← The Side Hustle Show
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- [00:00]
Nick Loper
If you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're hoping people find your listing or
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you're waiting for them to walk in.
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Whatnot lipsthat this is the live shopping platform that's exploding right now on Whatnot, you go live and you sell directly to real people in real time. They see what you've got, they ask questions and they buy. And what's crazy is Whatnot buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app. So whether it's beauty products, collectibles, thrift store finds, electronics, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses on whatnot. I've seen the rankings, I've seen the revenue numbers. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars on Whatnot has doubled
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in the last year.
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Now's the time to give it a try for yourself. For a limited time, Whatnot will match your first $150 sold in the first month. Visit whatnot.com sell to start selling. That's w h a t n o t.com sell whatnot.com sell this is the
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$300 a day marketing funnel that you can replicate in your own niche. Now here's the formula, the TLDR version of this. It's free content leads to free email opt in which leads to paid offers. But there's quite a bit of nuance and quite a bit of strategy to each of those steps, which is why I'm excited to give you kind of a real life breakdown. Some real life examples in today's episode. My guest is a financial educator and online entrepreneur. He's the best selling author of why does the Stock Market Go Up? From Long Term Mindset. Co Brian Feroldi welcome to the side Hustle Show.
- [01:38]
Brian Feroldi
Awesome to be here, Nick. Thank you for the invitation.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, I'm pumped for this one because I saw your presentation at Fincon with the same title, my $300 a day marketing funnel. It's like, hey, this magical ATM from the Internet gets a lot of people's attention. But this game starts with attention and in your case it starts with going where your target audience already is. Look, I want to teach people about being a smart long term investor and so I got to go out onto these social platforms where they're already consuming content. Twitter or X, LinkedIn threads, YouTube and how do I get people to notice me? There something you've done a very effective job of a couple hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn, over 650,000 on Twitter or X and something you've been really prolific at for the last several years speak to me about the attention getting game. What's working there?
- [02:27]
Brian Feroldi
Now the first question you need to ask are who of the customers that I am trying to serve and what platforms are they naturally hanging out on. Now the platform that I got started with was Twitter, AKA X at the time and that was the place that investors were going to talk about stocks. So I kind of of got lucky that the platform that I naturally gravitated to and started on was also the right platform to choose on. At least it was the right platform for me at the beginning. Now, if you're starting from zero, a big mistake is to try and use like five or six platforms or 10 platforms all at the same time. That's absolutely the wrong thing to do.
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Nick Loper
Everybody's advice is be everywhere.
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Brian Feroldi
Yeah, which sounds so smart. But if you are really starting from scratch or you don't have a big presence, it is far better to be excellent at one platform than horrible at 10 platforms. And if you really spend time on any given platform, you'll notice what kind of content is resonating on that platform at that particular period of time. And those things are constantly moving targets. So the first thing you need to do is ask what platform are your customers already hanging out on? It could be Twitter, it could be LinkedIn, it could be YouTube, it could be Instagram, it could be Threads, it could be Reddit, it could be medium. Right. It could be substack. There's actually many different places that you could look.
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Nick Loper
Start with one in your case Twitter. And then as that platform matures, as the audience grows. Okay, now I figured this out. Let me add in a second and a third.
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Brian Feroldi
Yeah, but you want all of your energy, all of your focus, focus on just one thing, one platform. Until you are getting traction on that platform. Until you can clearly define a repeatable system for yourself that you can reliably get traction and attention from. And only once you have that platform systematized should you even think about going on to a second platform. And you should take the lessons that you learned from growing on the first platform, apply them to the second platform and repeat that process again. Try and figure out what content works on that next platform. What is the format that consumers want to look at and keep iterating and experimenting you using the content you already have from the first platform ported over. But sometimes you just have to reformat it. For example, platforms like X might love text, but platforms like Instagram obviously love images. So you can even start by just taking a screenshot of your Twitter posts and put them over on your Instagram account and maybe turn them into slideshows, for example, or convert them into being very simple reels. So it doesn't have to be a huge leap. You just have to make sure you're optimizing the content that you're making to be the format that each platform is going for.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, it's got to be native to that platform, which is where you see a lot of podcasters, and I was guilty of myself of this in the early years. You know, their tweet would be, hey, new episode dropped today. You know, here's the link. Like, this is the worst tweet ever. Right? Like it's, you know, nobody's scrolling Twitter looking for a 45 minute audio episode to listen to. Like, you just didn't connect. What, what do you see working today on. On Twitter or LinkedIn or, you know, one of your primary platforms in terms of just, you know, starting out? It always feels like shouting into the void like, I've got good stuff. Somebody pay attention to me. Like, what do you see working today?
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Brian Feroldi
I take a very diversified approach to social media today because I've spent multiple months, if not years on every single platform to kind of grow it up. But one reason that I do that is because algorithms are constantly changing, constantly changing across all of the platforms. And as a general statement, I usually have one platform that's doing very well and one platform that was previously doing well, that's not doing well. And those things do ebb, ebb and flow. I can tell you that the platform I am currently putting the most time into is YouTube. So that is the one that I am focusing the most of my energy and time on. And I have the other platforms largely in maintenance mode.
