying to find that back door, that side door into the place. Like we. It's maybe it's number six on our menu of service offerings. But if I try to rank for general landscaping, it's really tough. But if I try and rank for. For concrete driveways. Paving. Yeah. A different just. Yeah. Okay. Specialized niche. Yeah. Meow mentioned looking at Semrush data for keyword difficulty and trying to find those keywords with a Difficulty score under 20. This is a metric of competitiveness. How hard it's going to be to rank for a certain keyword combination of service plus location that is episode 597 in your podcast feed. Really interesting one. And where it's really common to stack a bunch of these sites together to form a really strong income that's somewhat diversified and somewhat predictable. Month after month you've got recurring revenue. I mean, if your client is making money from your leads, it's a service that they're unlikely to cancel. And if you've got the skills to build one of these sites and get it up and running, you can rinse and repeat in a new niche or a new city. I forget how many Meow had, but I want to say it was 20 or more. So we got more of the best side Hustles of the year coming up right after this. Running a business is hard. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it, right? You got a to do list a mile long and a dozen different hats to wear. Well, here's a resource to help lighten your load. I'm excited to partner with Gusto for this episode as they've been one of the most recommended services by guests over the years. Gusto is the easy, affordable online payroll, HR and benefits tool for modern small businesses. In fact, they help over 300,000 businesses like yours take the pain out of tasks like payroll tax filing, direct deposit, health insurance administration, 401k benefits, onboarding tools and more. Whether your team is 1099 or W2 or a combination of both, of course, do your own due diligence. Check out the reviews online and I think you'll find some common threads in the comments about ease of use, great customer support and great value. And here's the deal. To help you get started or to make the switch from another provider side Hustle show listeners get three months free. Just go to Gusto.com Sidehustle to start setting up your business today and you'll see what I mean when I say easy. Again, that's three months of free payroll@gusto.com Sidehustle that's gusto G-S-T-O.com Sidehustle the next episode that really got people talking, including my then 10 year old neighbor, was number 599 on how to start a vending machine business. I mean these are literally money making robots that can make you passive sales when you're not around. So I get the appeal. I hung up the call saying like man, I want to start a vending machine business. Now the challenge is finding the right location with a hungry crowd. This is Mike Hoffman from that episode explaining what makes A good location and how we might make that pitch. Oh, it's super easy. I think the first thing is the examples you just rattled off. So senior center and let's say an apartment complex. The thing they all have in common is they have a front desk person that works there. So you can just roll right in there. They're not going to know you from anyone else. And you can just say, hey, is your general manager or your property manager in today? And if she's like, oh, no, you ask for the business card and send an email. But yeah, that's exactly what I did. That first location I landed, I was like, hey, is your manager in? And she happened to be in. She's like, oh, my gosh, come in with COVID We can't put out refreshments. Blah, blah, blah. We want to move forward. It's just such a low barrier to entry. By just doing that pop in, your ask was like, tell me about your current vending situation. Like, what's that line? Yeah, or just like, do you want to provide modern amenities? And then you just start asking questions about foot traffic to qualify them. So how many people live here? Or how many units are here? And they'll say, okay, Nick, there's 200 units. And then you're like, okay, well, how many people live in those units? Because some might be two or three bedroom. They're like, oh, 400 people. Like, right away, you're sitting on a 1500 to two grand gold mine. Just with that, is there a minimum residency or occupancy that you're looking for? Yeah, we like to target 100 units as a minimum or 100 plus employees. Okay, 100 residential units or 100 employees. It's hard to imagine an office building without this in there already. But you're finding, like, this building has been here for 25 years. No one has ever asked us about vending before. You know, that's a great idea. Like, does that happen all the time? And in fact, what you'd be really surprised about is we're taking over a lot of the market. So current user, let's say that location, they probably already have vending machines that aren't being stocked because the baby boomer generation doesn't use a cell phone. The only way they can track inventory is driving by the property, where, like, on my phone across the country, I can look at all my vending machines, even my micro market in Philadelphia, and see what I've done in sales in the last hour. So then I can get ahead of what needs stocked before it actually shows up empty customer facing of like, okay, we've sold eight out of 10 salads. We have two left. We need to backfill those salads. Where right now these places taking over for they either have vending machines that are broken, they have vending machines that don't allow credit card usage. Well, guess what, 80% of your sales are going to be with card, not cash anymore. Yeah. So it's not so much that they have never considered vending, it's that their existing provider is not living up to expectations or it could be doing better. Yeah, it's like either that existing provider took on a bigger. Let's say the coke provider of Washington has vending as a side service. Well, is that coke provider more worried about topping off the cafeteria