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Nick Loper
Okay, what's attracted you to YouTube? What do you. What's the opportunity you see there?
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Brian Feroldi
YouTube is a platform that combines discoverability, SEO as well as when a subscriber joined your channel, if they watch a couple of your videos, they have a deeper connection to you as a creator than they would if they were just reading text. You know, you're a podcaster. I'm very jealous of that because people that consume podcasts tend to listen to most multiple episodes and you have been in their ear for dozens, if not hundreds of hours. And they are likely developing a very strong connection to you as the host simply because you are spending so much time with them. That's not the case really for written platforms, and it's just a completely different human experience when you hear somebody's voice. You get to know how they speak, what words they kind of flub, or any inside jokes that you have. You can do that with audio and video platforms and you can't necessarily do that as easy with written platforms like LinkedIn or Substack. So I'm focusing my energy on YouTube because it combines discoverability, the ability to go live and with the ability to establish a deeper connection with the audience.
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Nick Loper
Are you targeting kind of evergreen how to evaluate a stock like type of keyword that people are searching for this month, they're going to search for next month. On social it seems like the lifespan of a piece of content is 24 hours, maybe, maybe a little bit longer if it really hits. But it's like it can be more evergreen on YouTube.
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Brian Feroldi
Yep. That's another reason I've made YouTube videos that, you know, if you're a YouTuber, you understand this. When I publish them, they're 10 out of 10, which is horrible, right? That means it's like the least popular video of the last 10 that you've produced.
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Nick Loper
Oh sure, sure.
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Brian Feroldi
But eventually the algorithm has found that video served it to the right audience and those videos eventually become 1 in 10 in time. So you are absolutely correct. That is another benefit of YouTube. Whereas the content you create can have a shelf life that lasts years where you can't say the same about tweets.
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Nick Loper
Okay, I'm looking at some of your titles now. Investing for Beginners, 2026, which S&P 500 ETF is the best. You know, so kind of these evergreen type of topics or you know, keyword targeted type of videos.
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Brian Feroldi
I've heard it said by Ryan Holiday, you're trying to create content that is timely and timeless at the same time, which is a really hard thing to do. So I am trying to create content that is related to right now. So putting 2026 in the title tends to do this. But I'm also trying to create timeless content. So I will remove 2026 from the title on those videos in let's just say six months time and they'll become videos that you can watch. So that'll become which S&P 500 tracker is best, no date on it and that will become more long term related.
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Nick Loper
Best performing video of all time. 1.7 million views for Warren Buffett how to analyze a balance sheet. So obviously this is tapping into the popularity of Warren Buffett related search terms. And so anybody who's watching investing related content on YouTube, this gets served up as like, hey, you might also like this.
- [09:36]
Brian Feroldi
Absolutely And I've made lots of videos that are similar to that and accounting related. And you know, as a content creator, you can never predict ahead of time what's going to do well, what's going to resonate for the long term. But in that case, I was borrowing the authority of Warren Buffett diving deep into how he thinks about a balance sheet, which is an idea that not only applies to investors, but it also applies to business owners, to managers, to entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs. So I think that one did well because the topic applied more broadly than just my niche, which is investing.
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Nick Loper
Okay. So kind of this combination of social content, written content, sometimes it's just like a little short form take on what's going on in the market and then some of this, you know, more longer form, evergreen content, you know, eight, ten minutes, sometimes an hour long video on this stock investing course, for example. But then you can make money as a creator on these platforms. Like Facebook has started paying people. Obviously YouTube has their partner program or ad program, but you have a much more in depth funnel that doesn't rely on any of that. So talk to me about kind of the, the next step you would like someone to take after consuming your content. If you have an example of that.
- [10:42]
Brian Feroldi
Yeah. If you ask anybody that doesn't understand social media or the world that we are in how, how YouTubers make money, most of them assume it is with the ads that are natively served up on YouTube. Right. And there's lots of reasons why people think that they're used to watching the ads. They know that there's some kind of creator split. And if you're a creator, it's very easy to just click a button, monetize, and you get paid on that. But I don't think people understand just how little those payments are, even at a relatively big scale that you have to be at. So if you're a Mr. Beast of the World or some massive creator with tens of millions of views, that can amount to sizable amounts of money. But that, that is the, one of the worst ways to monetize an audience. So if you are depending on programmatic advertising, which effectively, that is, that is the bottom of the barrel way to monetize an audience, in my opinion.
- [11:38]
Nick Loper
All right, so what do you do instead?
- [11:39]
Brian Feroldi
The best way to make money from an audience is to have that audience directly give you money by buying products that you have created. By far the best way to monetize an audience, like I can make a YouTube video and let's just say it gets 10,000 views, which may Be a lot or a little, depending on what scale of a creator you are at. From an advertising perspective, that will amount to maybe $100 in like, ad revenue or maybe like, probably less than that. Very little when compared to like, what you like would require to like, build a business on and be sustainable. But that same video with just like 10,000 views, if you are pitching a product that you personally own, create and is digitally native, that same video can make you $1,000, $2,000 or even more in direct revenue from the audience. So when you're talking about the scale of monetization, selling your own audience products that you make is way better way to monetize them.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, let's go through an example, if you have one handy, of taking somebody from a YouTube or LinkedIn or Twitter and kind of walking them through the next step. Okay, what's going to be the opt in offer and then what is behind you know, what happens after that?