with coke in the school or are they more worried about the teacher's lounge vending machine? A good location with the right product mix can earn 500 bucks a month. You place 10 of these machines, you got yourself a $5,000 a month side hustle. I think Mike had 10 or 15 when we spoke and maybe a couple employee less automated micro markets as kind of the next stage of the business. Now you still got to stock the machines. It's not totally passive, but you can find people to help with that and that's a good problem. If you need to restock, it means you moved some inventory to learn more. Definitely. Check out that episode with mike number 5 99. We talk startup costs, logistics, all that jazz. And he's helping other people get started in this world as well. @vendingpreneurs.com kind of tricky to spell. I will link that up in the show notes for this Episode again@sidehustlenation.com BestOf2 4. The Next Side hustle I want to highlight is one that you probably drive by every day without even thinking about it. That is until you heard episode 608 with Chris Brown. Chris runs a billboard business in Arkansas that generates thousands of dollars a month in again, relatively passive income. Now, just like real estate and like vending machines, it's all about location and the level of local competition that dictate how much you can charge. Here's Chris describing his first billboard deal and how much it made. Yeah, the first deal was very interesting. So he was just willing to get out. He actually showed me the invoice of his cost to put it in the ground, what he had on it that included the land. He didn't even want the land or anything. He was about to go bankrupt. So he really didn't care. Oh, okay. So he actually showed that to me. So that was $75,000, which again, I didn't know that the point was a great deal, but it was a great deal and I was able to purchase that from him and he sold it to me. It's right in the middle of a intersection. So it's literally surrounded by three roads. People have to drive underneath the billboard, which is very interesting and was a little concerning. So I actually had to get the city to sign off on it to say, hey, look, we're good with it staying. Because I was really not sure about that if they were going to make it take down or not and didn't want to buy something and if that was going to happen. So it did get hit a few times. Oh, my God. Like by a really tall truck or something. Yes, yes. Because the original road did not actually have the road that went underneath it. So people would normally have curved around it and then they added, this is on my property, but it never was addressed. And so it started out as like a little dirt cut through. And then people, they paved it and it became a main part of the road. Interesting. So really, really interesting spot. Yes. It's a combination of this real estate play plus a media play. How many eyeballs, like, am I going to get over here? They go to turn around and then sell that ad inventory. Okay, so 75 grand for the land and the structure to go out there. And then you go out and try and find a new advertiser for it. What happens next? Yeah, so once I acquired it, I actually then did. I called up a few local businesses and said, hey, I had some friends that own businesses, some heating and air companies, some furniture companies, some car dealerships. And I said, hey, would you guys be interested? And it was on the middle of a great location. It was kind of a random spot right by a bunch of neighborhoods where you wouldn't expect a billboard. So they jumped on it. And some of those people are still advertising today. And that was in 2011. So we're talking 13 years later. They still have the same advertisers on a few of them. Okay. Yeah. Long term. I mean, yeah, if they're seeing a positive ROI on it. Yeah, just keep it rolling. Yes. Because there's three elementary schools and junior highs and high schools right by it. So it's a great location. So that's how I got the first one is I'm driving around, I found one, decided I kind of wanted it. I was already looking for real estate itself. So I was into single family flips. I was into land acquisition and commercial property and multi family. But then I saw that and I thought about it was a very interesting way to play the land game. Or as just a different play to own the business, have the media, and have the passive income from the billboards themselves. What'd you end up selling the first spot on that first billboard for? Yeah, so each spot on the billboard. So that first billboard had four billboards on it for signs. Each one of those was about $600 each. That was the first day I had no idea how to price them. So what I did was just called some of the other billboards around and said, all right, what are you guys pricing these at? Because I just acted like an interested billboard buyer and they were glad to tell me what their rates were. And so I was able to find that and give that deal to people. I just wanted them full to cover my cost on that so that I would have just some positive cash flow coming in every month. A four sided thing or it's like one of these mechanic rotating type of deal. Yeah, it was a top and a bottom on both sides. So it was a good old fashioned. There was four static billboards. Yeah, so we call them static. So in billboards there's static, there's digital, and then there's actually tri vision. But most are static or digital. So you have just the ones that are flat. They don't change. They say the same 24 7. And then you have the digital that actually then rotate in as a LED screen. The one that's closest to us that I can think of. I think it. So it's two sided. Right. So you get people going both directions. And I want to say it. There's two different advertisers on each side. Like it somehow flips and then every now and again. Yep. So then there's a tri vision. So those actually flip. Yeah, the slats get broken. It's just like half of one and half of the other stuff. Okay. But four signs, 600 bucks each. We're at $2,400 a month in income there. Okay. And so then penciled that against the acquisition costs. And I have learned to not do math on air, but that's close to $29,000 for the year. Which pencils out ROI is about three. Yeah. Three years. And you're breaking even on that purchase cost. Total purchase cost. Yeah. Paid back in three. Okay. I promise you'll never look at billboards the same way again. Again. That was episode 608 with Chris Brown. Really interesting side hustle that's equal parts real estate and media. Next on my list is one that I shared with a ton of people just because of the novelty factor. I never knew this was a thing. And that was Cheryl DeFrank's photo organizing business in episode 619. In that episode, she said she had more than enough work to keep herself busy full time and that the average rate is around a hundred bucks an hour and that the average project could be 20 hours or more. It seems like a relatively low competition side hustle. Like there simply aren't that many service providers doing this yet. And there's a novelty factor when you strike up a conversation about it. Sheryl did her first project for free to get the hang of it, which gave her the confidence to go after paid photo organizing work. Here's how she described getting the business off the ground. I just started talking to friends and my first actual paying client was another friend who just said, hey, can you help me out with the photos on my phone? Cause they're such a mess. I know I've got so many duplicates. Everybody has tons of duplicates. It was a relatively small project, but I helped her out and she was grateful. And then she just started talking to other people. A lot of people would say to start with friends and family and that's a good idea. I mean, they obviously will already kind of have a certain amount of faith in you and already want to support you, but it can also be a little bit hard to work with friends and family. So I kind of started spreading the word as quickly as possible. I'm on a neighborhood listserv, so which is kind of like next. It's basically an email listserv. All the families in my kids school are on a listserv, all the people that belong to our pool are on another listserv, and so on. So you've got all these different kind of groups either. I would post something about my services and sometimes there's rules about self promotion, but either I would post something or a friend would post something for me. Kind of maybe even a scripted thing like hey, you guys wouldn't believe this person I found to organize all your photos and give her a call. And of course now years later, my previous clients will post things on their own listservs. So just the word kind of spreads. And the phone hasn't really stopped ringing in 10 years based on just kind of word of mouth. I always say, like someone told me early on, and this is probably true in every Business. Someone told me early on to put your company name and kind of a little tagline and what you do at the bottom of every single email you write, no matter who you're sending it to, whether it's a business email or not. Yeah. And it's not a new concept, but in my case, because it is so unique, I'll send an email to somebody about my son's lacrosse game or something, or lacrosse team, and they'll see what I'll do and they'll write me back having nothing to do with lacrosse but say, wait, what is that you do? I see you're a photo orgator. Like, what's that? And then might turn into a job, might turn into a project. It's a conversation starter, if nothing else. And we've talked about that. It absolutely is that email signature space. Underutilized marketing, real estate. Exactly. I was assuming this was going to be almost all digital, but when starting locally, I guess maybe it is in person. So it's that box in the attic. It's like the physical pictures. And so it. Does it need to be kind of a local radius for it? It's both. It's really both. The three main areas of photo organizing. Number one is the print photos. These are usually maybe older families that still have print photos in the attic. You know, it's a mess. They've been hiding up there for years. And so they'll give me the boxes of print photos for me to organize and sort. And usually it's chronologically for the most part, because there is a physical exchange there. Those are usually local clients. But I've had people mail me boxes and boxes of photos from other places. So that's one area. And then the other area is digital photo organizing, which is again, the photos on the phone and the hard drives and all those little camera cards that we have in all kinds of drawers around the house and so on, that clients also have no idea where everything is or what's on these hard drives. So in that case, again, it certainly can be local. But then you can have people either send me hard drives or sometimes, for instance, and we'll log into their online storage. So for instance, I can log into a person's icloud or a person's Google Photos or something, obviously with their permission, and organize straight online and never meet the client in person. And then the third aspect, which is kind of one of the main areas, is scanning or digitizing photos. There's certain photo organizers that just do that. So they just do scanning and they don't really even do the sorting process. So there's lots of different aspects and then there's other kind of offshoots, like just creating photo books. There are certain organizers, their specialty is creating photo books for all kinds of different events or slideshows, kind of anything having to do with photos that a lot of people either just have no idea how to do or don't want to spend the time figuring it out, or the other thing too is working with your own photos. Whatever you're doing, whether you're sorting them, whether you're creating a slideshow, trying to pick the photos for the slideshow is a very emotional process when you're working with your own photos. So what I tell clients, which is true, is there's no emotion for me, so I can