- [12:56]
Brian Feroldi
So in this case, what I am sharing here is just a direct tweet that I had from my Twitter account. So it's just a short little text tweet and it says investing isn't risky. Buying without doing any research is. This is a tweet that I have on basically autopilot. It's published through a platform that I use called hypefury. And this tweet surfaces every like 45 days or something, or something along those lines. Now I have the platform that I use called hypefury, which does the tweeting for me set up so that once a tweet gets, I think it's 50 likes, which isn't that many for an account of my size. It auto plugs below that tweet a link to a lead magnet that I created. So in this case, the lead magnet is about a free ebook that I made that creates some of my infographics that explain the, the content of investing. So every time a tweet gets a certain amount of likes, the software that I use will automatically publish this lead magnet below it and say, hey, if you like this tweet, you know, grab a cop a free copy of my infographics here.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, this is pretty slick. Can I pause here? Because it's like I'm not plugging this from the point of publishing. I'm waiting until it has some, you know, minimum bar of traction before I'm making an offer here. Yes, yes. So the opt in here was the access a PDF of 10 of the most popular investing infographics I've ever made.
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Brian Feroldi
Yep. So if, if somebody decides, hey, I like that, and they click over to it, they get taken to this, which is my Landin opt in page for capturing their email address.
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Nick Loper
A simple landing page built on kit, it looks like.
- [14:26]
Brian Feroldi
Yep, exactly. It's a simple landing page built on kit. I've done my best to optimize the heck out of it. Notice that on the page you cannot do anything except for give me your email address or exit out. There's no other options on this page. In addition, it ties in directly to the link that they clicked before. So the link that they clicked had a visual showing off what the thing is. So it's a free ebook, it's in big letters, 10 of the most popular things I've ever made. If you go over to it, I actually have a visual of what the e book looks like kind of on your phone to make it very easy to understand what you're getting. This has been downloaded by over 5000 investors at this point, so trying to pack it with social proof. And this is optimized for conversion. The last I looked, I think this page was converting at about 72%. So 72 out of every 100 people that land up on this page do give me their email address. Okay, so I fill in my email address and then you click yes, I want the cheat sheet. So now I have their email address, which is the critical step. That is the thing that you as a creator truly want people to give you. And maybe we should harp on this point for a second. I view the entire point of creating content on social media to get people to give me their email address. Social media is not reliable at all as a way to get in contact with your audience. But emails are. So I am very much focused on creating content on social media with the sole goal of getting people to give me their email address. Once they give me their email address, a big mistake that I say is they, they just have a pop up that says email sent or welcome.
- [16:11]
Nick Loper
Yeah, thanks.
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Brian Feroldi
You know, confirmed like that. Yeah, thanks for giving me your email. Huge mistake right now. Somebody has looked at a tweet that I had or some conflict that I had. They've clicked over to a lead magnet that I've created and they've chosen to opt in. So right now they are thinking, I know who this person is, or I know a little bit about this person. I just got a friend free thing from them. So you have their attention. And what I have chosen to do and I think is a huge opportunity, especially if you're a creator. With any size audience is right now. As soon as they give you your email address, you should present them with what's called a Tripwire offer. This is a very low priced offer that allows them to become a customer, not just a subscriber, as quickly as possible.
- [17:05]
Nick Loper
Hey, real quick. I took Brian's advice and turned it into a free visual funnel building worksheet you can download and start filling in the blanks for your own business. Just hit the show notes for this episode. Grab that for free. We've got more with Brian in just a moment. Including the Tripwire offer in this example and how that's presented coming up right after this.
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- [19:35]
Brian Feroldi
sidehustlez so in this case, they just downloaded a free ebook for me that has 10 of my most popular infographics that I've made related to investing. And what this offer is is I basically say, well, do you want 100 of my most popular infographics?
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Nick Loper
You like that? There's more?
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Brian Feroldi
Yeah, there is more, right? There is. Instead of just 10, do you want 100? Do you really like these infographics? And do you want all of them, not necessarily just 10, as a sampler?
- [20:06]
Nick Loper
Because like at this point they haven't even checked their email. Yeah, they haven't even had a chance to consume the original 10. But it's like, hey, while you're hot on this downloading infographics spree, I got more where that came from.
- [20:18]
Brian Feroldi
Exactly. So this is a full on sales page and right at the top it says, hey, your free gift is on its way to your inbox and you just unlocked a one time offer. So I normally sell my ebook for $49, but I am offering it to you today for just $7. So that's what I'm looking for, $7 from a purchaser. And there's a decent sized page here that explains who we are, what we do. There's videos, it's packed with testimonials, there's frequently asked questions. And what I'm trying to get them to do is click over to this button here, which takes them to my checkout page. This is what my checkout page looks like. So it's very, it's the same consistency. So you get all 100 infographics on there, lots of testimonials. You, you are trying to do everything in your power at this point to build trust with the person and show them that they're making a legitimate purchase.