do it much, much faster and I'm not reliving my son's three year birthday party in the process and so on. What do you think? Is this a side hustle you could take action on? Would you hire a photo organizer yourself again? Episode 6 with Sheryl to get the full scoop on her unique service business. I selected the next side hustle on this list because it's the one I probably tell more people to start than any other, and that's software consulting. The specific example I want to highlight from this year is Christie Da Silva from Da Silva Life. Christy's built a really strong brand and business specializing in support for two different software tools, Honeybook and ClickUp. The reason I like this model so much is you don't have to create demand from scratch. If you find the right software, maybe it's one you're an early user of, you're a fan of. They'll likely be heavily investing in growing their user base. A lot of times these companies have raised venture capital and they're investing in user acquisition, customer acquisition. So if you can create content to help those people, those new customers, it's easy to get found. Or at least easier than shouting into the void of the Internet without piggybacking on some built in search volume around the name of a specific software, like Cristy does with Honeybook and ClickUp. The other reason it's so powerful is by niching down and becoming a sought after expert in a specific software is the pricing power that comes with it. I started my rates a lot lower than other people may have been charging because I'm like, I'm not like a top tier expert yet, but I know that I know a lot more about these products than the people that I'm serving and these softwares than the people that I'm serving. And so I was still able to charge more technically hourly. Except a lot of our stuff is flat right now. For example. Yeah. Making about 30 to 40 bucks an hour as a VA where now I charge $300 an hour for a strategy session. Like so crazy that jump. But now being an expert in this for four years, it's really cool to see. It is really cool to see. She 10X'ed her hourly rate by niching down from generalist to specialist. And how does she find customers? Well, in most cases they find her. That's what's cool about this. She creates helpful keyword targeted Q and a content for YouTube and invites viewers to take the next step, either scheduling a call or downloading some free resources. Here's how she described the YouTube strategy. Strategy. We get the majority of our leads from YouTube and I will say like probably 80% of the time, people come on, they're like, oh my gosh, it's so nice to meet you. I've been subscribed to your channels for like two or three years and they feel like they already know me even though I have no idea who they are yet. It's funny because it's a huge thing in sales. Is that like, no. Like and trust factor. And we already solved that piece before we even ever get on a sales call. Yeah. You're showing your face, your voice. Yeah. You build a lot of trust that way. Deciding what type of content to make. Any sort of keyword research tools or search volume that goes into it. I'm just looking at broad Google searches, 400,000 monthly searches for ClickUp and then 60,000 for Honeybook. And so there's some decent top level search volume. But then I imagine it kind of goes into that long tail for like how to run your agency in Honeybook, like more specific type of searches. We actually really love Vidiq. We were using TubeBuddy for a while and then we started getting into Vidiq. They have some really cool things with like AI and their platform is a bit more robust, I feel. We look at our channel and we do quarterly content planning. We do yearly at a high level and then we do quarterly and we try to do like themed content, like themed months. And now we're starting to get into like different series and we'll look at what performed best on our channels or like what's ranking highest. Like for example, our ClickUp Dashboards video was ranking highest for like a long time. Our how to use Honeybook and ClickUp, like yearly videos, like in 2024. Those always do really well as well. So we're like, okay, we'll always do those in the beginning of the year, but we'll look back at our previous content. What's highly ranking, knowing people want more of that, and then we'll really just start doing long tail keyword research in Vidiq, you know, kind of going down a rabbit hole of like, okay, how are these ranking in terms of search volume and things like that? Is there a minimum search volume that is interesting to you or worthwhile to make the video about? It's more of like how it scores in Vidiq. I think we're looking over like a 60 or 70 ranking, which is a combination of volume and competitiveness. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so we also speaking of competitiveness, we'll definitely do competitor research as well because we have like a few competitors. We're very niche, but we absolutely have competitors. And so we'll look at their channels, what's ranking high on their channels? And by no means do we ever just copy their video, but we'll be like, okay, cool, they did something on this specific topic. How can we do something similar but have our own spin? And so we'll do that research as well. Again, this is something you can replicate across any number of different niches. We've seen examples of people doing this with Asana, with QuickBooks, with FreshBooks, with Salesforce, with Excel, with different WordPress themes and plugins. It's one that is ripe for replication. Be sure to check out the full episode number 627 with Cristy to learn more. The rest of our best side hustles of the year are coming up up right after this. This year I was lucky enough to connect with a pair of Jacks. Jack Fleming and Jack Linebach. Both really inspiring young college aged entrepreneurs. Jack Fleming had built up his lawn mowing and yard care service to 70 grand in profit as a teenager and ended up selling off a portion of the business. It