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Nick Loper
It's like, look, it's just $7. But still, the hurdle from free to any amount of money is significant. Like, well, who's this guy again?
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Brian Feroldi
Yeah, exactly. So you're trying to pack it with social proof. Lots of people on here. So again, 3,000 people have purchased this from, from me. It's actually more at this point and generally speaking, it Gets great reviews and it is just that $7 and you try and reduce all friction, just all friction from the offering. So you can use your credit card, you can use PayPal, you can use Google Pay, you can use Apple Pay. When I chose a checkout device, I wanted to make sure there was as many checkout options as possible for them.
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Nick Loper
What's the shopping cart that you're using here?
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Brian Feroldi
It's called Spiffy. Spiffy is the shopping cart that I use and I like them quite a bit. So right on this page they can just ch and buy the seven if they want to, but I offer them the ability to upsell. So I created a couple of mini courses. These are less than half an hour long and they dive into some aspect of investing. So I built a mini course that's all about how to analyze a company's moat. I built another mini course that's how to do a reverse discounted cash flow calculator. And similarly, I priced these at a one time. So these are normally $80 each and I discount them to $27. What I'm trying to do is if somebody is going to go through with the checkout process, I want them to have many options to give me more than $7. Right. If they are a purchaser. And it's very important that all of this makes sense in the eye of the buyer. Notice that all of this content is directly related to investing. It is from visual or tweet about investing to lead magnet about investing, to tripwire product about investing to upsells about investing. And so it's very important that you think through all of those flows that they match what the buyer is naturally thinking about.
- [23:15]
Nick Loper
Do you think it helps that there is kind of an inherent ROI in your customer's mind where if I'm in a hobby niche and you're going to teach me about how to grow better tomatoes, I got to pull some different psychological levers than you would in a financial niche.
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Brian Feroldi
I do think that helps the problem. The quote unquote problem with being in the investing niche is there's no way for me to like guarantee people money. I'm effectively selling them education related to investing. I can't make a guarantee about. You're going to do well as an investor. You're going to buy anything. But a lot of people that are in the business to business can offer guarantees around money, right? Like buy this thing and I'll help you land your first sponsorship or buy this thing and I'll help slash your profits and you can make guarantees. So the best offers to me are, you buy this thing and I can guarantee you that you will make money from it. That is a much easier sell. I can't necessarily do that. But to your point, in theory, this does help them to become a better investor, which can lead to money. I just can't promise it.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, what's the little guarantee badge at the top? That's just related to the product itself.
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Brian Feroldi
So it has a 30 day money back guarantee.
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Nick Loper
Okay.
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Brian Feroldi
So if anybody buys this, they can email me and they can get all of their money back within 30 days.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, just some kind of risk reversal. I think that's important to have.
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Brian Feroldi
Absolutely. All you're trying to do is minimize risk in the buyer's eyes at this point. And I'm absolutely dead serious about this. We have refunded people for $7 purchases. It's zero questions asked. So we do everything we can to make it as frictionless and easy as possible to become a customer of mine right away.
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Nick Loper
Okay.
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Brian Feroldi
So you can add, you know, these, these upsells to it and the button does happen. But this is the simple funnel. It is content to lead magnet, lead magnet to email opt in email opt in to low price ticket. And this is the funnel that makes me $300 per day.
- [25:14]
Nick Loper
So you said 72% of the people who hit the original landing page give you their email. And then what are the percentages look like on this next page? On the $7 page, for every 100
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Brian Feroldi
people that kind of go through this opt in process, a bad funnel will convert about half a percent of them into paying customers. A top tier amazing funnel will convert about 7% of them into paying customers. My funnels, I've never been able to get that good. But I'm in the third 3 to 4% range. So for every hundred people I get to give me their email address, roughly three to four of them become paying customers. And the average selling price on those customers is about $17. So for every 100 emails that I get, I roughly make 50 or $60.
- [26:04]
Nick Loper
Oh, okay. Like getting paid to build your email list is one way to look at it.
- [26:08]
Brian Feroldi
Exactly. Now I haven't gone and been so sophisticated as to connect this to ads so that you are, you know, you're paying for ads to get email addresses and then you're liquidating the cost. I am. That is something I do want to do. So the only thing that I'm driving traffic to on this particular funnel is organic traffic. But if you really get this dialed in and you really know your audience well. You can use this to dramatically offset the cost of running ads or in some cases even make a profit immediately from running ads. So it's a super, super simple, in theory, funnel to run, but I think it's one that every creator should, should, should implement as soon as possible.
- [26:49]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that was the next question. I was like, well now, yeah, do you have the paid ads running from Meta or from any of these platforms really, where it's like, I'm sick and tired of creating all this organic content on a daily basis. Like, maybe there's an easy button where I could pay a dollar a subscriber or whatever. If your subscribers worth 50 cents on average organically, maybe it's higher. It's quite a bit higher than that. But this is really interesting. So I am a little bit surprised. Okay. Lots of people opt in 70% plus for the freebie and then there's a pretty steep drop off. Well, I only get 3% to actually buy the thing, but it is kind of this psychological switch that has to flip of like, well, look, I just said I get your free thing and now you're trying to sell me something. Like, do you get that pushback of, dude, just, just give me the thing that I asked for? Like, why are you trying to sell me all this other stuff?
- [27:39]
Brian Feroldi
Yep. So that is by far the biggest mental hurdle that creators have to get over when, when they think about implementing that. And that, that's. I was resistant to that idea for quite some time. I was like, I don't want to bother my audience. They're going to be mad at me right away because I'm asking them for money. As a general statement, all of those fears are completely fake and exist in the creator's head. They are not something that actually manifests. One way of thinking about this, when you are at, let's just say the grocery store and you are checking out, are you mad at the grocery store? That right there is gum for sale. No, it's just an offer. Right. It is an offer to buy gum or candy or a tabloid magazine. That's the mindset that you have to get into when you, when you're doing a funnel like this, you are just presenting them with an offer and you're trying to make that offer as compelling as possible. But in no way are you deceiving the audience. I promise them a free ebook they receive in their email box. A free ebook. The only thing I'm doing is I'm inserting a intermediate step in there where I'm Asking them to become a paid customer. But if they don't want to, they just X out of that box, which is something that 97% of people choose choose to do. But yeah, doing this funnel, I'm identifying people that are willing to pay for digital products.
- [29:07]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I like that, that language, that mindset shift around. Look, I'm being super salesy to know I'm presenting an offer. Take it or leave it. Yep, here it is. If it's going to help you, go for it. If not, that's cool too.
- [29:19]
Brian Feroldi
Exactly. And I do think that the things that I am selling are designed to help people. My category is invest. I know what it's like to be an individual investor and all the education that you need to do, investing the right way. So the content that I create I am very proud of and I wish I had when I was a new investor. So that is the mindset that I have adopted for myself. I'm just making an offer. If they take the offer, I think that this content will help them. If they later decide that they want their money back, I will always give them 100% of their money back. No harm, no foul. So I make it easy to become a customer and easy to easy to get a refund. And if you, if you have that mindset, I don't feel like I have any ethical reasons not to do what I'm doing.
- [30:05]
Nick Loper
Let's talk through kind of creating the different tiers here because you have your free content that you put out for everyone on all these different platforms. You have you. Okay, well what am I going to gate behind the email opt in in this case, the, the infographics. The paid product, the initial paid product was, you know, a bundle of a ton of different infographics. And then we had these paid courses on, you know, mini courses behind that. Like so kind of a lot of quote unquote extra content to create. Or maybe you already had something in the archive or you'd been building for a year. Like speak to that piece of it. If I go, I'm trying to piece this together as a newer creator. Like what do I, what do I plug into all these different steps?
- [30:45]
Brian Feroldi
To me, the creator mindset is how do I create content, how do I get attention? That's great. You absolutely need that mindset. There's another mindset that you want to be, if you want to be a professional creator. And that is the mindset of business owner. Right. Creating content just to get likes and clicks and hearts and all that kind of stuff. That's A great way to start. But if you want to make this a sustainable career or you want to turn it into a meaningful side hustle, you also have to build the business brain behind becoming a full time creator. So a lot of creators just focus on creating content, making videos, trying to get their eyeballs and stuff like that, but they give no thought for how do I turn that attention into something that I can build a business around? So that's something that every creator needs to think through. And if you're in this business for any period of time, you know that there are dozens, literally dozens of ways that you can take attention and monetize it.
- [31:39]
Nick Loper
Yeah. What do you think about, you know, in terms of your mini courses and these like digital products? Like, there's a really high degree of continuity between each step and try to think, maybe if we go back to the gardening example or helping somebody learn how to play guitar or something, what would be the equivalent at the different stages there?
- [32:01]
Brian Feroldi
What I recommend you do is you start with the end in mind. What is the thing that you are trying to sell to your audience at the very end of the process? Right. So in my case, I have a digital course and tool that I call Stock simplifier. And it's a course, it's some AI prompts, and it is a checklist that I use to go through and analyze a business from start to finish. That to me is the thing that I want people to buy and I charge $200 for that thing. So then we have to think in reverse from that. I can't just ask for $200 right out of the gate to a new subscriber, someone that I haven't built necessarily a trust with. So I say, what is one part of that course or one part of that idea related to learning how to analyze a business that I can break up into a lower priced course? So as you saw before, a part of my course is how to analyze a company's moat. That's a competitive advantage for people that don't speak investor. So I broke that piece out into a mini course. That's like a sampling of the larger course that I created. And I break that out and I bundle that into a $27 offering. Then I think, okay, I have my $27 offering. How can I turn that into a $7 offering? Well, I created infographics related to investing that I share online. And all I did was bundle a bunch of them up into a PDF and that is the content that I share online. So it's content, visuals, Related to investing becomes a book about investing, becomes a mini course about investing, becomes a full course about investing. So start with the end in mind, break that down into many chunks and go all the way back to free. And there's your funnel.