was a great story. Starting out pushing the lawnmower up and down the sidewalk I think starting at 13 years old and then continuing to level up and bid bigger and more complex projects. That was episode 610. And a little bit later in the year in episode 630, we met Jack Limebach who had a similar local service business, only instead of lawn mowing, it was window washing. When we recorded, Jack was about to start his sophomore year in college but was already selling ten grand worth of window washing every Month. Now, like the other Jack, the business started out by going door to door. And that worked, but it was tedious. And if you've ever gone cold calling, you know, you deal with a lot of rejection and sometimes just flat out rude people. So it was when Jack layered on a level of online advertising and combined that with some better equipment when the business really started to blow up. Made my first Instagram ad. And I posted on. I posted it on Facebook, I posted on Instagram. Facebook didn't do very good. So I just, I took it off Facebook, kind of put all the money towards Instagram, and I was just spending $10 a day, like, really nothing. And then I was knocking on the side of it. But just that one ad, after spending $600, it generated me $10,000 in revenue just from the ad. And that doesn't even include the word of mouth I got from it or, you know, recurring customers, whatever it is. But the return on investment on online advertising is huge. Wow, that's crazy because it's probably, like super location targeted. Probably. I imagine you, like, want to target homeowners, you know, above average income level. You could probably set it really, really targeted. Yeah, there's a bunch of little, little things you can add in. Like, I want it to be a woman that's 35 to 65, and I want it to be right in my area. But in, in all these ads, the super important part is. So I made a video. They were all super funny. I tried to make them, like, super entertaining to listen to. But the most important part was right at the beginning, I'd say, hey, Evergreen. Or hey, Auburn. That way people know I'm talking to them. And they're not just gonna skip it because they see the send message which shows it's an ad. So they're not just going to skip it right away. And they actually might listen because they know I'm targeting it right to them. And then I'm going to throw in a joke a little bit after. So, for example, for my Auburn ad, I posted this one about six days ago, and I've just. I put in 60 bucks into it. I've already booked $2,500 worth of jobs with it. It's been doing super good. But what I said, I said, hey, Auburn. There's a huge epidemic going around the Auburn and Opelika area. Your windows are looking like this or this or this. And it's going to cause some serious permanent damage that's going to seriously lower your property value. And then, you know, I did this funny little transition right where I did a little jump and I went from my, my normal clothes to like my uniform with my belt on. And you know, people love that. But then I have all these moms texting me and they're like, or dming me and they say, hey, like I love a quote. And then you get there and then you do your spiel. Okay. Okay. So that's the. They call the action of the. I love that. There's a huge epidemic of dirty windows going around. And then you show the visual your link and then you can see people look it up there. It's like, yeah, when was the last time those were clean? So then the call to action is message me for a quote or message me to schedule an appointment. Yeah. So at the very end, I tell them all the services I do and I say, I know you need at least one of these done. So give me a text. And I like point up and then my number pops up. But most people just DM me and it says at the bottom, like the whole time you're reaching, it says send message. And then they can just send a message and it's super duper easy. Most people just say, hey, I'd love a quote. And then maybe they send their address and I say, okay, I'll be there tomorrow, blah, blah. And then they're like, oh, that's super easy. Okay. How cool. What a great return on investment on that. And then while you're out on the job, of course there's opportunity to go get some warm or semi warm leads from the neighbors. Hey, we're working on so and so's house next door and try and turn one job into two. Yeah. So typically how we structure our business plan for the day is we schedule one house from an ad or that we've knocked on on a previous day. And we schedule one house per day, like per morning or which. Whenever we start working. And then when we get to that house, normally one person starts cleaning while the other goes knocking to line up the rest of the day. And that's how we're able to fill up our schedule so often just because we already have that name and so we can say, oh, Michelle down the road, like that's where we're at. And that builds that level of trust. Okay. It's. You're more likely to land the client. Yeah. Leaning on the job that you were able to book and then being able to. To say, as soon as we're done there, we'll come over here versus well, let's let's book it. Like, well, you know, the motivation might wane if you. If you wait too long. We're only going to schedule one per day and then trust and hope that we can get some more jobs to fill up the schedule. Yeah, when people are calling you out, usually they got a couple people that are asking for a quote, and so you're trying to just beat those other people. But when you're doing door to door, you know, there's that appeal of the homeowner to just, like, get it done right away. And so, you know, you're not really competing with other people. And the homeowner just loves the fact that, like, okay, these guys can do it in literally an hour. They can get me a price in 30 seconds. Like, I might as well just hear the price and then, you know, if I want it done today, like, that'd be great. What both Jacks showed me was that the money's out there if you're willing to go and get it. And