- [33:56]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's helpful. Something that the side Hustle show audience struggles with. A portion of the audience is, you know, coming up with side Hustle ideas. And so maybe there is a certain sequence or funnel around finding your idea. You know, here's a strengths finder type of maybe there's AI quiz prompt, something related to this and it goes on and on and on up the sequence there.
- [34:17]
Brian Feroldi
Yep. There's a great tool called Score app I recommend you look into.
- [34:21]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [34:21]
Brian Feroldi
It's a AI tool that you answer a series of questions and it gives you a custom score at the end that that is AI powered and it can be. Yeah. To your point, what side hustle is the right choice for you?
- [34:32]
Nick Loper
Cool, you kind of alluded to it, but that was the next question was what happens after somebody opts in and the 97% of people say no thanks to this offer. So ultimately I want to continue to serve them and build trust and build the relationship and build the authority so that they buy this $200 course and tool. So what does that portion of the relationship look like? You know, great if they pressed the follow button on whatever social platform they found you on, but now you also have the opportunity to be in their inbox.
- [35:03]
Brian Feroldi
So my funnel post, let's say you're going through my funnel and you don't choose to become a customer. Or in fact if you do choose choose to become a customer, I have the same follow up sequence. So you've come into my ecosystem because you're interested in investing and you've downloaded my infographic ebook. That's the free thing that you got. So as soon as I get your email, I send you through a free five day course, an email based course that teaches you the principles behind the infographics that you downloaded. Okay, so what's the difference between a stock and a bond? How do you read financial statements? What are the different types of moats and why are they important? So it's a five email sequence delivered once a day for five days. And it's pure me giving educational value related to the lead magnet to the new customer. So I put them into this one week long welcome sequence. So that way they're getting use to opening my emails, they're getting used to me being the source of information and as they're reading the information I'm hoping to build credibility with them that I know what I talk about. And look how, look how useful this free thing was that this, that this guy created.
- [36:18]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [36:18]
Okay, so after the five days, what happens then?
- [36:22]
Brian's response, plus the tools it takes
- [36:25]
to run this online business and the new thing he's building to help his audience this year. Coming up right after this.
- [36:32]
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- [38:48]
Brian Feroldi
Yep. So then if they did not buy, I offer them the ability to buy it again now that they have some more education about it.
- [38:55]
Nick Loper
The mini course then or the $7 thing?
- [38:58]
Brian Feroldi
Yep, I will offer them the ability to buy. If they didn't buy the $7 ebook, I re pitch it at the end. If they didn't buy the mini course with the ebook, I re pitched that at the end. But if they go through that whole sequence and they don't buy anything, no problem. I then add them to my newsletter. So I have two newsletters that I write. One is a hand curated one that comes out every Wednesday and that is a newsletter called Long Term Mindset that is all about investing. And me and my partners hand do that every single week. That's a new and update issue. Then I also have a evergreen newsletter that comes out on Saturday that is all about the fundamentals of stock investing. We've written one year's worth of content for that, so 52 emails that come out every Saturday. So after they go through that sequence, I'm in their inbox at least twice a week with pure value add education on top of that. And what I'm trying to do is stay top of mind with them and again help them with educational content related to investing that is pure value add.
- [40:06]
Nick Loper
Okay. And are you making an offer for the $200 thing along the way?
- [40:11]
Brian Feroldi
Yep. So along the way, the strategy that I have there is I do monthly promotions to my audience. I discount the products that they have and I do temporary sales on them. But the bigger thing that I do is I invite my email audience to private webinars. And during these private webinars we're typically researching a company's stock that's in the news from scratch over the course of an hour or we're doing some type of educational content with them related to just general concepts about investing. But the goal is to get them on live webinars with us because as we talked about before, then they see my face, hear me talk, watch me and my business partners go through and analyze companies, show them how we think as investors take their question and they get to know us. And once they know us and trust us, then they're far more willing to become customers of ours.
- [41:04]
Nick Loper
Yeah, another touch point. A really high engagement or high relationship building touch point. If somebody's going to hang out with you live for an hour, that can be really powerful.
- [41:10]
Brian Feroldi
Or watch the replay if they're not there live.
- [41:12]
Nick Loper
Yeah, yeah, real quick. After the five day mini course, it's about the infographics. Educate, pure educational content. If you didn't buy the thing originally, I'm going to pitch it again. The original upsell, is it the same $7 price point? Because it was like messaged as like, well this is. You just unlocked this limited time thing and so now as a thank you for going through the five day course, you unlocked it again.
- [41:33]
Brian Feroldi
Exactly. It's the same offer. I've experimented with different price points. I just feel that $7 is such a low figure that if you're willing to break out your credit card, it's like such a low friction number. Like I've experimented with 17, I've experimented 27, I've experimented with 47. The thing that I'm trying to optimize for is the absolute number of customers. I'm not trying to optimize for the highest dollar amount right right out of the gate. I'm trying to identify customers, not, not grab as much as I can from them right out of the gate. If you, if your goal was to get more money from them right out of the gate, I would definitely focus on raising prices. You'll obviously trade off that with conversion rate, but that's not the thing I'm trying to optimize for.