maybe they had the advantage of youth when knocking on doors, but I still think there's a big opportunity in local home services. Lawn care, window washing, house cleaning, car detailing, gutter cleaning, you name it. Another side hustle I just couldn't help but tell people about was Wayne Semenoff's junk land flipping business, highlighted in episode 629. Wayne holds the record as the most experienced side Hustle show guest at age 81 when we recorded. And he said he's been doing his unique land business for the last 40 years. Now, the name of the game here is to find these unwanted, unloved vacant parcels. Maybe they've got title issues. Maybe they're too small to get a building permit. Maybe there's no sewer or septic. Wayne picks a handful of these up every year at the tax auction, or sometimes is able to make a deal with the seller before the public sale, and then opens up his bag of tricks and works with city hall to make the lot buildable. It's more like legal and red tape work than it is bulldozers and hammers. But if you can get that stamp of approval for a building permit, all of a sudden that lot is worth 10 to 100 times what he paid for it. And the key to it is pretty simple. Generally, junk land is junk because you can't build on it. But I found there is like seven tools you can use to change junk land into buildable land. And one is like variances. You get a variance to. To a variance from the building code or let's say you need a boundary line adjustment or title problems or whatever the problem is on the property. If you can isolate that problem and then correct it, your value dramatically increases a hundred times. I mean like literally a hundred times. I'll give you an example of that as a I bought a property a year ago in Issaquah, which is a really hot area. Bought a half acre lot with water, sewer, power, road access right across street from Target, and I paid a thousand dollars for it. And then the reason I bought it for a thousand dollars is the guy who had owned it for like 20 years couldn't sell it to anybody because they had a title problem. He couldn't get clear title from the title insurance company. So he was going to let it go on the tax sale. So I called him before the tax sale and I said, hey, are you going to let it go in the tax sale? And he says, yes, I'm going to let it go in the tax sale. I go, well, I'll buy it from you, you know, and don't let it go in the tax sale. And I said, I'll give you $500 for it. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, you think I'm crazy. And I said, well, how much do you want for it? He goes, I'll take $1,000 for it. I need to pause and say like, you know, any piece of land just given the path of development in this area is worth significantly more than even a thousand dollars. So you're thinking, he's like, hey dude, don't lowball me, come on, I know what I'm sitting on. But he's like, I didn't really want that much more. It always shocks me and I always come back, do that lowball thing. And they always come back with low, low counteroffers. And so he said, if you write, if you send me $1,000, I'll sign over the deed to you. And so him and his sister owned it. So I got his sister and him to sign it and we did. I just sent him the deed electronically and then I, I venmoed him the money. So he had the money immediately and then he just sent it back to me and I had a deal. So then I took this gorgeous piece of land, right now it's zoned for one unit in that area. Like one unit of land is worth $500,000, one housing unit. And so I went to my attorney and I said, I need to do a quiet title on fear of this title. And I looked into what the problems were on the title and I found some supporting data to give to the attorney to make the quiet title action go smoother. And it took him four and a half months. And at the end of four and a half months he gave me clear title and I got a title report that says I'm the sole owner of the property and nobody else can challenge it. And now today that thousand dollar Property is worth 500,000 right now, yeah. So you have $1,000 into it plus some legal fees. Yeah, I had it cost me 15,000 for the clear clearing the title. So for $16,000 I'm going to make 500,000. Right. Wow, that sounds pretty good. Right, that, that would get people on their toes. Right. But that's not enough. Okay, so this lot is subdividable. So I'm applying for a short subdivision. I'm going to split the lot in two and two lots, okay, in that area are worth a million dollars. So in four months from now, when the short subdivision's over in Issaquah, I'll have two separate lots and I'll have a million dollars worth of land for about $25,000 total investment. I'll have a million dollar property. Now there's a lot to unpack here, but it was such an interesting conversation and Wayne just happened to be local to me. It definitely got me looking at some vacant parcels nearby. I think the side hustle might be best. If you've got a little bit of legal background, maybe a little bit of real estate background, you enjoy a little bit of a treasure hunt. And I got the impression that at this stage of his life, Wayne's just in it for the game, the thrill of the big win. And I could be wrong on that, but that was my impression. Episode 629, fascinating one. Definitely check it out. And I think what I love most about my job is even 11 years into the show, I'm still coming across people like Wayne, people like Cheryl, people like Chris with the billboard business, who've got businesses never heard of, never thought about before. Number nine on our list of the best side hustles of the year is Debbie Gartner's digital products business on Etsy. This is episode 637. This episode stood out to me for a few reasons. First, it's low risk, low overhead. It's a business where you can sell the same product to multiple different customers. That always appeals to me. Second, it wasn't an overnight hit. It took Debbie a couple years of admittedly very part time effort to Build the business to $1,000 a week or around $4,000 