- [42:18]
Nick Loper
Do you find that the 3 or 4% who bought initially and then, you know, whatever additional percent that buy after the five day thing, do they convert at a better rate, like long term for the primary course and tool?
- [42:32]
Brian Feroldi
Absolutely. Yep. People that are willing to pay any amount of money are just at a completely different class of customer than other people. They're way more likely to open your emails, they're way more likely to click your links, they're way more likely to join you on live streams. They're way more likely to take advantage of offers that you have down the road. Which is why I'm trying to identify those people as early in the process as possible. You know, if you have an email list or anybody on social media, you get to know somebody and it's like you see their, their, their content once and maybe you never interact with them again. Or there's a really big, there's a really sharp fall off rate with the following somebody. So there's a cost to our attention to following anybody. So I want to make it so that if somebody does find me online that I am able to provide them with value in their inbox as quickly as Possible.
- [43:20]
Nick Loper
Yeah. I find myself definitely more likely to even open the emails from people I'm a customer of than just somebody that I randomly opted into. So I'm with you. You mentioned hypefury as this kind of social media auto posting tool. It'll recycle tweets on a 45 day cycle. It'll automatically add the opt in if it reaches a certain level of engagement. That sounds like a really cool tool. We talked about kit for building the email sequences and the initial landing page. Spiffy was the checkout software. Anything else on the tools and tech side that you swear by?
- [43:54]
Brian Feroldi
Yep. So I use a platform called Circle for delivering my courses. Circle allows you to do all kinds of things. You can load courses into them, you can do live webinars in them. We do kind of our higher end premium communities through them. So yeah, my tech stack is really Kit for email collection and email delivery, Spiffy for Spiffy for checkout and Circle for delivery and retaining the audience that I built.
- [44:22]
Nick Loper
Got it. What's a day in the life look like at this stage of the business where it sounds like some of the social stuff is automated and now I've created five, six years of it. So it's just like, well, let's go back to what content did well and resurface that versus creating new longer form stuff for YouTube. Like where are the hours going today?
- [44:44]
Brian Feroldi
I'm always kind of creating new content, new infographics, new visuals, that kind of thing for those platforms. And I outsource that work largely to virtual assistants. So I come up with the ideas, the virtual assistants actually create the content and then I approve it and then in some cases they post it, in other cases I post it. So that thankfully takes up not a lot of my time, but most of my time is devoted to video where I'm creating shorts. I try and do four shorts per week and I share those across Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, you know, all the places that you can share shorts. And I try and do one livestream per week that's an hour long on YouTube plus one long form video. And I put long form and air quotes because it's about 10 to 15 minutes long. But those are kind of like highly produced. Produced.
- [45:32]
Nick Loper
That's long form these days. Yeah, the attention spans are short.
- [45:35]
Brian Feroldi
Yeah, those are more edited and highly produced and really optimized for either SEO or they're optimized for content consumption. Whereas my live streams are live streams. Right. So it's not like the editing is
- [45:48]
Nick Loper
perfect on Them on the short form,
- [45:51]
the, you know, the four shorts per week. And even on the, you know, longer form YouTube content, is it the same call to action where it's like, hey, if you like this, why don't you grab the 10 free infographics that teach you about the basics of investing?
- [46:04]
Brian Feroldi
Yep. So I even optimized that as well. My short forms, if you follow me, are me talking through infographics. I literally print out the infographics that I make and I just, with a highlighter, go through and explain them, each of the infographics in less than 60 seconds. And again, some of those videos have done extremely well. But again, think through the continuity of that. You watch a short of me explaining an infographic and then I say, do you want to download these infographics? Do you want to buy a whole bunch of these infographics? Do you want to learn more from me? So again, it's all about continuity, from the free content that you make to the premium content that you want to sell. That's very important.
- [46:44]
Nick Loper
Okay, yeah, that makes, that makes sense. Yeah. We had a woman, Cheyenne Bullock, on the show toward the end of last year and her product, the end, starting with the end in mind, was a cleaning service subscription. But it was like Audio Guy. Like it was old school radio shows where she would intersperse housekeeping tips or, you know, go clean, go empty the dishwasher or go fold some laundry, you know, interspersed with like Dragnet episodes from the 50s. And so her social content was, you know, housekeeping tips and the email opt in, you know, on almost every post was, hey, get a free sample episode. You know, plug it into your earbuds, see if you like it. And so it was really natural progression. Be like, you want more? You know, here it's 25 bucks a month or it's 50 bucks a quarter or something. You know, it was kind of a very straight progression from the social content to the final offer there. But Brian, this has been awesome. I am curious what's surprised you the most over the last four, five, six years of making all this content and running this business, that this can be
- [47:41]
Brian Feroldi
a business in the first place? I did not set out to become a professional content creator. I did not set out to start a business. All I was doing, I was working for the Motley fool back in 2019, which is a financial newsletter publication online. I was just a writer for them. And I started to share posts online related to investing and that happened to do very well on Twitter. And it was only basically accidentally that I discovered that you can build a business. So I did not set out to build a business as a content creator. I was purely a content creator. I had so many mindset blocks. I was like so allergic to the idea of charging money for things. So much so that the first time I made money online, the price that I set for it, the thing that I was quote, unquote selling was $0. It was, you can download this for free. But I basically put a tip jar on there. So if you want to give me money, this is free. But if you want to give me a thank you tip, you can. And that very first product, I vividly remember this day. It was like you always remember the day you make your first dollar online. I made $2,000 in tips online.