a month. I think a lot of people will see that result, but not the slow, consistent asset building effort that it took to get there. And third, what was maybe most interesting to me was her product idea generation methods, which went all the way back to her as a kid thinking, well, what did she really like to do? Just like with blogging, you start with, what do you know, what do you like, and how can you leverage that? So the simplest thing, like a blood pressure, one page, you know, tracker is all I did. I did other things like that. And then I started getting into games because I've always loved games. So I created a July 4th trivia game just because I had a blog post on my website that was for July 4th fireworks, you know, in my county. So I did that. And of course, it was, I don't know, November, so it wasn't very relevant. Oh, okay. You got to skate where the puck is going. Right. Okay. Come come July, there's going to be some demand for this. Okay. Exactly. So then I said, okay, I made it done, but it proves to me that there's an opportunity here. So now let me do another trivia game. So I did a trivia game for Thanksgiving, and then I said, okay, well, there's Hanukkah and there's Christmas, and you just keep going through all the different holidays. I would do that. I would do different games. And I just had fun with that because it was really interesting. I just enjoyed it. There was the solar eclipse this year, so I did several solar eclipse games. So whatever is kind of of the moment or coming up, let's call it two to three months in advance, I would do it, and then I would just keep doing different things I was interested in or that I wanted to learn more about. And that's kind of how I did it. At some point, I had this realization that when I was younger, like in high school, I had this conversation with one of my friends in math class. You know, like, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I told them I wanted to be a puzzle master. Okay. Okay. You know, like Will Shorts does. Except at that point in time, Will Shorts, I didn't know who he was. He wasn't anyone famous, But I'm like, I want to do something like that, but there's no such job. So I just went to college and had a regular job. Yeah, like a virtual escape room coordinator or. That's a really interesting one. I had a similar, because now you're making money doing that. Like, taking it back to high school. I had my job shadow day would have been junior. Senior year was going down to the sports broadcast Office for Channel 5 in Seattle. And I was like, yeah, it's super irrelevant to what I'm doing today. And then, then my buddy was like, you're kind of in media. That seems actually pretty relevant. So I was like, oh, it's kind of this weird full circle moment of. Yeah, I guess that kind of is broadcast media in a way. Exactly. There's so many things I've done in my life in different jobs and different courses I took in college or high school or just continuing ed courses or hobbies or anything. And so then I just kept going through my brain, like, what do I. Like, what am I interested in? And then I would try to understand, is there a need for whatever that is. Do a little bit of keyword research, try some stuff out. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. Then do more of what works, like rinse and repeat. And that's basically what it is. So I'm picturing, like, trivial game, like Trivial Pursuit, where I've got a bunch of these cards. I got these card question cards that people are cutting out at home. It's just like a big list, like, tell me just like a little bit of the structure of what the product looks like. Exactly. So you can't use Trivial Pursuit because that's a trademark, but you can take games like that or something else and call them something else and make sure you don't use the trade colors of them or anything like that. But yes, that's exactly the idea. And what happens is, when you make some products, Essie recommends other products that are like this, and you kind of can't help but notice other games. So as I start creating more games, I see more games that are available, and then I try those, and then some work, some don't. And then whichever ones of those work, I make more of those. And then I get more suggestions and then it gets my brain going. Because I am not naturally a creative person. Like, not at all. I don't know. Give yourself some credit. You've been creating content on the Internet for 14 years here. Well, you get better at it. So the point is, you don't need to be creative. My mom would always say, you're so creative. I'd say, no, I'm not really. Honestly, I'm good at creative problem solving, but I'm not a creative person. But it doesn't matter because you can just learn it because as you do it, you become more creative. You know, just like I did not know anything about flooring, but you learn it and then I became good at home decor. So you just as your interest level increases, your curiosity does too and then so does your knowledge. They all work together and then ideas, they just come to you. It's like I don't even try anymore. I mean, you've seen one of my things where I wrote like I have 10, 14 ideas of things I can create on Etsy. I hope that little sample sparks some inspiration to start thinking about what kind of digital products you could create or even a little bit broader. What kind of side hustle might be in your wheelhouse. Episode 637 with Debbie the flooring girl Gardener all right, let's bring it home with number 10. To round out this list, I want to highlight Skyler Sullivan's remote cleaning business and let this be an example of or a lens into any number of drop servicing style businesses where you're essentially playing a matchmaker between qualified service providers and people who need that work done. You've got a little more skin in the game than with Meow's website rental model, but I would say they're cousins. Business models are related. In Skyler's case, it was super impressive building Nebraska elite cleaning to $60,000 a month as a side hustle in episode 645, just aired a couple of weeks ago. The premise here is to build a strong online brand and presence, nail the operations and logistics and then find people who are excited to do the delivery for you. In fact, that's where Skylar recommended starting. After all, if you book a job and you don't have anyone to go out and do it, it's going to be you. And that's not the end of the world. But that wasn't his ultimate goal. I asked him how he sourced and onboarded new cleaners so then he could go out and market the business. Yeah, well, everybody's cleaned. I've cleaned before, you know, don't love it, but everybody's clean. And so cleaning to me is like you don't have to be a star or machine. Yeah, we can learn all learn tips and tricks and be more efficient, be better. But if you're just detailed and diligent, anybody can do it. If you're high character, detailed and diligent, you probably anybody can do it. And then after that, I mean there's tips and tricks for different chemicals, but so that's what I knew. That's What I knew is that it doesn't take a master. I just need to find some people who are probably good and maybe they've worked in a hotel or something like that. So I would use, indeed, Facebook a little bit, but Craigslist. Indeed, indeed was really, really helpful at first. And then after I found a couple, we would. We would use referrals from cleaners who knew other cleaners who, you know, had worked out. So what. What's that pitch like, though? The pitch is like, hey, I just created the. An elite cleaning company, a company that I'm looking for pros. We are pros. We have. We have a professional mantra, and I'm looking for pros like you, based on your resume and who you are. You know, does this sound like something you'd be interested in? You know, getting. Making some more money and taking more jobs. And most of the time it's yes. Not always, but most of the time. Okay, so it's like the pitch is, well, you know, we're building this elite culture. We'd love for you to be a part of it if. If that's a fit. And we'll help you fill up your schedule. We'll help you get more hours. Absolutely. Yep. Exactly. We'll help you fill up your schedule. All you have to worry about is doing the cleaning. We'll do the, you know, the scheduling, we'll do the. The notes. All you have to do is just show up, do the cleaning. You have to worry about reschedules and collecting payments. We'll. We'll take care of all that for you. Got it. And so that it appeals to the people who want kind of like an easy button way. I mean, of course, it's still manual labor, but, like, they don't have to be the entrepreneur. They don't have to be the marketer. They don't have to be the administrator. Like, they can just be. Just show up and do that. Show up and do the work. You know, I think a lot of people are looking for something like that. Yeah, exactly. Advertising. They don't have to worry about sales, negotiation with customers, customer cancellations, getting payments, you know, and the communication with customers. It can be literally 24 7. Like, we'll get calls, texts from people, and all day, all night. And so if you're not an entrepreneur, don't have that mindset, you'll. You can get walked over by customers as well, or taken advantage of what's typical in terms of an hourly rate or a payment per clean or how do you think. How do you have things structured with the cleaners. We like to be around that 25, $25 an hour ish. Because they're also supplying equipment of their own equipment as well, their own cleaning supplies and driving there. So $25 and then they get tips as well. And it can be a little bit higher around that. Skylar went on to explain that he typically would aim for a 40 to 50% margin on the residential jobs. He'd book lower on commercial cleaning work because it's more competitive and more frequent like lower margin but higher volume if that makes sense. And I highlight Skyler's business because it's another one like Christie's where you could replicate it in any number of different niches. The key is looking for an industry that's pretty fragmented like cleaning, where there really aren't any single companies that you could probably think of that command a big chunk of market share on top of that, like we might've talked about in that episode, it's an industry where the pie keeps getting bigger. It's a truly sure that more and more people are choosing to hire out. So you don't necessarily need to conquest business from another provider. Again, episode six 45 remote cleaning business. That's number 10 on our list. To recap, number one was the a hundred dollar a day challenge with Jackie Mitchell. Number two was the website rental business, the rank and rent model. Number three was vending machines. I think we could all use a money making robot in our life. Number four was the billboard business. You'll never look at billboards the same way again. Number five was photo organizing. Number six was software consulting highlighting the piggyback principle. Go where there's already some level of demand and establish some credibility and expertise there. Number seven was window washing or one of our college side hustle examples. Number eight was the super super interesting junk land flipping business. Looking for those unloved parcels and making them buildable. Number nine was digital products on Etsy, an example of creating something once, selling it over and over again. And number 10 was Skyler's remote cleaning business. If you want to learn more about any of these individual businesses, make sure to check out those specific episodes. You know I will link those up in the show notes and for the sake of convenience I put them all into a Spotify playlist for you which is also linked up in the Show Notes Side hustlenation.com beta guest of 24 or just hit the link in the episode description and it'll get you right over there. Big thanks to all our incredible guests. For sharing their insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.