- [48:46]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [48:47]
Brian Feroldi
Yeah.
- [48:47]
Nick Loper
From a tip jar. Wow.
- [48:48]
Brian Feroldi
But that was because I built up so much goodwill over the course of like 18 months that people were basically looking for a way to say thank you monetarily. But I had all of these hang ups about charging for things online, which, as you've seen, I've completely gone now.
- [49:05]
Nick Loper
You know, people seem to fall into one of two camps. Your camp of like, look, I'm doing this for the love of the game. I'm just putting stuff out there. I don't even know I would feel bad charging for this stuff. It's all free in my head anyways. And other people are like, look, it's a thousand bucks. Take it or leave it. I admire your confidence, but I'm more in your camp there. What's next for you? What's got you excited these days?
- [49:25]
Brian Feroldi
So I've been all over AI just I think a lot of people are. AI is dramatically set to transform the finance industry. So I've been building an AI powered product that dramatically speeds up the stock research process. So my, my category is helping individual investors to analyze businesses so they can make better investing decisions. And we have a AI powered product coming out in the next month or two that I think is going to really help with that process. So that's what I'm pretty excited about.
- [49:55]
Nick Loper
Well, I'm excited too. Let me know when it's live. We'll definitely add it to the show notes along with longterm, Mindset Co and all of your social profiles. Make sure to follow along with whatever Brian is up to on your social platform of choice. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation.
- [50:15]
Brian Feroldi
Number one tip is going to be Just get started. So many people are. I've heard them called Wantrepreneurs, right? They. They consume content related to starting an entrepreneurship, they think about starting a side hustle, but they're always looking for an idea. They're always consuming more content related to it. Nothing will actually start the process better than trying to sell something to one person. Doesn't matter what it is. It is so important that you actually take the first step to start a business to just get that first customer. To me, nothing else matters. So if you've been sitting on the sidelines, if you've been consuming content, if you've been thinking about a side hustle, just do it. Whatever your idea is right now, just do it. Take the next first step to try and get your first customer. If that fails, you now have data that you can try again with more information to make a better decision.
- [51:06]
Nick Loper
Yeah, this is your year. Go after it. Get started today. You know, what separates a lot of people stuck on the sidelines is this. You know, you don't need to know steps two through 10. And in fact, it probably changed by the time you get there. But you just got to take that first thing. It honestly doesn't matter what the thing is, because you're going to figure out, do I like it? Do I not like it? What am I going to learn from this? I think a friend has a quote that stuck with me. Likened it to your first move in a game of chess. Like, I just put my pawn out into the world. Let's see what kind of reaction it gets. And. And then I'm going to go from there. A couple takeaways for me before we wrap. Number one was this. the very top of the show, go where your target audience already is. Start with one platform. Don't spread yourself too thin. Learn what works, and go deep there first before diversifying. And then obviously, long term, diversifying would be a good thing because the algorithms are constantly changing and you don't want to see your thing evaporate overnight. The second thing that I wrote down was the content itself is not a business. This is something that took me as a podcaster a long time to realize. You know, but 14, 15 months into hosting the show, it's like, you know, this switch flipped. It's like, oh, dummy. It's content marketing for a business. Okay, now we can figure this out. I loved the call to, especially if you kind of have a hesitancy towards selling. It's like, look, I'm going to make an offer. I'm not going to sell you anything. I'm going to put this offer out there if you want it, great. I think it'll help you. Here's the price. Take it or leave it. And then the consistency across, creating the content consistently like showing up for your audience, but the continuity of what you're talking about where it's like starting with the end in mind, like Brian mentioned, and then kind of reverse engineering okay, what, what is this offer going to be? What is this offer going to look like? And and so on. And actually to help you out with that, that's your free listener bonus for this week. It's a free visual funnel building worksheet that I put together based on Brian's advice so you can plug in different pieces what makes the most sense for your business. That is the next step. So you don't just listen and kind of nod along as we're talking about this. So it's the next step to help you actually get started and do the thing. You can grab that for free at the show Notes for this episode. Just follow the link in the description. It'll get you right over there. And if you're already a side Hustle Nation subscriber, just check your inbox. It'll be in the newsletter. Big thanks to Brian for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up Sidehustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. It really does make a difference.
- [53:31]
That is it for me.
- [53:32]
Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So do me a favor, fire off that text message. I appreciate you. 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.